Welsh’s Cavalier Attitude Didn’t Come Easy

George Welsh was sitting in the chair in which he once thought he’d probably never sit -- behind the desk in the coach’s office at a sparkling, opulent new facility intended to house one of the nation’s elite college football programs -- saying the things he once thought he might never get to say.

This weekend’s nationally televised Gator Bowl matchup with Oklahoma, he said, is not that big a deal for his Virginia Cavaliers, at least not in the way that it would have been a few years ago for this so-recently decrepit program.

It wasn’t typical Welsh understatement, and it certainly wasn’t any subtle form of boastfulness. It’s just that Virginia doesn’t need to win a game like this to put itself on the college football map.

No, it’s already begun carving a niche, and Welsh needed only to look at the relative grandeur surrounding him to be reminded of that. For Virginia, playing Oklahoma in 1991 simply is not the same test of self-worth or barometer of progress as was facing Penn State in 1988 or Notre Dame in ’89 or Clemson in ’90.

“The program has come a little bit beyond that,” Welsh said here before departing for Jacksonville, Fla., to prepare his 19th-ranked team for Sunday’s 8 p.m. EST game against the No. 20 Sooners. “Some of those other games -- like Clemson, Penn State or Notre Dame -- we felt like a win could take us to the next level. It was important for us just to be out on the field with teams like that. Now our situation is a little bit different.”

Indeed. Welsh, the coach who has spent so many years exceeding the expectations of others, finally has surpassed his own.

It is a situation saturated with ironic twists and reversals of fortune. There’s Virginia, which had had two winning seasons in the 29 years before Welsh’s arrival in 1982, ho-humming its way into a fourth bowl game in five years. There are the Cavaliers, after a 1-2 start that included a season-opening loss to Maryland, putting together a better year than in 1990, when they spent three weeks as the country’s top-ranked team. Welsh concedes that his team is better right now than it was at this point a year ago.

And then there’s Welsh, the hawk-nosed 58 year old who’s had to abandon (or at least delay) his long-promised early retirement to go back to sea because being on the sideline is just too much fun these days. The reconstructor of dormant programs at Navy and Virginia, he apparently is finding life near the top of his field to be at least as gratifying as enduring the struggle to get there.

“George has spent a long time trying to climb to this point,” said Welsh’s first-year defensive coordinator, Rick Lantz. “And now he’s just starting to enjoy himself a little bit.”

Two years ago, as the Cavaliers were preparing for the Citrus Bowl, Welsh -- in what was for him a fit of giddiness -- told reporters that he could see the day when Virginia would be playing for the national championship. His forecast included the disclaimer, however, that he’d be long gone by then.

Instead, the Cavaliers were on the verge of a title the next season (“I had no idea how right I was,” he said). Last year’s wild ride left its scars, though. After the jarring fall from No. 1 -- the Cavaliers dropped four of their last five games, including a 23-22 loss to Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl, to finish with a modest 8-4 record -- Welsh spent the offseason shaking up a coaching staff that contained many longtime sidekicks.

The reshuffling included Tom O’Brien, a Welsh aide for 17 years, being named his first offensive coordinator. Even more significantly, it included the hiring of Lantz, Welsh’s onetime assistant at Navy who had spent the previous five seasons as Louisville’s defensive coordinator.

Soon afterward, the defensive scheme that Welsh teams had employed since the mid-1970s had been scrapped. In its place came a more aggressive, straight-forward approach, a setup that had the unit’s one potentially dominating player -- junior Chris Slade -- lining up in a three-point stance and rushing the quarterback almost exclusively.

“It’s been a big change from one year to the next,” Slade said. “It’s been a real big change -- for the better, as I think you can see.”