UVA Athletics is in disarray right now. There’s no other way to say it.
It’s hard to decide where to start, so I’ll start with the most recent – with the football program, in Year 3 of the Tony Elliott era, just dropping its third straight, this one in blowout fashion, before the biggest home crowd in years, to the program’s biggest rival.
There are four games left on the schedule, three on the road, including at Virginia Tech, three of the games involving Top 25 opponents.
We’re staring 4-8 squarely in the face, and a 4-8 finish would mean closing out with seven straight losses.
A 4-8 finish would, yes, technically, represent an improvement from back-to-back three-win seasons.
Problem being, there are 43 seniors and grad students on the roster – let me repeat, for emphasis, 43.
Next year is going to be another rebuild.
Unbelievable, right?
But that’s football, the #1 revenue sport in the department.
Men’s basketball, the other program that turns a profit, just saw future Hall of Fame coach Tony Bennett step down on the eve of the season, handing the reins of the program, on an interim basis, to his long-time top assistant, Ron Sanchez.
The preseason forecast for the 2024-2025 season is for a Top 5 finish in the ACC, 20-plus wins and an NCAA Tournament berth, but the athletics director, Carla Williams, is nonetheless insisting that she will begin a “national search” for a full-time replacement.
Problem here being, Carla Williams is, at the moment, a lame duck – her contract is set to expire on May 31, 2025.
You can never get anybody on the record on these things, but I have been in communication with a person at the tippy top of the administration at UVA, and the word at that level is that Williams has been interviewing for “other jobs.”
It wasn’t made clear to me the nature of those jobs, but I’d imagine, for someone with her resume, that we’re talking about an AD job somewhere else in Power 5 or a conference commissioner post.
I’m writing this to say to the UVA fans and alums who have been emailing me the past couple of days about how something needs to be done with the football program – all due respect, the football program is not the top priority right now.
The top priority is, we’re not even sure who the AD is on June 1.
I can see the point about needing to be prepared to move on from Tony Elliott, if things continue the way they’re trending.
If he’s 3-7, 3-9 and 4-8, with 43 seniors and grad students on their way out the door, now is as good a time as any to pull the plug and make a change.
But do you make that change with a lame-duck AD?
And with men’s basketball, for the bluster from Carla Williams about a “national search” for a full-time coach, it makes no sense to have a lame-duck AD involved in that process at all.
In both cases, your pool of candidates is going to be limited, because the guys with the good resumes are going to balk at being hired by an AD who is on her way out the door, with the presumption that whoever the next AD is will want to have their future decided by people in the important jobs that they put there, not what they inherited from the predecessor.
We kinda, sorta saw that with Williams vis-à-vis football. She inherited Bronco Mendenhall from the Craig Littlepage era, and it only took back-to-back .500 seasons, two years after an Orange Bowl appearance, for her to push Mendenhall out the door in favor of getting somebody of her choosing, in the form of Tony Elliott, in place.
Everything else – women’s swimming, tennis, baseball, the rest of the non-revenues – is in a good place, but those programs are on cruise control with good coaches and staff, and all lose money, gobs of it.
With respect to the programs that make money, football is in need of a change in direction, basketball is in wait-and-see mode.
We’re at a critical juncture, and we’re in a state of flux at the top.
UVA President Jim Ryan and the Board of Visitors need to act, fast, to resolve this uncertainty, one way or another.
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Chris Graham
