There even is a UVA Football program because the University of Virginia, like every other college and university in America that plays football, has made a Faustian bargain.
We, like the others, let kids truck each other into head injuries and various other upper- and lower-body injuries and maladies involving broken bones and ligament and cartilage tears and bruised spleens and the like that will affect them the rest of their lives – the whole point to us doing that being, because it gets other kids to decide to apply for admission.
You thought I was going to write about the money that the schools make.
News flash: only a relative few schools actually “make money” on college football at the end of the day.
And even then, the operating surpluses that Power 4 schools get from football basically pay for the non-revenue sports, and at the Group of 5 level, most football programs operate in the red.
The bottom line for athletics departments as a whole: well, there’s a reason they’re always emailing you for donations, and it ain’t because they’re rolling in the dough.
It all only makes sense if you view it as a stealth marketing campaign – 12 three-hour TV and internet broadcasts a year getting a million or two people to tune in, plus all the headlines on sports websites, and people posting on social media and message boards, with their pregame and postgame chatter, and the endless speculation about high school recruiting and the transfer portal.
It’s all about getting the school’s name out there.
Which is to say, it’s not about money, it’s not about winning.
Now, I told you that story so that I could start to tell you another one, about the University of Virginia, and its oddball approach to playing big-boy football.
One hand tied behind our backs
I’m the first guy, and the loudest, breaking down how just plain awful Tony Elliott and his staff have been at recruiting – telling you, for instance, that his 2024 prep class is ranked 88th nationally by 247Sports, trailing a host of not even good Group of 5 schools there, and that they haven’t done a good job landing enough guys from the portal to plug gaps in the two-deep the past couple of years.
That’s Football Talk.
What if I told you that the issue isn’t entirely on Elliott and his staff, that the big issue is, they’re not getting any help from the folks in admissions?
I got word from a contact this week that the staff has been working the transfer portal pretty actively the past couple of weeks with a focus on the FCS level, where the regular season has already come to an end.
The On3.com portal tracker has 181 guys in the portal at this writing.
From what I was told earlier this week, the UVA staff had already made contact with around a dozen guys who have interest.
None got through admissions, was the word to me on their status.
Put this up against what you’re seeing from a peer institution, Northwestern, which has “streamlined the admissions process to enable prospective transfers to get admitted by the start of winter quarter classes, on Jan. 6,” according to one report.
What is being said there: Northwestern is playing big-boy football.
Duke, another peer institution, has already gone this route – don’tcha bet Elliott wishes he had figured that one out back when he was trying to decide between the Duke and UVA jobs three Decembers ago?
Meanwhile, the approach at UVA is, we’re going to keep playing high and mighty with our academic standards, while making our coaches go about building a roster with one hand tied behind their backs.
Will we even be able to field a team next year?
The 2024 UVA Football roster has 43 guys who are seniors or grad students, a result of two things coming to a head at once.
Everybody had the opportunity to use the COVID redshirt year from back in 2020 to extend their college athletics careers by one year.
On top of that, the UVA guys got an extra year from the NCAA after the Nov. 13, 2022, mass shootings that forced the cancellation of the final two games of the 2022 season.
In a normal year, you have anywhere between 20 and 25 seniors and grad seniors on your roster to replace for next year.
Forty-three is an absurd number, and it doesn’t account for the 12-15 guys who will be looking to transfer out for the myriad reasons guys decide to transfer out for.
Elliott could be on the hook for having to find 50 to as many as 60 new guys for 2025.
The scorecard there: his current 2024 prep class has 14 commits.
Maybe they add an uncommitted high school kid or two, get another kid or two from flips.
You still need between, gasp, 30 to 40 more from the portal.
I feel bad for the coaches, and more so, the folks in admissions, who are going to be working overtime the next few weeks to process the academic records of all those kids to get 30 to 40 kids in school for the spring semester.
Elliott on where things stand now
Elliott still has Virginia Tech to game plan for, with a win in that one getting his team into a bowl game for the first time in his tenure, but the topic of next year came up at his weekly presser on Tuesday, for probably obvious reasons.
“The folks in the scouting department are nonstop, because now is, I guess the FCS season is over, so a lot of the grad transfers and those individuals are getting in the portal,” Elliott said.
“We’re already preparing to be evaluating a lot of film on the guys currently in,” he said. “Obviously having conversations with the guys that have entered the portal and are approved to talk to. So, the folks behind the scenes are already working preparing for finishing out the signing day for the high school guys next week, and then preparing for the portal when it’s going to be on and popping.
“The difference this year that makes it a little bit tougher is, it’s a dead period all the way up until the portal opens, then it’s a quiet period for 14 days,” Elliott said. “So, now you’re going to be scrambling to get guys here. Why I said that’s different is because, now you can’t go on the road and see them. You used to be able to go on road and see them, have conversations, kind of recruit them to come see you. Now everything is going to be done on the phone and through conversations, and you’re going to be, not begging, but down on your knee, please come see me, please come visit.
“They’re going to have everybody, and there is 14 days, and all 130-plus schools will be vying for the top guys on the market. It’s going to be a little different, and going to be hectic,” Elliott said.
I’ll give Elliott credit here. The way he phrased it, he’s looking at having to get 30 or 40 guys from the transfer portal into school and in his football program not as a challenge akin to climbing Mount Everest with hiking boots and a vest from LL Bean, but rather, an opportunity.
