Virginia is the highest-ranked ACC program in the initial College Football Playoff Top 25, at 14th – a high-water mark for the UVA Football program, and first CFP Top 25 ranking for the program since the 2019 season.
The ‘Hoos (8-1, 5-0 ACC) have an inside track to an appearance in the ACC Championship Game with three games to go in the regular season, but the message that fourth-year coach Tony Elliott is stressing to his team: “Truth be told, it doesn’t matter what you rank today.”
“You wanna worry about the one after that first week in December. That’s really what the focus is. And so, what happens today doesn’t matter, right? We control what we do from here on out, if we’re really serious about it, about being where we wanna be in December,” Elliott said during the day on Tuesday, hours before the CFP rankings were revealed in primetime on ESPN.
The TV show that rolled out the rankings featured a projected playoff bracket, which had UVA seeded 11th in the 12-team CFP field, and in line for a first-round playoff game at #6 Ole Miss.
Before we get too much further with this, I was sitting on The Lawn as a first-year student at the University of Virginia 35 years ago this week, November 1990, on an unseasonably warm day, reading the sports section of USA Today, taking a peek at the paper’s bowl-game projections, which had #1 Virginia set to face #2 Notre Dame in the Orange Bowl, in a de facto national-championship game.
I also had with me a copy of The Cavalier Daily, which ran a letter to the editor from the AD reminding us not to tear down the goal posts again, ahead of a game against Georgia Tech that I can’t seem to erase from the memory banks.
Point to my digression being: I’m with Elliott, our guys ain’t done nuthin’ yet.
“It’s just like preseason rankings, right? I think everybody was making a big deal of where we were ranked in the preseason, and I was like, OK, it’s a preseason ranking. We have an opportunity to do something about it,” said Elliott, emphasizing the need here for humility – which is to say, no letters to the editor, if those things still exist, about goalposts, or more to the point today, field storms.
And to be fair, Virginia will have to either win out, or at the least go 3-1 down the stretch, with one of those three being a win in Charlotte in December, to get a CFP spot.
UVA’s strength of schedule, 85th nationally, per the ESPN Football Power Index, is only better than that of one other Power 4 CFP contender, Pitt, which slotted in at 24th in the initial Top 25, and has a strength of schedule ranking 86th nationally.
There just isn’t going to be an at-large bid even for an 11-2 Virginia team that wins out in the regular season and loses by two points in triple-OT in the ACC Championship Game.
“We looked at schedule strength when we considered Virginia,” said Mack Rhoades, the athletics director at Baylor, and the chair of the College Football Playoff Selection Committee, in a Top 25 reveal press conference Tuesday night. “We looked at three overtime games, the Florida State win. I think that’s hard, quite frankly, for the ACC. Florida State has lost its luster a little bit as time has progressed, as games have accumulated. A really close game, obviously, at North Carolina, and then a close game again on the road at California.
“To Virginia’s credit, beating a really good Louisville team at Louisville, overtime, that’s a really, really good win,” Rhoades said. “I would just say in general for the ACC, five teams in the Top 25, four in the Top 20, and there’s still a lot of ball to play. If we go back to last year, Arizona State wasn’t even in the rankings our first two rankings. Again, to everybody out there, this is the first ranking and still a lot of ball left to be played. Virginia is a really good team.”
Translation: no at-large bid, need to win out.
That’s perfectly fine with Tony Elliott.
“If you want to stay focused, you’re going to have to, you know, and so, that’ll be the message,” Elliott said. “We’ve kind of simplified our focus down the stretch and really don’t talk about big picture at all, really just focus on trying to go 1-0 each day so that we can go 1-0 on Saturday.”
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Chris Graham
