If you didn’t watch the game, or look at the score, or the stats, you would have thought, after listening to UVA Football coach Tony Elliott talk with the media, that his team was thisclose to pulling off a big road win at Florida State.
To that point: I did watch the game, then watched TE’s presser, transcribed it, read it a couple of times, and, gotta say, I’m almost there with him.
The ball bounces differently once or twice, and that game’s not 38-7.
Enough sarcasm.
If anybody out there is buying what Elliott is selling, lean in here for a second.
Can I also interest you in my new memecoin?
One side is a ‘toon of the Brooklyn Bridge; the other is oceanfront property in Arizona.
Get in now, before they’re worthless.
ICYMI
- UVA Football: Overpaid, poorly coached ‘Hoos steamrolled at FSU, losing 38-7
- UVA Football: This Virginia team has a whole ‘nuther dimension of quit to it
“I told them coming into this game that it’s not going to be five or seven plays that determine the outcome of this game, it’s going to be two, right?”
That was Elliott, trying to get us to buy into what we thought we saw being our eyes telling us lies.
“When you’re playing a team like Florida State, and I don’t care what people say, that’s a talented roster, and I think we saw that today, and they put it all put it all together, so when you’re playing a talented team like that at home, right, in a in a hostile environment, it’s going to come down to two plays, and you know, maybe one of those drops would have been one of the two plays that swung the momentum in our favor to help us be on the other side of this.”
The environment: decidedly not hostile.
Doak Campbell holds 67,277; the announced attendance was 55,782.
So, about 12,000 empties.
And then, they were silent for the entirety of the first quarter, until the home team started on its 38-0 run.
The noise didn’t cause the 38-0 run; the 38-0 run caused the noise.
More from Elliott:
“We knew it was going to be a hard-fought battle, and I thought that, you know, we missed some opportunities, and when we needed to fully flip the momentum, we couldn’t. We missed some tackles, missed some plays on offense, a couple of dropped balls, and before you know it, the momentum had fully changed, and we couldn’t get it flipped.”
Reality check: not a hard-fought battle, not even close – not with FSU outgaining Virginia 465-204, sacking Beau Pribula 10 (!) times, holding the ‘Hoos to 37 yards on the ground, while gashing the UVA defense for 281.
“I think this was a new frontier for this team,” Elliott said. “You know, it’s the first time that that they’ve come down here with this staff and this group, and so, a lot of teaching and growing that, one, I have to have as a head coach, because it’s my first time coming down here as a head coach, as a staff, and then as a team.
“I love my guys. I wouldn’t want to go to battle with anybody else, and we’re gonna get it fixed.”
You’ll hear a version of that a lot as we get through this.
Gotta get it fixed.
Let’s start a drinking game around that phrase; but before we do, do me a favor, and make sure you have a safe ride home, or somebody to help you up the stairs.
Warning: you’re going to be sleeping with your shoes on tonight.
Elliott seems to think we’ll confuse the current FSU team, which got the AD fired last month, and has its head coach on the verge, with the teams that he used to do battle with a decade ago, when he was at Clemson, and the winner of the Clemson-FSU game seemed destined for a spot in the national title game.
This Florida State team isn’t that; it’s a group that struggled to put away New Mexico State in its opener, then gave up 500-plus in total offense in back-to-back losses to SMU and Alabama.
FSU is supposed to be in a holding pattern, waiting for the inevitable bottom to drop, so they can fire the coach, while Virginia is supposed to be ascendant, building off a program-record 11 wins last season with a deeper and more talented roster this year.
But now we have a different sense of what the 2026 Virginia team is – and it’s not made up like the 2025 Virginia team, which got the most of its talent because it played with a chip on its shoulder, set on proving everybody that had them finishing in the back of the pack in the ACC wrong.
That group faced adversity every week from the end of September on, and played its way into the College Football Playoff discussion.
This 2026 group has faced adversity twice – two weeks ago in Charlotte, when a bad West Virginia team punched it in the mouth, and Virginia folded, and then today in Tallahassee, when Virginia not only folded, but curled into a fetal position and asked for its binky.
That started happening on the sidelines midway through the second quarter, as the ‘Noles were beginning to assert control – outgaining the ‘Hoos 218 to negative-12 as they turned a 7-0 first quarter deficit into a 17-7 lead at the half that could have been worse, if Ashton Daniels hadn’t thrown an INT at the UVA 20 in the closing seconds of the first half.
“I think there in the second quarter, you know, I really challenged the guys from that standpoint, just to control what they can control, and not let the circumstances and the situation, you know, kind of dictate the way that they respond,” said Elliott, who isn’t exactly fessing up there to how he was also visibly losing it on the sidelines as the game was getting away.
“We all got to be better in that aspect, because the reality is, body language influences, you know, the way that you think, and the way that you think influences the way that you go out and talk and act and respond,” Elliott said.
“I got to do a better job. Again, it starts with me. So, that’s on me to fix, and I’ll go to work, and I’ll get it fixed.”
Drink.
Anyway, that was what we got, in terms of Elliott taking ownership for failing to do Job #1 of a head college football coach – which is, to pump up the kids when they need pumping up.
We did eventually get, in the Elliott postgame, to the platitudes that we’ve been hearing for years – the echoes go back to the Mike London era – along the lines of London making excuses for the latest ugly loss with a version of, Just gotta coach ‘em up.
Here we go, to that:
“I mean, everybody’s got ownership in it. Start with me. It starts with me. I got to do a better job of making sure they’re prepared and ready to play, make sure that they fully understand the plan and are ready to go execute it,” Elliott said.
“I love my guys up here. Go back to work. I mean, it’s a great group of young men. It was a tough day at the office. We’re going to own it, take accountability for it, and we don’t have a long time to hang our head about it. We got to go back to work on Monday, because we got a good Syracuse team coming into the house.
“We’ll fix the problems that we got …”
Drink.
“ … but everybody’s got ownership, and, you know, the challenge is just for all of us to take the accountability necessary so that we can go work on it and fix it.”
Drink.
“There’s also a lot of pictures of them doing good, too, so we got we got to make sure that that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and think that everything is lost.”
That was all in one breath, that one.
Sir, what dressing would you like with your word salad?
Elliott would make another go at it later in the presser.
“I gotta do a better job from a leadership standpoint, and I will, but I believe we got young men in there that care, right, that want to do well. They’ll come in Monday wanting to fix it,” Elliott said.
Drink.
“They’ll be looking for answers, and my job is to make sure that I that I give them the right answers, right? And first, it starts with me making sure that I come up with the right answers for them, and I’ll bust my tail between now and Monday to make sure that I do. But I mean, I love my team, right? I mean, I told the team down there, like, I’ve had my butt kicked worse than that down here in Tallahassee before, right? And you know what, I still ended up OK, right, winning a lot of football games and responding.”
I don’t even know what to add there that can be more snarky than that.
We just lost 38-7, sure, but I won two national championships, so I’m doing OK in life.
“I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, and I got a great group of young men in there that work their butt off every single day,” Elliott would go on to say.
If you haven’t picked up on this already, everybody works hard.
Just want to make sure y’all knew that.
“It was a rough day at the office for all of us, and we’re gonna take accountability from it. We’re not gonna point no fingers. We’re not gonna lay blame anywhere other than the things that we didn’t control, that we said we were going to try and control, and we’re going to go back to work and have a great week of practice, and you know, show back up on next Saturday and see can we get this bad taste out of our mouth.”
He’s right, you know.
That sh-t sandwich he tried to get us to scarf down would leave a bad taste.
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Chris Graham
