At some point, Virginia football coach Tony Elliott saying a lopsided loss in a big game is on him because he didn’t have his team ready to play ceases being a noble act and moves into the territory of being an admission of guilt.
“It’s on me. I did not do a great job of having this football team prepared and ready to play at a high level.”
This wasn’t Elliott after Virginia’s 55-17 loss to Virginia Tech on Saturday.
It was actually Elliott after UVA’s 45-17 loss to Georgia Tech on Nov. 4.
This was Elliott tonight: “I mean, it starts with me, I have to do a better job of having the team ready to play, week in and week out.”
It’s almost like these are his lines in the school play.
Credit to him: he has ‘em down.
For all the puffery I put into print this week about the close losses – one by one point, three by three points, one by seven – Saturday’s evisceration by the Hokies was the fourth by four touchdowns or more for Virginia this season.
The 2023 season was bookended by blowouts – 49-13 in the season opener in Nashville to a Tennessee team that looked that day like a national-title contender, but needed a win today to finish 8-4, its best win being, maybe UTSA, then the 38-point home loss today to a Virginia Tech team that didn’t beat a single team that finished with a winning record in 2023.
Maryland, which won today to finish 7-5, beat Virginia 42-14 in Week 3, and then there was the loss to the other Tech, which lost to Georgia tonight to finish 6-6.
It’s one thing to get blown out by a playoff contender, another thing entirely to be taken to the woodshed by a succession of mediocre teams.
Virginia had come into Saturday on what constituted a hot streak for a program that is 6-16 in the last two years, having gone 3-3 in its last six after an 0-5 start, with wins over North Carolina and Duke highlighting the recent success.
A win to finish 4-8, and go over .500 for the closing seven games, would send the program into the offseason with some positive momentum, which when you look at the recruiting for the Class of 2024 – UVA’s class currently ranks 15th in the soon-to-be 17-team ACC, and it’s a tiny class, just 12 commits – , a jolt there would be nice.
Now Virginia is off to building for 2024 off a dispiriting loss to its in-state rival, whose fans rushed the field at Scott Stadium to celebrate their favorite team’s sixth win and pending cold-weather bowl bid, and whose players were lingering around the 50 a half-hour after the final whistle dancing on the V logo, until they were chased off by the water sprinklers.
I hang around postgame to write my stories about the game in the press box overlooking the field. The only program that I’ve seen celebrate wins the way Virginia Tech did Saturday night, and did similarly two years ago, is, yeah, Virginia Tech.
The Virginia Tech program has no class; Virginia has a coach totally lacking in situational awareness.
To wit on that point, there is Elliott’s answer to a reporter’s question about whether the loss will kill the program’s momentum heading into the offseason: “I don’t think so.”
Here comes the word salad:
“I think obviously, in the state, we got, we had some work to do to begin with,” Elliott said, throwing shade there at his predecessor, Bronco Mendenhall, who didn’t exactly leave him with an empty cupboard – Mendenhall’s sin was back-to-back .500 seasons after leading Virginia to the Orange Bowl in 2019, and his unwillingness to fire his defensive coordinator at the behest of AD Carla Williams after a disappointing four-game losing streak to close out the 2022 season.
For a guy whose first recruiting class was 13th in the 14-team ACC, and second recruiting class is 15th in a 17-team ACC, to throw recruiting shade at anybody takes a lot in the way of cojones.
Back to the word salad:
“I think in-state, you know, guys may look at the score,” Elliott said, begging for you to interject, yeah, you think? “But when you look in totality, the progress that we made as a program, I’m very proud of all those guys in that locker room and the coaching staff, and I love that group of seniors. I mean, it’s a special, special group. And I know there’s no moral victories, but what that group did, and what they went through, right, the adversity that that they faced day in and day out, and there were several weeks throughout the course of season that there were things outside of the normal preparation process that they had to deal with.
“I’m very, very proud of that group and very, very proud to be their coach. And as I said when I told them, this has been, you know, one of my funnest years in coaching because I got to be around that group of individuals that showed up every single day and gave what they had.”
Elliott will almost certainly get a third year, because Williams’ future at UVA is tethered to his due to the way she created the vacancy, by running off the one guy who has taken Virginia to an ACC Championship Game and Orange Bowl.
That third year for Elliott had better come with benchmarks from Williams – the floor being six wins and a bowl game on a weekday afternoon between Christmas and New Year’s in some cold-weather environ, or else.
Williams also needs to do what she did to Mendenhall, when she told the coach that it seems that she ran off because she didn’t hire him – Mendenhall was a Craig Littlepage hire – that he needed to go with another guy to lead his defense.
The ultimatum from Williams in the 2023 offseason needs to be, it’s time to move on from Des Kitchings, the offensive coordinator whose unit ranked 12th in the ACC in scoring this year and was 14th last year, and Keith Gaither, the special-teams coordinator whose unit gave up blocked-punt TDs in one-score losses to JMU and Louisville, and kickoff-return TDs in the losses to Maryland and Virginia Tech, among its many other ills.
For those reading this far wondering why I’m not calling for Elliott’s job, I’ll concede that if a Darden MBA was looking at the Virginia football program like a business, and Elliott its CEO, the recommendation would likely be for a change to be made, but that recommendation would have been handed over a few weeks back.
It’s too late now to make any moves for 2024, given the glut of programs that fired coaches in the last few weeks, giving ADs and college presidents time to come up with their lists of candidates and narrow them down to short lists.
So, it’s on to getting ready for 2024 with what we’ve got, with Williams needing to tell Elliott to find two new coordinators, telling him he needs to get his team bowl-eligible, oh, and she might want to remind him, next year’s schedule has games in September with Clemson, Notre Dame, Louisville, Maryland and Coastal Carolina, in addition to the annual games with North Carolina and Virginia Tech, so, good luck getting to six wins.
For Elliott, tomorrow begins with exit interviews with his players, those whose eligibility is done, and those who will theoretically still be around.
“We’re going to start talking about the portal, free agency, all of that,” Elliott said. “There’s gonna be some tough conversations, and, you know, first we got to figure out retention-wise, you know, who are the guys that that we need to make sure that we that we retain on the roster, and then look for opportunities to improve the roster. And it’s gonna happen fast, you know. The portal, technically is not open, but it’s on and poppin’, as the young people say. There’s a lot of action going on in the portal already, there’s gonna be more to come, and it’s just gonna be a mad dash. Thing for us is we got to continue to figure out and find the right guys. We also got to make sure if we do go to the portal to supplement the roster, we get, you know, the length, the speed, the athleticism, you know, that we need at a certain spot.”
To make that long story short, the need is for length, speed and athleticism at every spot, in duplicate.
Share
Chris Graham
