Courtesy of Augusta Free Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Most of Virginia’s student body took this weekend’s away football game as an opportunity to leave its collective bowtie in the top drawer or pearl necklace in the jewelry box and relax, free from the stress of watching their winless team.

For some frustrated fans, though, the Cavaliers’ trip to Hattiesburg, Miss., represented an opportunity to make their complaints heard.

Dozens of the disenchanted Wahoo faithful congregated in front of the team’s McCue Center headquarters next to University Hall in the wee hours of Saturday morning, armed with posterboard, blue and orange magic markers, and a common message for much-maligned Virginia head coach Al Groh.

“Groh must grow!” second-year political science major Lance Massenburg shouted while filling in the blue bubble letters on his sign with orange, coloring carefully within the lines.

“We’re fed up with his schtick,” Massenburg continued. “Every week, win or lose, we get the same old stone-faced ball coach shrugging his shoulders for the fans. He’s lost his last six games, choked away bowl eligibility, and taken one on the chin from William-and-freaking-Mary, and we haven’t gotten so much as a headset smashed in frustration.

“He needs to show a wider range of emotions. If he’d just hit a microphone or something, the sixty minutes of bad football would at least be entertaining.”

With the football team’s staff out of town, Massenburg explained, the group seized the opportunity “for real grassroots action against the coaching status quo” after meeting and organizing through private messages on Internet message boards.

“We wanted to stage a sit-in hunger strike, like those Living Wage hippies did,” he said, “but the doors were locked.”

Undeterred, the gathered protestors disperesed temporarily, returning before noon with camping supplies and provisions for a protracted stay on McCue’s grassy front lawn.

“I refuse to put off working on my dissertation to follow week after week of fruitless gridiron futility!” philosophy grad student Erik Bayes opined as he inflated a bed inside his Coleman-brand tent.

“If I’m going to pull all-nighters wracking my brain on how to answer the question of free will well enough to get a master’s degree from this school,” Bayes said, “I expect the football coach to be similarly thoughtful about the awful results he’s getting. Lose a cupcake game, lose six games—lose every game this season, for all I care—but at least take a lesson away from it.

“Bemoan that ‘the best laid plans of mice and men’ fall to pieces. Question whether the end of winning justifies the cutthroat means used by the schools who rise to the top. Realize the insignificance of a game in a world torn by war, poverty, and disease.

“Expand your mind, for crying out loud!”

When told that many Virginia supporters are calling for Groh’s dismissal, the protestors seemed taken aback.

“Fire him?” townie and lawn maintenance contractor Ted Spargo wondered as he taped his “Emphasize The Positives” sign to a wooden paint stick. “That’s so harsh.”

“I mean, his program’s graduation rate has never quite lived up to the school’s reputation, and those six consecutive losses sting a little right now,” Spargo acknowledged. “But he’s coached up 23 NFL draft picks in his eight years, including five first-rounders. And his defenses have always been competitive in the ACC.

“Then again, these are the same fans who dress for football games like weddings and drink a fifth of liquor before the last home game as a rite of passage. I wouldn’t trust them with operating a weedwhacker, let alone a football team.”

But for Brenda Miller and Stacey Welsh, two undergraduates at the University of Florida who volunteer with Shands Children’s Hospital in Gainesville through their sorority, Tau Beta Theta, the broadcast was quite an eye-opener.

“We already knew that he [Tebow] was, like, the best–and hottest!–football player ever,” Miller explained. “But when that announcer-guy said, you know, that spending five or twenty minutes with him could, like, change your life, we both thought of the children.”

Miller and Welsh started volunteering at the Gainesville-area children’s hospital during the spring semester of their freshman year, bringing gifts and spending time with the patients.

“We volunteer on weekends there, mostly,” Miller said. “Whenever there’s not, like, a mixer or a home game or something.”

The children whose plight had weighed most heavily on the girls’ minds was that of three young brothers, Thomas, Andrew, and Daniel Nguyen. The boys had been diagnosed with malignant brain tumors which had recently spread, afflicting each of them with near-total blindness. Despite the attention of the hospital’s world-renowned neurologists and staff, the boys’ conditions had continued to worsen.

“I mean, yeah, the people who treat them at Shands are, like, doctors and such,” Walsh acknowledged, “but they mostly just walk around writing on clipboards and do tests on the kids. A lot of medical-type stuff.

“That guy on television had talked to Tebow, not even about medicine, and he said it changed his life.”

“And then,” Miller added, “when he was on the four-yard line, with the Gators only ahead by three, and he acted like he was running and then jumped to pass it for the touchdown, we were like, ‘Oh-my-god, that’s a miracle!’ It seemed impossible, that one person could be running and passing at the same time. And I’ve never seen one of those doctors perform a miracle in three years of volunteering.

“We decided the next day at lunch to ask Harry [Harold Hodgkiss, the hospital's chief of medicine] if he could get Tebow in to see them.”

Dr. Hodgkiss admitted that he was initially reluctant to involve the quarterback in the boys’ case.

“We are very proud of the unrivaled team of neurosurgeons in our employ,” he explained. “I was confident that, with the proper precautions, we would be able to successfully operate on each of the boys in the near future–and, frankly, the girls’ suggestion was quite unorthodox. There isn’t a soul east of Tallahassee who’d dispute Mr. Tebow’s status as perhaps the greatest human being to ever touch a football, but I like to think of myself as an advocate of the power of modern medicine.

“Besides,” he added, “that spread option offense isn’t exactly brain surgery.”

But Dr. Hodgkiss was persuaded to grant Miller and Welsh their request. “We agreed that I would ask him,” Welsh said, “since I paid a girl $200 for her spot in one of his sociology classes. I was totally nervous since it was my first time, like, actually talking to him.”

Tebow agreed to accompany the girls on their next volunteer visit. “He said he was really busy, of course,” Welsh explained, “but that guy on TV said it only took five minutes, so we weren’t concerned.”

What followed, according to Dr. Hodgkiss, was “magic.”

“He walked into the children’s wing behind the girls,” Hodgkiss recalled, “still shaking hands and signing scrubs for a few of the doctors, and we brought him over to the Nguyen children. Andrew was lying there, propped up on pillows in the bed, and Mr. Tebow looked at him and said, ‘Hey, buddy,’ and the boy blinked–and looked up at him, and said, ‘Hey.’ And you could just tell that Andrew could see him.”

Miller and Welsh excitedly directed Tebow to the other boys’ beds, and soon Thomas and Daniel were looking at each other and Tebow.

“It was positively Christ-like, what he did,” Hodgkiss said. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind in church last Sunday–the first Sunday I’d gone in twenty years. I just had to thank God for Tim Tebow.”

MRI scans taken on each of the Nguyen boys after Tebow’s visit showed no trace of the tumors which had afflicted them. They were recently released to their parents’ care with the approval of the hospital’s neurological experts, who consider the possibility of the tumors’ regrowth to be negligible.

“I’m glad Mr. Tebow gave me my sight back,” said Andrew Nguyen. “I got to watch all the Gators games I missed. My favorite player is Percy Harvin. He’s so fast!”