If it was close, and it sounds like it was, UVA Football coach Tony Elliott probably should go with Anthony Colandrea as his starting QB.
Colandrea is a sophomore with three years to grow into being the quarterback of the future at Virginia.
The guy that Colandrea beat out for the QB1 job, Tony Muskett, is a fifth-year senior.
Fair or not, Muskett, whose college career is over in a couple of months, would need to be head and shoulders better than Colandrea to be the starter.
Right?
“These guys battled every single day. It was extremely close,” Elliott said in his Tuesday game-week press conference, telling us that “it came down to, OK, now we’re going to look at fall camp and every day, every rep, not just the live reps, just the reps away from the defense. Everything was evaluated. And it was very, very close.”
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This is a decision that Elliott needs to get absolutely right. He’s entering Year 3 as the head coach, and the old rule of thumb with a college football coach was, you don’t make a call on his tenure until he’s had five years, but with the money in football being what it is now, and Elliott not only coming off back-to-back three-win seasons, but UVA Athletics telling us, through a public-records request, that season-ticket sales are at a 30-plus-year low, there’s no margin for error.
There’s already a sense floating around on his staff that Elliott should have made a call on his QB sooner, to give whoever was going to be named the QB1 the chance to build more rapport with the first-team offense in training camp.
To that point, though, it still sounds like Elliott is hedging, which is frustrating when you hear him say things like he did on Tuesday, that “everybody in that locker room and in our program understands is we’re going to need both of them, we’re going to need both of these guys to go to win football games,” which makes it sound like Colandrea is either on a short leash, or that Elliott is thinking about building a game plan around shuttling Colandrea and Muskett into the lineup.
If you’re thinking the latter is the case, you wouldn’t be disabused of that notion when you consider that Elliott seemed to further hedge in the presser, saying “where we’re at right now, is AC will be the first one to run out there versus Richmond,” which, please, oh, please, let that not be the case, that he’s actually planning to run both out there.
And then, in his next breath, Elliott went on to say that the “expectation is, they continue to compete every single day, because that’s going to bring out the best version of each one individually, and then collectively, they’re going to help each other put their best foot forward daily, because they know their value.”
I hope what Elliott is saying there is, Colandrea is my guy, but if he gets hurt, we’re lucky to have a guy like Muskett, who has won games here, as our backup, and not what I’m afraid he’s saying, which is, if Colandrea has a bad series, a bad practice, who knows, maybe I go with Muskett.
Best-case scenario: Colandrea has a solid game, Virginia wins comfortably, Muskett gets a few fourth-quarter snaps in mop-up duty to execute a few handoffs, and we start thinking about Wake Forest.
Worst-case: I don’t even want to go there.
Video: Is Tony Elliott still hedging on his QB?
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Chris Graham
