#

Includes ACC football standings chart

#

Virginia wallops Duke (again)**

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- There is bad football, and then there is Duke football.

"I'm just disgusted with the way we played," head coach Barry Wilson said. "I don't like the way we played. We just couldn't get anything going. The defense couldn't stop them. Offense couldn't score. When you play a good football team, you're going to get beat badly when that occurs."

Duke (1-3) fell to No. 21 Virginia (4-0), 35-0 in a contest tainted by four player ejections after a late game brawl on Saturday afternoon at Scott Stadium.

Duke threatened to score on the Cavaliers only once the entire afternoon. The offense did not make it into the Virginia red zone -- the area between the 20-yard line and the goal line -- until the fourth quarter.

The Blue Devils actually came out strong on offense. After starting back on the 14-yard line, Fischer moved his team into UVa territory. Duke made it all the way to the Virginia 41-yard line, but then Fischer threw two incomplete passes, and David Lowman lost two yards rushing. The drive stalled, and freshman John Krueger came on to kick the first of his six punts.

"We were moving the ball," Fischer said. "They weren't showing anything that surprised us. They weren't doing anything differently. We were moving the ball on them well early. [Our breakdown] was unfortunate."

The Blue Devil offense only tallied six first downs in the first half, and five of those occurred on Duke's first two offensive series. With so little ball control, the defense had to spend the majority of the game on the stadium's hard turf field.

But the defense was simply outmanned by a Virginia offensive line that averages over 280 pounds.

"Many times, it was not so much that we did anything wrong, they just flat overpowered us with their size and their athleticism," Wilson said. "I said all week that was the thing that scared me, because if they just get all that power and movement going, they can get six or eight yards just by sheer momentum."

The Virginia defense was able to completely stymie the Duke offense which had scored 80 points in its last two outings.

"[Virginia] did a good job of taking away our short passing game," Fischer said. "That's a credit to their linebackers. They were doing well. And we just couldn't get by them deep when we wanted to. We'd move the ball well on first and second down, and then on third down, we'd breakdown, and they'd come up with a big play."

Duke's frustration, coupled with a rather vocal Virginia squad, came to a head with 14:04 left in the game. After Thomas picked off sophomore quarterback Symmion Willis' only interception of the day, he scrambled up the right sideline where the players on the Virginia bench waited for their chance at some action.

Just after Thomas touched out-of-bounds, Willis tackled him, and Thomas found himself alone in a sea of orange jerseys.

Before any of the coaches or officials knew what happened, the entire Duke bench raced across the field for a less than friendly visit.

The brawl took about five minutes and resulted in the ejection of two players on each team. One of the Virginia players tossed was tabbed to be red-shirted. After the game, UVa coach George Welsh joked that he wasn't sure if he would be allowed to red-shirt a player who never competed but was thrown out of a game.

"[The Virginia-Duke game] is always somewhat heated," Wilson said. "We told our guys we need to be mad about the fact that they've beaten us. Virginia has played better than we have [in the last four years], and we haven't helped our own cause any. That's what I'm interested in, not all the conversation."

Virginia may not have been doing all the talking, but they were the only team on the field who did any playing.

The Cavaliers led 28-0 at halftime, and at other times Virginia was able to move the ball in a variety of ways. UVa registered 223 net rushing yards, and Willis completed 24-of-34 passes for 246 yards through the air.