There was frustration among the UVA Football coaching staff over Tony Elliott’s indecisiveness on who his starting quarterback will be ahead of the Saturday-morning announcement that Elliott is going with sophomore Anthony Colandrea.
“I’m hopeful that sometime this week, you know, we should be able to settle in on who’s going to be the guy, or if it’s going to be a combination of both of them,” Elliott told reporters after practice on Monday.
ICYMI
The internal frustration was over Elliott and offensive coordinator Des Kitchings allowing the competition to extend even into the final week of camp.
The extended competition had Colandrea and last year’s Week 1 starter, Tony Muskett, splitting 50-50 the reps with the first-team offense, which from a practice standpoint means whoever the starter ends up being will have gotten appreciably less work against Virginia’s first-team defense.
Had Elliott made a decision on his starter earlier, the split in first-team reps would be more 80-20 or 90-10 for the starter, allowing the starter to sharpen with more reps against a first-team pass rush and pass coverage.
This issue, indecisiveness at QB, has been a feature of the Virginia Football program dating back to the second half of the Al Groh era, when Al Groh and Mike Groh ran off Kevin McCabe in favor of Jameel Sewell, then tried Marc Verica before going back to Sewell.
The Mike London era was six years of indecisiveness: London won eight games with Michael Rocco in 2011, then put Rocco into a competition with Phillip Sims in 2012, which didn’t work – Virginia slipped to a 4-8 finish.
London flamed out with three more losing seasons in 2013, 2014 and 2015 variously trying David Watford, Greyson Lambert and Matt Johns at QB.
The one guy who got it right, for the most part, was Bronco Mendenhall, who went with Kurt Benkert for two years, Bryce Perkins for two years, then Brennan Armstrong, who had understudied behind Perkins, for two years.
I say for the most part with Mendenhall, because there was that debacle of a game plan for his first Virginia Tech game, in which he alternated between Benkert and Johns.
I bring that one up because Elliott seemed to be hinting toward using both of his guys in next week’s season opener with Richmond, against all the available evidence that two-QB rotations don’t work.
Good news: there was no indication in Saturday’s announcement that Colandrea will be the starter that Elliott is thinking of using both guys in the opener next Saturday.
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Chris Graham
