The lack of fire and focus that you saw on the UVA sidelines in Saturday’s 24-3 beatdown at Illinois was something that coach Tony Elliott had seen earlier in the week in practice.
“We’ve got to own that. That’s us. We put that out there. We can’t blame it on anybody else. Now we have to acknowledge, OK, what are some of the things that contributed to that,” Elliott told reporters at his weekly press conference on Tuesday.
“Last week, Wednesday we didn’t have a great practice. Thursday, we had to get after the scout team to give us a great look for the offense, which created some issues just from a flow of practice standpoint.
“Monday there was a sense of just after a victory, and I said it, and I said it in the locker room after the game, and I said it at halftime and I think I said it here last year, fellas, we’ve got to learn how to handle success.”
It doesn’t say a lot for the state of the program that the success the players had trouble handling was a middling win over an FCS opponent.
No disrespect to Richmond, but that one was marked as a W months ago. No reason to get fat and happy about beating an FCS school.
This is particular cause for concern because of the number of upperclassmen and grad students on the roster this year.
It would at least make sense for a young team to let a Week 1 W go to its heads, but the bulk of this roster is back from a team that was 6-2 and in the driver’s seat to win the ACC Coastal going into November before losing its final four games.
That, in turn, precipitated the sudden, shocking decision of sixth-year head coach Bronco Mendenhall to step down, ushering in the beginning of the Tony Elliott era.
One thing you wouldn’t have thought Elliott would have needed to focus on was getting this team motivated to want to play, especially this early in a season with everything out in front of the program in terms of that which can be accomplished.
A first-time head coach, Elliott signaled Tuesday that “I have to be at my best is this situation right now, because there’s a locker room full of people that are looking at me to figure out, what do we do next.”
“What we do next is we own it, we accept it, we realize that for a week that’s what we are. That’s what we put on film,” Elliott said.
He realizes, he said, that “everyone is trying to see how is Tony Elliott going to respond after a loss.”
He set the tone on Sunday, getting in early to break down film.
“Hey, it’s Sunday. We’ve got to move forward. Monday is Monday, we’ve got to move forward. Really just illustrating to folks that, hey, I’ve got your attention now after a loss, right, but hopefully we understand that we don’t like this feeling, and we don’t like to have our attention captured like this, so let’s stay committed to the process and let’s be honest, and I think the guys have responded well,” Elliott said.
The first two practices of the week heading into Saturday’s game with ODU were “good practices,” Elliott said, but “for me, it’s on to the next one. I mean, that’s just how I’m wired.”
“You enjoy it for the night, or you weep for the night, and you know that joy is coming in the morning, and you get back up and you go back to work, and you own your mistakes, and you figure out how to fix them, and you move forward,” Elliott said.
“What my job is now is I got to foster the leadership collectively, and there’s still a lot of teaching, too, and I’m developing the staff, getting them to understand my expectations, so everybody — I’ve got to create an environment collectively where everybody raises to that level of humility day in and day out so we can go out and attack the day,” Elliott said.
“Now they’re coming off a loss. Nobody likes to lose. That’s what I told them today. I told them, today has been one of the best Tuesdays we’ve had. But it shouldn’t be because we lost. It should be the best Tuesday every week, because that’s all we’ve got. We’ve got today, and we’re hoping for Saturday. It’s just a mindset with these young people.”
Another thing that Elliott is focused on changing is his team’s mental fortitude. He said part of the problem was that his players thought what happened on Saturday “couldn’t happen to us.”
“This can happen to anybody in football. I’ve been on the other side in College Football Playoff games where it was 31-0, 30-3 on the biggest stage, on the other side, and then I’ve been on the side where you get your butt kicked by Alabama in the Sugar Bowl just like got beat up. It can happen. We’ve got to be humble and understand that this can happen, and then we’ve got to learn from it,” Elliott said.
What Elliott didn’t like, he said, “is the guys just had a look, and it’s one of those things as a coach, you’re like, man, I’m trying to say whatever I can say, I’m trying to holler, I’m trying to talk quiet, I’m trying to pull everything that I can, and you just can’t pull those guys out of it.”
“What it’s going to take, it’s going to take one of their teammates. It’s going to take one of their teammates going in there and saying, fellas, hey, we’re going to get out of this thing. I’m going to put my back, y’all just follow me,” Elliott said.
“Unfortunately, KT [Keytaon Thompson] was the only one that was trying to do that. I kept trying to urge Brennan, man, Brennan, go in there and talk to your guys. Go in there and talk to your guys. Go in there and talk to them. And he would try, but then he wouldn’t have success on the field, so now he’s struggling.”
Bottom line: the team felt like world-beaters after a win over an FCS team, had a bad week of practice, got punched in the mouth early on Saturday, and didn’t step up.
“What was more evident when I watched the tape, just the guys didn’t respond well to the adversity,” Elliott said. “I felt like especially on the offensive side of the ball, just being transparent, Illinois punched us in the mouth, and the guys were reeling the entire game.
“You were hoping that somebody was going to step in and say, Hey, fellas, follow me, I’ll find us a way out of this situation. But when you watch it on tape – I was trying to find some positives, but there wasn’t a ton of positive.”
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Chris Graham
