ESPN College Football

Posted by ESPN.com’s Heather Dinich

Unfortunately for Virginia, this is nothing new.

Coach Al Groh said the recent season-ending foot injury to freshman running back Dominique Wallace will shake up his lineup, but it’s the seventh or eighth year, according to Groh, that the Cavaliers have had to make an adjustment because of injuries at that position.

Groh said it’s a different foot injury than former running back Cedric Peerman suffered, but similar to what Wali Lundy had. Lundy was injured on the third play of his senior season and needed seven or eight weeks to recover. Peerman lost a whole season. Wallace will have surgery as soon as it can be scheduled, and Groh said it’s “unavoidable.”

“Unfortunately he joins a long list of backs here who have suffered significant injuries during their season,” Groh said. “It seems that if there’s one position where we’ve had issue with one of our top guys every year, I think this is the seventh or eighth year this has occurred. We’ve tried to investigate every possible thing -- curvature of the arch each player had, were they flat-footed, did they have a nice arch, what kind of shoes were they wearing, what kind of run were they running. Despite all due diligence, it looks like it’s just a bad set of coincidences.”

Wallace had 11 carries for 35 yards in Saturday’s 37-34 loss to Southern Miss, and was a player Groh and that staff had high hopes for in the next nine games. He had played in all three games, but moved into the starting lineup last week.

“He was becoming as you could see last Saturday a significant part of that rotation,” Groh said. “Obviously by starting that game he was about as close to the top of the rotation as a player can get, and acquitted himself very well. What was certainly a testimony to his will and his toughness was he played well over two quarters after being injured. Our trainers have remarked from their perspective how tough he must be in order to be able to do that and still produce very well. It certainly does change the rotation.”

Groh said Wallace “meets all the criteria” a player would need to be awarded a medical hardship by the NCAA, but declined to comment further until that decision is made.