UVA Football coach Tony Elliott clearly needs to cut bait with his offensive coordinator, Des Kitchings, whose offenses have been in the bottom half of the ACC in productivity in each of his three seasons, and regressed depressingly in the second half of the 2024 season.
After tuning into Elliott’s post-Virginia Tech beatdown press conference, it seems like the head coach is going to need some help to come to terms with what he needs to do with Kitchings.
“I felt like it was a good plan. I felt like there was some ways to move the pocket. I felt like there was some alternate protections, in case we were having just, you know, absolute issues protecting the quarterback. But I’ll look at it because, again, in the heat of the moment, you see one thing, and then when you go watch the tape, you know, you see other things,” Elliott said after Virginia’s season-concluding 37-17 loss to the Hokies on Saturday night.
Kitchings presided over another unproductive 60 minutes from his unit, whose offense averaged 286.8 yards per game over the final six games of the 2024 season, as the Cavaliers lost five of those six.
UVA gained 274 yards in the loss to the Hokies, 190 yards coming in the second half, with the game’s outcome already having been settled.
In their past three games, all blowout losses, Virginia fell behind 35-0, 26-0 and 27-3.
Saturday night, the ‘Hoos ran all of five plays in the first quarter as Tech got out to an early 10-0 lead.
The issue the past few weeks seemed to have been that Kitchings had lost confidence in the starting quarterback, Anthony Colandrea, who was picked off seven times in 73 pass attempts in a rough three-week stretch in which he completed just 54.8 percent of his passes and had just one TD pass.
Colandrea, in the season’s first seven games, completed 63.6 percent of his passes, and had 11 TDs and four INTs in his first 220 pass attempts.
I knocked Kitchings’s game plans and play-calling in the ugly losses to Notre Dame and SMU, where it seemed that Kitchings was more concerned with limiting the exposure of Colandrea to turnovers than he was actually moving the ball downfield.
Which gets us to the change that was made official during the day on Saturday, when it got out into the public domain that Elliott and Kitchings were going with Tony Muskett, who was the Week 1 starter in 2023, and started six games last season, around shoulder and ankle injuries.
Turns out, Elliott made that call “essentially on Sunday night, Monday morning, and that’s how we started the week,” the coach told reporters late Saturday night.
So, the jazz about “getting off Tony Elliott’s back” over what he needed to do at QB that we got from the gatekeepers, it was so much bulls%&*.
Word got to us on Tuesday that Muskett was getting the first-team reps, as “get off his back”-gate was heating up.
“I sat back after the last game and just kind of looked at where we were offensively, and, you know, we’ve been struggling kind of for the last four games or so, four or five games, and it wasn’t all AC’s fault, and that’s what I told him. I said, you know, this is not this is not necessarily anything that you did in particular in the last game. He didn’t have a ton of protection around him, right? But I just felt like I needed to do something to help the offense,” Elliott said.
It was typical Tony Elliott Word Salad, and the more legumes he added to the bowl, the more it sounded like the switch from Colandrea to Muskett was motivated by simple desperation.
“There have been times when Tony was inserted in the game, he gave us a little bit of a spark,” said Elliott, referencing Muskett’s numbers in mop-up duty in the blowout losses to Clemson, UNC and Notre Dame, in which he was 23-of-34 passing for 347 yards and three TDs, with no INTs, in basically what would amount to a full game of snaps, albeit in garbage time.
“Just looking at the big picture, what I felt like would give us the best opportunity to be successful, I just needed to do something to help get the offense jumpstarted, and again, wasn’t going to make the change during the last game, because I didn’t think that AC’s play warranted that,” Elliott said.
“But when I looked at the last, you know, four to five weeks, I just felt like I needed to do something as the head coach, to try and help the offense by maybe giving us a little bit of different spark in the game. And I felt like the best thing was to give Tony an opportunity to practice the week as a starter, to see if we could get things going,” Elliott said.
Unfortunately for all involved, the offense didn’t get going until it was 27-3 Tech in the third quarter.
As he did in the 35-14 loss at Notre Dame two weeks ago, Muskett directed two second-half TD drives, willing his team downfield with a mix of passes, scrambles and designed QB keepers, both drives ending with Muskett TD runs.
“I thought he battled. I mean, I thought he left it all on the field. I mean, I thought the guy was scrapping,” said Elliott of Muskett, who was 19-of-36 for 178 yards and two INTs through the air, and ran for 86 sack-adjusted rushing yards and the two TDs on 13 attempts on the ground.
“He ran the ball, you know, converted some first downs for us,” Elliott said. “I thought he battled. I think he wants those two throws back for sure. Had a couple balls that I thought should have been caught to help him out, but with the exception of the two the balls that sailed on him, the interceptions, man, I thought, I thought he battled, had a good look in his eye and put his body on the line. So, he gave us everything that he had.”
Muskett battled, but in the end, the results were the same that we saw with Colandrea behind center.
The common denominator is the guy who comes up with the game plans and calls the plays.
Elliott is a smart guy – he has an engineering degree.
He knows what he needs to do.
“I evaluate it based off of my experience as a play-caller,” Elliott said, “and what I’m looking for is, in that situation, would I deem that a bad call? And then also, you know, are you putting the players in position to have angles and to have numbers? And I felt like last week, when you look at the tape, we had numbers, we had angles, and we just didn’t have great execution.
“I’ll watch the tape again here, but to give an analysis, you know, right now, after the game, without having seen, you know, all of the different coaching angles, I don’t believe it’s fair,” Elliott said.
The press release thanking Kitchings for his hard work and dedication and wishing him well in his future endeavors is being drafted as we speak.
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Chris Graham
