Virginia football coach Tony Elliott is losing the heart and soul of his offense, QB Brennan Armstrong, the heart and soul of his defense, linebacker Nick Jackson, and the heart and soul of his coaching staff, Marques Hagans, and doesn’t seem all that torn up about it.
To wit, this is Elliott offering his thoughts last week on Hagans, a UVA alum who was on the coaching staff for 12 years, dating back to the Mike London era: “Excited for Marques in his new opportunity, and very, very grateful for his service to the institution, and also the impact that he made in the community.”
Next, on Jackson, a three-time All-ACC selection: “At the end of the day, I understand that he’s earned the opportunity to look around and see what else is out there.”
And then on Armstrong, who holds UVA’s single-season record for passing yards, set in 2021 under Kitchings’ predecessor, Robert Anae, with whom Armstrong is reuniting at NC State: “It’s a lot like Nick’s situation, you know. Brennan graduated, and he gave a lot of blood, sweat and tears to this university. And so, you know, he has every right to make that decision, and I support him in wanting to make that decision.”
How it makes sense that Elliott is happy to be losing foundational pieces like Hagans, Jackson and Armstrong is that Elliott has been making clear from Day 1, back when he got the job in December 2021, that he wasn’t interested in building on the rebuild that Bronco Mendenhall had achieved in his six years at Virginia, and rather, was focused instead on tearing everything he’d inherited from Mendenhall down and starting over from scratch.
As much as you want to take Elliott at his word that he’s just happy for his guys, then, seeing Hagans, Jackson and Armstrong leave, in essence, completes the teardown from the Mendenhall era that he’s been striving for.
You break it, you bought it
Elliott chafed as the losses mounted in Year 1 at the constant reminders to “last season” when reporters asked about the offense’s struggles under his handpicked offensive coordinator, Des Kitchings, and repeatedly talked about his desire to change the culture in the program, as if there was something wrong with where Mendenhall had left things.
Mendenhall, for those who don’t remember, or just didn’t know, and it seems that Elliott is among that latter group, inherited a program that had recorded losing seasons in seven of the eight years before he took over, and had Virginia in the Orange Bowl – the program’s first-ever New Year’s Six bowl berth – by Year 4.
That Elliott didn’t want to build on where Mendenhall had left things isn’t just an indictment on him, but also on Carla Williams, the athletics director, who you have to assume would have laid out her thinking on where the football program needs to go as she met with candidates for the job after Mendenhall stepped down 14 months ago.
The teardown, then, you have to assume, was not Elliott’s idea, but Williams’, whose tenure is on the clock after Virginia’s 3-7 finish in 2022, with the prospects for even a return to the apparently unacceptable .500 football that led her to push Mendenhall out after a 5-5 finish in 2020 and a 6-6 finish in 2021 not looking good in 2023 or 2024, given the stunning lack of talent in the program now, and the even more stunning failures of the Elliott regime on the recruiting trail.
No, the latest rebuild of Virginia football – the fourth since George Welsh stepped down after the 2000 season, a period spanning three UVA athletics directors – isn’t off to what even the most Orwellian of PR flacks could paint as a rousing start, and it’s deeper than that 3-7 record on the field in Year 1.
Elliott’s dawdling in naming an offensive coordinator when he got the job in December 2021 led to mass departure of what would have been one of the top offensive lines in all of college football, a key factor as to why the offense, which set several school records in 2021, would end up putting up anemic numbers in 2022 under Kitchings, who now has to replace the slapdash O line that he and offensive line coach Garett Tujague cobbled together in the offseason that is now losing four 2022 starters to the transfer portal and retirement.
This, on top of the poor showing on the prep recruiting trail, which in the Elliott staff’s full year combing the high schools for talent ranked 13th in the 14-team ACC, and then also, the pick-ups from the transfer portal have been similarly underwhelming, with the replacement for the NFL prospect Armstrong at QB coming in the form of a mid from Monmouth, an FCS school that isn’t even among the powers at that next-level-down division, with glaring needs remaining on the O line and at linebacker.
And for all the credit that Elliott deserves for luring John Rudzinski from Air Force to shore up the defensive side of the ball, the move to give the offense to Kitchings, whose previous two stints as an offensive coordinator, at NC State and Vanderbilt, resulted in him not being retained after a single season at the controls, and then double down by sticking with Kitchings after the disastrous 2022, has been nothing short of bizarre.
It’s no wonder that recruits aren’t showing interest in signing on, even as Elliott acknowledged last week at his signing day presser – a signing day presser on a day on which the program added exactly zero new prep recruits – that Virginia needs to focus on being a “developmental program.”
Coaching talent, too, isn’t exactly flocking to be part of the Elliott rebuild. It took Elliott four weeks to replace the departing Tujague, who will be joining Anae and Armstrong at NC State, as the program again was losing what it had on the O line, and he ultimately ended up with Terry Heffernan, who has a decent resume, sure, but Heffernan had been on the job market for six weeks after David Shaw stepped down at Stanford in November with no takers.
The replacement for Hagans, who left UVA for Penn State, and is regarded as one of the top young offensive minds at the college level, is a guy named Adam Mims, whose experience before serving as an analyst last year at Virginia came with seven years as an analyst and assistant at the FCS level.
The good news, if this is good news, for Elliott is that there will be no more questions from reporters about “last year” with “last year” referring to success that could have been built upon.
The head-scratching teardown engineered by Williams should have the scribes focused on getting the the AD and the head coach to offer their perspectives on the old Pottery Barn rule from the late Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Pottery Barn rule stating: You broke it, you bought it.
Williams didn’t need to hire a coach to execute a teardown, but since she did, and the guy she hired has flubbed it spectacularly, they need to be made to own it.
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Chris Graham
