Michael Vick had not set foot in Scott Stadium since Oct. 2, 1999, when he went 7-of-9 for 222 yards and a 60-yard touchdown in a 31-7 Virginia Tech win. He came back Friday night as Norfolk State’s second-year head coach and found things much more difficult this time around. Virginia routed the Spartans in front of 46,918 at Scott Stadium.
The game was over by 3:12 of the first quarter. Beau Pribula threw three touchdown passes before the opening period ended, Brandyn Hillman intercepted Norfolk
State’s first two possessions, and Virginia led 21-0 before the student section had finished filing in. The Cavaliers won 59-3 and out-gained the Spartans 466-223.
59 points is Virginia’s highest single-game total since a 59-16 win at Western Michigan on Sept. 13, 2003. Through two games the ‘Hoos have outscored NC State and Norfolk State 93-11, a margin of plus-82; the last Virginia team to open a season that emphatically was the 1930 squad, which beat Roanoke 37-0 and Randolph-Macon 48-0. The 11 points allowed are the fewest through two games since 1952.
Here are five takeaways from Friday night.
Virginia has two ACC Defensive Player of the Year candidates
Two games into the season, Virginia has five takeaways. Brandyn Hillman has produced four of the five.
The Michigan transfer out of Churchland High School in Portsmouth — the in-state recruit Tony Elliott chased in 2023 and lost — intercepted CJ Bailey and punched the ball out of his hands in the opener. Friday, he picked off Deljay Bailey on Norfolk State’s first two possessions, returning the first 50 yards to set up the touchdown that started the rout. He has now forced multiple turnovers in both of his games as a Cavalier.
The other candidate was returning for his first game in almost 10 months. Kam Robinson finished second in last year’s ACC Defensive Player of the Year voting, behind only Miami’s Rueben Bain Jr., and he did it in eight games — he missed time early with a fractured collarbone and tore his ACL against Duke on Nov. 15.
Robinson put up 64 tackles, 4.5 for loss, two interceptions and a blocked punt in two-thirds of a season, and he became entrenched in that race not just for the numbers but for the critical moments and game-sealing plays he made throughout the season.
Both of those interceptions went back for touchdowns: a pick-six at Louisville, and a 35-yarder with 45 seconds left at California that ended the Golden Bears’ comeback and locked up Virginia’s seventh straight win. In between was the safety that broke a 20-20 tie against Washington State and clinched bowl eligibility. He is the only player in program history to win three ACC Linebacker of the Week awards in the same season.
As expected, he was on a pitch count Friday, and he still tied for second on the team with five tackles, one of them the 200th of his career. UVA defensive coordinator John Rudzinski will relish the opportunity to have two playmakers and potential ACC DPOY candidates on two levels of his defense.
The rest of the unit was in character. They held Norfolk State to 4-for-17 on third down and 0-for-2 on fourth and picked off three passes. Jacobie Henderson led the team with eight tackles for the second straight week. Justin Rowe provided the exclamation point on the victory with the third interception, which he returned 50 yards to the house with 4:17 left.
Virginia opened up the passing game, and it opened it up early
While the outcome against NC State was incredible, questions lingered about the Virginia passing attack, or lack thereof. Against NC State the Cavaliers threw the ball just 11 times in roughly 68 snaps. Many asked whether that was indicative of Virginia choosing to stick with what was working or signs of an inability to have a reliable passing game.
Des Kitchings answered that question in the first 15 minutes. Pribula threw three touchdown passes in the first quarter — a six-yarder to Jacquon Gibson, a 27-yarder to Da’Shawn Martin and a 30-yarder back to Gibson — and finished 12-of-14 for 162 yards in a half of work. That is one more touchdown pass in a quarter than he managed in the entire opener, and perhaps even more impressively, it came almost exclusively out of a drop-back passing attack rather than off play action.
The full-game line: 18-of-24 for 229 yards and six touchdowns, 9.5 yards per attempt. Twenty-four attempts is not heavy volume by 2026 standards, but it more than doubles the opener, and the emphasis was there from the opening drive rather than in garbage time.
That said, the run game did not disappear, especially as the game got out of hand. Xay Davis went for 107 yards on 11 carries with a 44-yard long run late in the game, the first 100-yard game of his career, and Noah Vaughn added 81 on eight. Virginia ran 38 times for 237 yards at 6.2 a pop. However, this game showed that Virginia has more nuance in its offense than some skeptics had concluded after the opener.
Will Bettridge is now Virginia’s all-time leading scorer
Sometime in the third quarter, after one of Holstein’s touchdown passes, Will Bettridge jogged out for an extra point nobody in the building would have remembered otherwise. Lining up the kick toward the end zone where the numbers 1, 15 and 41 hang — for Lavel Davis Jr., Devin Chandler and D’Sean Perry, killed in November 2022 — he stepped into it and knocked it through the uprights. It was his sixth extra point of the night and the 333rd point of his career, one more than Connor Hughes scored between 2002 and 2005.
