If I’m UVA Football coach Tony Elliott, I’m hoping I get fired.
Seriously. This would be the best thing to happen to Elliott, though it’s not going to happen.
Elliott himself seems to recognize where things are going.
He’s not exactly begging to get fired, but he’s not sugarcoating the situation that lies ahead.
“We’re going to lose a lot of seniors, right?” the coach told reporters last night, beginning to acknowledge aloud, after the 37-17 loss at Virginia Tech, the almost impossible rebuilding job that lies ahead.
Elliott, three years into his first (and maybe last) head-coaching job, is 11-23, and it’s going to get worse, with no promise that it will get better.
Elliott has conceded, in recent weeks, the difficulty in recruiting at the University of Virginia, which wants to have it both ways – to borrow from Art Guepe, who was 47-17-1 in seven seasons at UVA, from 1946-1952, and whose 1951 team earned a bid to the Orange Bowl that UVA President Colgate Darden declined: the school wants to be Harvard Monday to Friday, and Alabama on Saturdays.
Even George Welsh wasn’t able to be Alabama on Saturdays, and George Welsh didn’t coach in the era of obscene money, NIL and the transfer portal.
Tony Elliott, more a Mike London, a nice guy, than a George Welsh, an old cuss who once threw his entire team out of practice, tried to give himself a chance at getting over the hump by loading up his 2024 roster with old guys – the senior class included 20 fourth-year guys and 23 grad students, all but a few headed out the Bryant Hall front door for the final time after their exit interviews in the coming days.
That old-guy roster was still only able to get to five wins, losing six of seven after a 4-1 start against a favorable schedule, the lone win coming over a Pitt team that itself lost five straight to finish the season after a 7-0 start.
Between having to replace in the area of 43 seniors and grad students, Elliott will have an additional 12-15 underclassmen hitting the portal when it opens on Dec. 9, a week from tomorrow.
Meaning, he’ll have anywhere from 50 to 60 open spots on next year’s roster.
There’s no way Elliott will fill all those spots in time to have a full roster for spring practice.
It’s going to take an act of god to have a full roster going into training camp.
“I think every position, you know, we got to go make sure that we that we address our depth issues, right, from, whether it’s the addition of high school guys, or whether it’s the addition of portal guys, to kind of balance out, you know, where we are, because we don’t want to be too young of a football team,” Elliott told reporters gathered in a room in the bowels of Lane Stadium.
“We got to add some veteran leadership and some veteran experience, but we may not have that, you know, in the pipeline with what we currently got on the roster,” Elliott said. “So, every position is going to be evaluated to try and see, can we find the right mixture of depth to give us the best chance to compete next season.”
I was the lone voice in the wilderness at the outset of the 2024 football cycle looking at what Elliott had coming back ahead of this season who dared to say, I think this team can get to six wins, when the consensus was what the ACC media did in the preseason, picking UVA to finish 16th in the 17-team league.
Turns out, we were both right – in my favor, I was only off by one win, but in the ACC media’s favor, once the ‘Hoos got to five, with that Nov. 2 win at Pitt, they were not competitive, falling behind 35-0, 26-0 and 27-3 in their final three games, all blowout losses.
And before the Pitt win, Clemson led 38-10 in the third quarter, North Carolina led 38-6 in the third quarter.
Virginia’s is one of the softer five-win resumes you’ll ever see from a Power 4 team, and this was a team loaded with old guys, 43 of them.
No rest for the weary: early signing day is Wednesday, and Elliott’s 2024 high school class is ranked 57th nationally by 247Sports, and he has just 18 commits.
Then the transfer portal opens on Dec. 9.
“It’s a tough timetable,” Elliott said, laying out the focus for the next couple of weeks.
“We’re going to first have to try and address, you know, some of the immediate needs from a roster standpoint, and then we’ll, have, you know, time, once we get through signing day, to really be able to evaluate, you know, everything in the program, from A to Z,” Elliott said.
It’s not hard to look at this and think the 2025 season could rival Mike London’s 2013 and Bronco Mendenhall’s 2016 (both 2-10 seasons) and, before that, Dick Bestwick’s 1981 (a 1-10 season) in terms of futility.
Mendenhall gets a pass for his contribution to this list, because he was cleaning up the mess left behind by London.
Bestwick’s 1981 season was the end of a 16-49-1 run over five seasons at UVA.
Assume a 2-10 finish for Tony Elliott next year, and I’m thinking 2-10 is best-case, that would put him at 13-33 through four years.
He doesn’t get a fifth at that rate, and he may already be at the point where he can’t rehabilitate his career with a stint as an offensive coordinator at a money program, but add a historically awful season to what he’s already done at UVA, and even the value of the buyout might not be worth it at that point.
Share
Chris Graham
