I think it’s fair to speculate how the big season that a lot of folks seem to think is in store for Virginia Tech might factor into the thinking around Tony Elliott and Virginia.
There’s buzz about Tech being a sleeper pick to contend in the ACC this year, and that translates to expectations about, what, nine wins, maybe 10 wins?
If Brent Pry, in his Year 3, has Tech on the doorstep of an ACC title game, it’s not hard to imagine the people who pay the bills at UVA saying, hey, wait a minute, our guy is in his Year 3, what are we getting out of him?
The media vote in the preseason ACC Football poll pegged the ‘Hoos at #16 in the 17-team league.
I’m pretty much the only media type out there who thinks even bowl eligibility could be on the horizon.
Even simple bowl eligibility – a 6-6 season, leading to a bowl game somewhere way north of the Mason-Dixon Line – pales in comparison to seeing the guys down the road a piece winning nine or 10 games and trying to break up the Clemson-Florida State duopoly.
UVA Football
- Tony Elliott on UVA’s special teams: ‘That’s where we’ve got to improve’
- UVA Football: The computers don’t like the ‘Hoos heading into Elliott’s Year 3
- New scoreboard, access points for The Hill in store for UVA Football fans this season
- UVA Football: The offense could be special. It all starts with Malachi Fields
- Elliott ‘not surprised’ that UVA was picked 16th in ACC preseason football poll
- UVA Football season-ticket sales continuing to trend at historic low level
- UVA Football Preview: Six guys that we need to have big seasons in 2024
But what happens, then, if the 2024 season goes off the rails, as many expect?
I’ve written about the schedule setting up nicely at the outset, how there could be a 4-0 start in the offing before the first bye week, ahead of a game coming back off the bye with Boston College.
The other side to that is, you barely get past Richmond in the opener, you’re 2-2 or 1-3 at the bye, BC is no pushover, and then the murderer’s row part of the schedule kicks in thereafter.
One thing I’ve been writing consistently is that Virginia isn’t the kind of school that cuts bait with a football coach after Year 3, but the word over the weekend is, there’s been rumbling among the donors.
The 55-17 loss to Tech in last season’s finale, and Elliott’s tone-deaf response to the beatdown afterward, from what I’m being told, got the clock ticking.
The magic number for Elliott this year, according to one source, is five – which, let me quibble here, but five wins in Charlottesville, and eight, nine or 10 down in Blacksburg, I dunno.
But whatever the magic number is, it does all seem to fit. I started writing about the pressure that would come with the new $80 million football ops center back when Bronco Mendenhall was still the head coach, and Mendenhall was the guy who got Virginia Football into an Orange Bowl not that long ago.
The money people didn’t put $80 million into the football program to not even have it eligible to play in December in a baseball stadium.
It’s the same as when the John Paul Jones Arena opened back in 2006. Dave Leitao got the basketball program into the NCAA Tournament that year, and two mediocre seasons later, he was history.
We all know that money drives the decisions, and the biggest issue for UVA Athletics is the 20,000-plus empties in Scott Stadium six or seven times a year.
The bottom-line impact there is easily quantifiable: Virginia reported $7.7 million in ticket sales in 2022, barely half of the $15.0 million that Virginia Tech reported that year.
But what’s $7 million, when Tony Bennett is being told that there isn’t money in the budget to fill his two open staff positions, right?
Chris Graham: Is Tony Elliott on the hot seat?
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