“That was a rough day at the office right there,” Virginia football coach Tony Elliott said after his team’s loss to Illinois on Saturday, and he wasn’t just talking about the football part of things.
The TV shots of the UVA sidelines didn’t put a good look on the Elliott administration, with the head coach shown firing off at players several times, which would be perfectly fine if what was happening was all the players’ fault, which it wasn’t.
And then there’s this one thing Coach Elliott had to say postgame:
“Hats off to Illinois, but it’s going to be a hard film for them to watch,” Elliott said, “because they’re going to realize there were so many things that they could have done better to give themselves a chance to be in the game in the fourth quarter.”
“Them”? “They”?
Elliott seems to still need to adjust to the idea that he’s not at Clemson anymore.
Note to Coach Elliott: Virginia is “us,” “we,” not “them,” “they.”
He’ll get it, eventually, we hope, just as we can hope that we get better work from offensive coordinator Des Kitchings, whose game plan for Illinois seemed totally divorced from any sense of reality.
Kitchings had to know coming in that Illinois was going to bring it with its five-man front, which had put 20 QB pressures on Indiana and held the Hoosiers to 32 net yards rushing in a 23-20 loss in Week 1, but Kitchings played it like he was going up against Richmond, the FCS opponent that Virginia beat 34-17 in its Week 1 game.
And if that wasn’t frustrating enough, Kitchings didn’t show any interest or ability to make adjustments when it was clear that his creaky O line couldn’t give Brennan Armstrong any time to throw the ball, or Perris Jones and the running game any holes to try to run through.
The definition of insanity, as the saying goes, is doing the same thing over and over, and hoping for a different result, but that was what you got from Kitchings – more dropbacks for Armstrong, instead of using his mobility to move the pocket, and pick apart the man coverage on his receivers; more targets for Dontayvion Wicks, who couldn’t seem to get open to save his life, and when he did get his hands on the ball, couldn’t seem to squeeze it in.
So, now it’s back to the drawing board for an offense that ranked third in the nation in total offense a year ago at 515.9 yards per game, and put up a measly 222 total yards on Saturday, and didn’t even record an offensive first down until the second quarter.
The only inkling that anybody is thinking of what needs to be done to address what Illinois was able to do came from Armstrong, who offered postgame that “teams could see what just happened there and come out and play us man every time. That’s a possibility. So, we better figure out how to protect and how to get the ball out and how to get open in man.”
Note what he said there.
“We” better figure out how to protect.
“We.” “Us.”
Not “them.”
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Chris Graham
