The build for UVA Football toward the 2026 season started as Tony Elliott was walking toward the tunnel after the OT loss to Duke in the 2025 ACC Championship Game.
Elliott’s team had just come up painfully short in an underdog season-long effort to go from back-to-back-to-back losing seasons to the College Football Playoff.
I’ll say, just for me, sitting up in the press box, I was gutpunched, and I’m just an alum, fan and occasional impartial sportswriter.
ICYMI
- Duke 27, ‘Hoos 20: Cardiac Cavs rally, force OT, but Duke scores, seals game with INT
- Mistakes, early, late, doom Virginia, in 27-20 loss to Duke in ACC title game
Elliott sensed as he made his way to his guys that they didn’t need to be reminded of what had just slipped through their fingers.
“I go back to an experience that I had in 2015. I remember coming off the field in Phoenix, just lost the national championship. I saw my mentor and my boss just, like, distraught, defeated. I just remember saying to him like, Coach, the guys in the locker room need you. They need you,” Elliott told reporters on Day 1 at the 2026 ACC Kickoff in Charlotte.
It was actually January 2016, the championship game for the 2015 season.
Second-ranked Alabama beat #1 Clemson, 45-40.
Elliott, a former Clemson walk-on, was the co-offensive coordinator and play-caller for his former wide receivers coach, Dabo Swinney, who was 19-15 in his first three seasons as the head coach, but had taken the 2015-2016 Clemson team into the national title game with a perfect 14-0 record.
The experience of coming so far, then coming up just short, informed Elliott on how to talk to his guys in Charlotte after their heartbreaking loss.
“I don’t know if Kam and McKale remember it,” Elliott said, gesturing to Kam Robinson, his star linebacker, and McKale Boley, a foundation piece on the offensive line, seated beside him on the dais, “but I was pretty upbeat and positive in the locker room after the game, right, because I knew that this was going be to lead to something better in the future.”
That’s the hope, anyway.
Virginia went on to win its bowl game to finish with a school record 11 wins, and enters 2026 with something that no UVA team has had since the early ‘aughts – the weight of expectations.
Elliott and his staff restocked at every position group in the offseason, arguably with more talent and certainly more depth on the lines, and at QB – even with the loss of last year’s QB1, Chandler Morris, Virginia will have two guys in 2026 with Power 4 starting experience, in Beau Pribula and Eli Holstein.
ICYMI
- UVA Football: Battles shaping up for QB1, QB3 spots heading into summer
- UVA Football: Elliott stocked up on tailbacks, which will be a position of strength in 2026
- UVA Football: In-depth look at the wideout room, which is a work in progress
- UVA Football: Tony Elliott, finally, gets a contract extension, through 2030
- UVA Football: Finally, we have the details on Tony Elliott’s contract extension
Elliott was asked about the “what-ifs” from Charlotte.
“I have not even thought about the what-ifs,” Elliott said. “I knew that had an opportunity to develop us as a program that night in Charlotte. I think the guys were able to quickly flush it, and that resulted in us being able to go out and win the last game of the season, which is one of our team goals.
“I’m focusing on the future,” Elliott said. “I’ve learned not to do the what if, wish I would have, because that agony and that regret, it will eat you up inside.”
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Chris Graham
