Virginia has tripled its win total from 2016 and yet, still has three games left in the regular season. Bronco Mendenhall has done plenty to expedite the turnaround.

Mendenhall has a method for all applications and he has his reasons behind them. Take moving the team to Scott Stadium for instance …

“We’ve come a long ways, but we’ve worked hard at it,” said Mendenhall on his coaches show with Dave Koehn on Tuesday. “Starting this spring, we moved all of our spring practices to the stadium. We took over the visitors’ locker room, there was a position group meeting there. The operations center in the stadium, one of the sides of the locker room was a position room. So basically, any room that we could put people in, we moved our organization.

“Because really what we remembered is that people don’t come to play us in our indoor facility. We actually play at Scott Stadium and so, we were really comfortable at our practice facility but we weren’t very comfortable playing the game in our stadium. So, we moved the team there.”

Moving the team to the stadium wasn’t quite enough.

Something was missing, according to Mendenhall.

“We realized something was missing. The players can tell you about this, but it didn’t smell like home. That might not sound like much to anyone else but for whatever reason, and I forget, we started making toast.

“So now, our locker room smells like toast and when it smells like toast, we know we’re home.”

The toast phenomenon is not just for Scott Stadium.

It’s a road show as well.

While Virginia Tech has its lunch pail and Tennessee has its traveling trash can (what a terrible idea), Virginia has its toaster … And ultimately, toast.

“Every stadium we go into, we bring a toaster and have toast, so when we go, we know we’re home. It’s kind of been symbolic.

“That might not make sense to anyone but my players, but it makes sense to us.”

ESPN 30 for 30, you know you want to get in on this now.

“What if I told you, a toaster changed the course of Virginia Football …” - ESPN commercial narrator guy, probably.