“This is probably the first time where I had additional numbers to supplement the roster. But I want to get the right guys. Whether they’re portal guys or high school guys, I still want to be a developmental program,” said Elliott, for whom the glass is, most certainly, half-full.
He’ll have guys, but can UVA Football be competitive?
Northwestern is willing to work with its football coaches to let them work to put together a competitive roster.
Duke has already gone that route.
Elliott isn’t letting us in on any such peace treaty with the folks in admissions at UVA.
He’d already let this cat out of the bag on that in an interview on the ACC Network a couple of weeks back.
Mark Richt, who, you may remember, interviewed for the UVA job back in 2015, as the program was making the transition from the six-year Mike London era, is a member of the ACC Network football panel.
Before he got that gig, Richt, who had just been let go by Georgia after leading the Bulldogs to a 9-3 record, with a 145-51 record in 15 seasons at UGA, including nine double-digit-win finishes, interviewed for the UVA job, before pulling his name from consideration over issues with the admissions office vis-à-vis football recruiting.
Let’s just say, Richt asked the following question from a position of something resembling inside knowledge.
“I know the academic standard standards at Virginia are super high. Actually, I was interviewed by them years ago. Is there any limit to what you could do in the portal, or is it just case by case?” Richt asked Elliott on the “ACC Huddle” set.
Good – no, great – question.
Elliott’s answer:
“Yeah, I think we, we have a unique approach,” Elliott began. “The grad transfer route, you know, we will be able to take advantage of that, because we actually have some really, really good graduate options for guys, both non-degree seeking and guys that want to get additional degrees.
“Where we have to be strategic is undergrad guys, right? Because once they get beyond, you know, their second year, they don’t have enough time to get the 60 credits that they need to graduate from UVA,” Elliott said.
“So, we just have to be strategic, but we’re gonna be able to advantage of it moving forward,” Elliott said.
Asked to expound on what he said in that interview, Elliott told reporters at his weekly presser this week that, yes, “the grad transfer route is definitely easier for us in terms of getting them in. Still got to get the right guys, because grad school is still challenging.”
“Undergrad is a little bit more challenging because of the 60 hours that they got to complete to get to a degree from UVA,” Elliott said. “So, even if there is an older guy with one year of eligibility left, I just don’t know. Morally, I don’t think it’s the right thing to bring a guy in that has to have 60 hours, and only one year to do it. That’s pretty much impossible.
“And when you’re looking at the undergrad guys, you got to make sure they got the right amount of eligibility, and do they have enough transferable credits to get in, and are they going to lose credits,” Elliott said. “If they lose, now you’re adding that on top of the 60 they got to complete here. So, it’s a little bit more of a constraint on the undergrad side. That’s why you’ve only seen a handful of those and more grad transfer guys.
“We’ll look in both spots for the best players, but it is a little bit easier, so to speak, on the grad transfer route, because of the degree fields we have available and getting those guys in,” Elliott said.
Breaking it down
If what I’ve been told is true, Elliott and his staff have already presented about a dozen cases to the admissions folks for the 2025 cycle, and they’re 0-for-12 – and you’ve got to assume, at this point, three years in, Elliott and his assistants have a good feel for the kinds of resumes that are a fit academically, so they’re not pulling an Al Groh here to make a point.
Which gets us to the question of the day: why are we still playing football at the University of Virginia, if we’re not going to try?
I mean, I know the answer there.
The UVA Football program subsidizes the non-revenue sports, and that’s even with half-empty stadiums on home Saturdays.
UVA Football ran a $20 million operating surplus in fiscal year 2022, and that was with football getting $22.8 million from its TV rights from the ACC, according to data from Sportico.
Knowing that, now, maybe, you can see what’s going on here.
UVA Football is the Chicago Cubs or Boston Red Sox of the ACC.
The analogy I’m going for here: the Cubs and Sox make money whether they win or not, so as much as Cubs fans and Sox fans want to be competitive, the owners of the teams have to really be motivated to want to spend to put competitive teams out there, when all that extra spending does is cut into their bottom line.
It’s not quite a spending issue at UVA, which has more money than god.
The issue is more cultural, dating back to when UVA President Colgate Darden turned down an invite to the Orange Bowl in the 1950s, citing his desire to steer clear of “big-time, highly subsidized football.”
The George Welsh years must have driven the suits with their noses in the air crazy, because those folks have always wanted it both ways – they want the TV money from football to pay for swimmers and rowers and track and field athletes and tennis players to represent us in the Olympics, but they don’t want to be too good at the football thing, so as to be able to engage on a level playing field in “jocular” rivalries with the likes of Virginia Tech, because football, let’s face it, it’s low-brow.
Tip of the hat there to John Casteen, who didn’t even want to fund scholarships for the women’s basketball program when it was starting up in the 1970s, preferring to put money in women’s sports in old guard sports like tennis, because he dreamed of a UVA alum getting into a Wimbledon final.
I wish I was making that up.
They don’t want to win, is what I’m getting at here.
The suits with their snoots are perfectly happy putting a football team out there that has no chance of being competitive, as long as the football money keeps coming in, so that we can be Top 10 in men’s and women’s squash.
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Chris Graham
