UVA Football coach Tony Elliott is more upset at Ben Smiley not reacting well to a Clemson player taunting him with the game already well out of reach than he is at Dabo Swinney trying to run up the score to add style points to the final result.
Elliott wasn’t asked, directly, in the postgame to address the dick move by Swinney to send his first-team offense out not once, but twice, in the final two minutes of the 48-31 Clemson win.
Swinney did get a question on that, and offered up this lame excuse:
“To their credit, I’m trying to call the dogs out,” Swinney said. “That is what I told those guys. When we put the subs in, they don’t call timeout and say, Oh, they put the backups in, let’s put our backups in.”
Except that Elliott had already emptied his bench, giving his backup QB, Tony Muskett, a chance to get live reps with the second-team offense after Clemson punted with 4:47 left, the scoreboard reading Clemson 41, Virginia 17.
Muskett, a grad senior who lost the QB1 battle to sophomore Anthony Colandrea in training camp, was 5-of-6 for 54 yards on that drive, throwing to backups Suderian Harrison, TyLyric Coleman, Jaden Gibson, Noah Vaughn and Sackett Wood, with the driving ending with a TD pass to Wood with 2:11 on the clock.
Virginia, down, after converting a two-point try, 41-25 at this point, tried an onside kick, because that’s what you do, even with the game still out of reach.
Clemson recovered, and after a 5-yard run on first down, we got the two-minute timeout.
Coming out of the two-minute timeout, Cade Klubnik, on the first play, connected with TJ Moore for a 34-yard TD.
Now, to be fair, Elliott did have three timeouts to use if he wanted to, and could have tried to stretch things out if Swinney had gone with the approach that you see 99 percent of coaches use in this situation – namely, run the ball on second-and-5, make the other side start using their timeouts, try to get a first down to render the timeouts to be of no value, then go into victory formation to bleed the clock to double zeroes.
That’s what 99 percent of coaches do here.
A full 100 percent of coaches looking across the field at a guy on the other sideline who was on your staff for 11 years, and was the play-caller for two of your national championships, aren’t looking to throw the ball deep up two scores inside of two minutes to go.
There was a bit of pyrrhic poetic justice to what happened when Virginia got the ball back – Muskett hooking up with backup wideout Ethan Davies for a 65-yard TD pass.
“That was a good call,” a smug Swinney said of that one. “He went at our young corner out there and took a little shot, and I saw him smiling over there, so I tipped my hat to him. They kept playing.”
As did Clemson. After recovering the second onside-kick attempt, Swinney sent his first-team offense back out there again, getting another first down on an 11-yard run from Keith Adams and a short 3-yard run from Adams before having Klubnik kneel down to run out the clock.
The postgame presser for Elliott was a lot about the play earlier in the fourth quarter involving Smiley, who was ejected after being flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct, the result of Smiley grabbing Clemson offensive lineman Tristan Leigh and tackling him to the ground during a dust-up between the two.
The dustup was precipitated by the two getting tangled up after a fourth-down-and-short run by Phil Mafah that moved the chains for the Tigers, up 38-17 at the time.
Leigh, extricating himself, stepped on Smiley’s leg, then stepped over Smiley and appeared to taunt him.
After being flagged, an angry Smiley had to be restrained by Virginia staffers as he was being led off the field, and he reacted angrily to Elliott as the head coach tried to calm him down on the sidelines.
“Just unacceptable for Ben to react that way,” Elliott told reporters after the game. “I talked to him in the locker room. He’s very remorseful. He knows that’s not truly a reflection of his character.
“He understands, and the team understands, that we’re not going to respond that way,” Elliott went on. “That’s not who we are, that’s not how we play the game and that’s not how I coach the game. He’ll take accountability for it, and we’ll learn, we’ll grow, and we’ll move on.”
It’s appropriate that Elliott would have that to say about one of his guys getting thrown out of the game, even if it feels a little like he was throwing his guy under the bus, especially considering the grace that he showed for the coach of the other side that thought it appropriate to try to rub it in with the outcome of the game already having been decided.
This is the closest that Elliott came to addressing that issue:
“I’m just very fortunate to have had a chance to learn a lot from him, and, you know, had a chance to go compete. And like, I thought, like, he wasn’t gonna take it easy on me. He wouldn’t go take it easy on us, man. He’s going, he’s going to do what he does, and as he prepares his football teams, to go finish, and to go win, and to and to not only win, but to try and dominate.”
You’d like to see Tony Elliott treat Dabo Swinney trying to run up the score as being as “unacceptable” as he treated Ben Smiley not reacting well to being taunted down three touchdowns in the fourth quarter, because that would be Tony Elliott sticking up for his guys.
That really doesn’t seem like a hard ask.
Share
Chris Graham
