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Not that anyone looks at it, nor does it really matter, but Virginia pretty dominated most of the Duke, UNC, and GT games, only to let them make runs in the 2nd half (GT actually took the lead).

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This is a huge LOL. Yes, they dominated most of the Duke game and it wasn't close until Duke made a couple late scores.

The North Carolina game though? Virginia was tremendously lucky there. UNC gained 6.54 YPP compared to 4.49 YPP for Virginia and the only reason the Cavs won is that they were lucky enough to win the turnover battle 3-0. 2 of those were fumbles which are even less correlated to skill than interceptions are. Also Virginia never had more than a 2 possession lead at any point of the game so it's not like they were just letting up when the game was out of reach.

Georgia Tech, meanwhile, didn't "make a run in the 2nd half". They trailed 21-17 at haltime and were outscored 7-6 in the 2nd half en route to a 5 point loss. This was another tremendously close game where GT had a drive in Virginia territory late in the game, but lost after two holding penalties killed the drive.

Georgia Tech also outgained UVA in terms of YPP, this time by a margin of 4.94 YPP to 4.78 YPP. The mere fact that Virginia briefly took a 2 TD lead in the first quarter doesn't mean that they "dominated the game". If anything, it would point to GT coming out unmotivated playing a morning game against a weak opponent the week after losing their biggest game of the season and not waking up until the deficit got too big.

The fact is that Virginia's an average team who's played a relatively weak schedule and has gotten extremely lucky to make it to 7-1. They have a 2 point win over a team who outgained them, a 5 point win at home over a team who outgained them in YPP, a 2 point win on a last second field goal, a 1 point win at home over a team that went 1/13 on 3rd down and a 1 point win after converting a 4th down on the final drive on possibly the worst spotting of the ball I've ever seen in my life.

That's not just a little lucky, it's extremely lucky. The only reason the computers have them so high is that they can't see margin of victory. If you assume normal distributions of points in wins over UNC, GT, UConn, and Maryland, it looks like you have a pretty good team. Knowing that those were all in the 1 to 5 point range and that one of them was an outright robbery of a call makes you look at things a little different.

In the Sagarin ratings for instance, the ratings that are used for the BCS that don't count MOV at all have Virginia ranked 8th. The predictor which relies solely on MOV, but is also proven to be the most accurate ranks the Cavs 45th. Obviously, there needs to be a little bit of a happy medium there and you have to give them some credit for just getting wins, no matter how they did it, but I think any ranking of Virginia in the 20-30 range would be very fair.