Bettridge has been building toward this for a while. He made 24 field goals in 2025, a school single-season record, and entered this year already Virginia’s career leader in field goals made. He won the ACC’s Jim Tatum Award in 2025 as the league’s top football student-athlete, the first Cavalier to take it since 2019. And he has worn No. 41 since 2022 in honor of Perry, his Gulliver Prep teammate.
Friday he was good from 30 and 7-for-7 on extra points, finishing the night at 337 career points as he continues to be as reliable as they come for the Cavaliers.
Nobody has claimed UVA’s No. 1 receiver job
In conjunction with the broader questions about the passing game, much has been made about which receivers would step up for Virginia. Twelve different Cavaliers caught a pass Friday. None caught more than three, and the leading receiver finished with 36 yards.
That is a wonderful problem in a 56-point win. Spreading the ball around is a strength, especially in a game that had the backups on the field early. However, it poses questions for future games in which the Cavaliers will undoubtedly be tested more than they were against Norfolk State. Gibson, the UMass transfer who caught 63 balls for 616 yards and All-MAC honors last season, caught two touchdowns. Kameron Courtney had three catches for 35 yards and leads Virginia through two games with six for 47. Coleman had three for 14. Martin, Willem Thurber, TeKai Kirby, Rollison, Dakota Twitty, Xavier Brown, Noah Vaughn and Jekail Middlebrook had one apiece.
The mitigating fact is a big one: Rico Flores Jr., the UCLA transfer penciled in as the No. 1 receiver in the preseason, has not played yet. He was held out again Friday and is expected back for West Virginia.
Three quarterbacks threw touchdown passes, tying a 27-year-old record
Six touchdown passes ties Virginia’s single-game school record. It had been done twice — against Ohio in 1993 and against Buffalo in 1999, when Dan Ellis threw all six himself. Friday was the first time the Cavaliers got there with three different quarterbacks.
Pribula had three. Eli Holstein, the Pitt transfer, came on and threw two more in the third quarter, including a gorgeous ball to Ty’Lyric Coleman in the back corner of the end zone. Cole Geer, the second-year quarterback, hit Hayden Rollison from 12 yards out for the sixth. Virginia’s backups accounted for 67 yards and three scores on 10 combined attempts.
This is exciting to see as it highlights the depth of Virginia’s QB room, which could be critical in the event that Pribula sustains an injury. Given the quarterback-run-heavy offense displayed in the opener against NC State, where Pribula carried 15 times for 110 yards, an injury to him is something to account for — so getting reps for the backups, especially an experienced ACC signal caller like Holstein, is important.
Bonus: The defensive line is improving, but still has room to grow
The front’s progress from last season carried straight into Friday. Norfolk State ran 31 times for 55 yards — 1.8 a carry — and Virginia piled up eight tackles for loss after managing three in the opener. The Spartans never got a run game started, and their longest carry of the night went for nine yards. It was a dominant display, and a continuation of what the front did against NC State.
The pass rush is a different story, and it is the same story as two weeks ago. Two sacks again. The pressure was better — more hands in throwing lanes, more quarterbacks moving off their spot — but too often the rush over-pursued, and both Bailey and Da’Jean Golmond were able to step up into the vacated pocket and find something downfield. There were multiple plays where Virginia got pressure but allowed the quarterback to roll out, which resulted in some of Norfolk State’s biggest plays of the game.
Last year the pass rush seemed to get better as the season progressed, so that’s something I’ll be keeping an eye on throughout the rest of the season.
Bonus: The ‘Hoos are getting healthy at the right time
Robinson was not the only one back. Corey Costner returned after Elliott said during the week that both he and Robinson would be turned loose, and Isaiah Robinson came back and caught a touchdown. Flores is next.
For a team that emerged from the opener without a single new injury and then spent Week 2 handing snaps to backups, Virginia arrives at the first real test of the season with more available bodies than it has had since last October.
What’s next?
The opener looks better every week. NC State followed its loss in Charlottesville by hanging 73 points on Richmond as a 30.5-point favorite — a 42-point cover — which suggests the Wolfpack are perfectly capable of burying an overmatched opponent and that Virginia’s 34-8 win was not a case of NC State being bad.
West Virginia comes next, on Sept. 19 in Charlotte — the only Power Four nonconference game on Virginia’s schedule this season. Everything through two weeks says this is an even better football team than the one that won 11 games and played for an ACC championship last November, but time will tell if the Cavaliers are able to realize that potential.
