Get off Tony Elliott’s back, we’re being told by the gatekeepers, who want the few of you who still care about UVA Football that it’s you caring that is the problem.
Reading this was another “fringe media” moment for me, since I’ve been the one in the UVA Athletics media asking the questions about Elliott’s approach on offense.
I’m the guy who raised issue with his move to overhaul the offense after getting the job in December 2021, going with a guy in Des Kitchings as his offensive coordinator with a track record of being given that opportunity, getting a year to prove himself, and the coach who made that call moving on after not getting results.
I’m the guy who wondered aloud why Carla Williams, the AD who ran Bronco Mendenhall out of town because he wouldn’t fire his defensive coordinator after that historically bad 2021 season from the UVA defense, didn’t press Elliott to make a similar change when Kitchings, in his first season as the O coordinator under Elliott, once again proved himself unworthy of that job.
ICYMI
- Inside the Numbers: Simplified game plan, play-calling doomed UVA Football offense
- UVA Football: Tony Elliott isn’t interested in your opinion on who should be his QB
I keep trying to see the glass as half-full – I’m the guy who started saying back in the spring that this year’s UVA team would get back into a bowl, even as the media was voting at the ACC Kickoff in the summer to put Virginia at 16th in the 17-team ACC.
And Elliott and his kids are, with one game left on the schedule, a win away from doing just that.
There are obvious issues going forward – the 2024 roster has 20 seniors and 23 grad students, so we’re in roster-overhaul mode heading into next year, but that’s next year.
In the here and now, the ‘Hoos are one win away from playing a December game in a cold weather city.
The opponent this weekend, Virginia Tech, is reeling – the third-year coach there, Brent Pry, who came into the 2024 season with stage whispers from the fan base about being an ACC title contender, is also 5-6, and he may have to go with his third-string QB for the finale.
That being the case, the Hokies are still big favorites, because they always win this game – Virginia hasn’t won in Blacksburg since 1998, and has won only twice in Charlottesville since that one, in 2003 and 2019.
Elliott, as we know, also has issues at QB, which is what got me that “(g)et off Tony Elliott’s back” smackdown.
To be clear, I didn’t create the quarterback controversy out of the ether; Elliott did that when he lifted his starter, sophomore Anthony Colandrea, in the fourth quarter of blowout losses to Clemson and North Carolina, then at halftime of the blowout loss at Notre Dame, in favor of grad student Tony Muskett, last year’s QB1.
Colandrea, since getting yanked down in Death Valley, is passing for 119.0 yards per game, with a 58.0 percent completion rate, one TD and seven INTs.
After starting the season strong – in Virginia’s first six games, Colandrea averaged 248.3 yards per game, with a 64.4 percent completion rate, nine TDs and four INTs – we’ve seen the passing game regress.
Just saying it the way it needs to be said, it’s reductive to blame it on “injuries to the offensive line” – the UVA line has three guys (Noah Josey, Brian Stevens, Blake Steen) with at least 672 snaps this season, and four others (Jack Witmer, Ty Furnish, McKale Boley, Ugonna Nnanna) have gone for at least 400.
The issue isn’t walking wounded; it’s scheme, game plans, play calling and bad individual coaching.
With scheme, Elliott, from Day 1, has tried to fit a square peg into a round hole, with predictable results.
Elliott just assumed that he could make work at Virginia what worked for him when he was the play-caller at Clemson, where you can keep things pretty vanilla in terms of scheme because you have better athletes at every position than the guys on the other side of the ball, and all you need to do is execute to get results.
The issue with game plans and play calling was never more evident than what we saw last week in the 33-7 loss to SMU.
A week after Colandrea got the hook after throwing three INTs in the final 2:57 of the first half at Notre Dame, Kitchings went with the most basic game plan you can imagine – the bulk of his passes behind the line of scrimmage or just beyond, only three pass attempts in the intermediate area, nothing of consequence downfield, which invited the SMU side to put extra guys in the box and crowd the line to take away the run, knowing they weren’t going to be beaten deep.
Honestly, getting seven points and 173 yards out of that game plan was about what you should expect.
That was exacerbated by the obvious coaching mantra passed down from Kitchings to Colandrea, which emphasized, don’t turn the ball over.
Colandrea, taking the coaching, created pressure by not trusting his arm and his receivers when throws were obviously there, which extended numerous dropbacks to the point that pressure materialized as a result of the QB’s indecision, and led to the nine sacks, and the nine scrambles that saw Colandrea gain 64 net rushing yards running for his life.
Elliott tries to explain away the idea that I’ve been advancing, that he needs to go back to Muskett as the QB1, by saying:
“You know, everybody’s, you know, got an opinion, you know, they got, they got, they got an answer. Don’t necessarily have all of the details in front of them.”
We don’t see the team every day in practice, is what he’s getting at, which isn’t the flex that he thinks it is.
He’s one game away from finishing up his third season as the head coach.
It’s his system that hasn’t worked, isn’t working, and we have to assume, based on the results, won’t work.
It’s not working not because of a rash of injuries, but because he hasn’t been able to recruit the kind of kids who could make it work.
Big surprise there, that you’re not able to get the kind of kids at Virginia that you can get at Clemson.
Looking forward, his 2025 class, which will be putting ink to paper in the next few weeks, is ranked 57th nationally by 247Sports.
Elliott acknowledged in a recent ACC Network interview how tough it is to get kids into school off the transfer portal, so that’s not a real option.
Which is to say, no, it’s not all Tony Elliott’s fault.
This one is on the AD, Carla Williams, who hired him, after pushing out the guy before him who had figured out a way to win given the challenges of being a football coach at the University of Virginia.
I actually feel bad for Tony Elliott, because he had his choice of jobs, between UVA and Duke, back in December 2021, and if I’m him, I’d look at the two and think Virginia was the better one.
He couldn’t have foreseen that Duke would be the one that would allow for, ahem, creative admissions practices, to get kids into school to allow football to be more competitive, though, in retrospect, you could have looked at what that school has been doing to its academic reputation to achieve whatever it has achieved in men’s basketball and come to a different conclusion.
Elliott probably would make a good college football head coach where you’re not recruiting with both of your hands tied behind your back.
Problem is, Virginia isn’t that place.
All of that said now, I should get off Tony Elliott’s back, given what he’s working against, except that, he took the job, with all its limitations, and he’s getting paid handsomely to do the best that he can to win games within those limitations.
That’s where the criticisms need to be focused.
And by that standard, he’s the one who blew everything up so that he could rebuild something that didn’t need rebuilt, who has Des Kitchings running his offense in Year 3, who is ultimately responsible for the recruiting classes that trail several Group of 5 schools.
I’m the bad guy for pointing all this out, by the way.
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Chris Graham
