The only job that I can imagine UVA Football coach Tony Elliott leaving us for is the one at his alma mater, Clemson, where Elliott started his career as a walk-on, ended as a co-captain with an engineering degree, then came back to as a coach to serve as the play-caller for two national champs.
I think we’re now officially on Clemson Reaching Out to Our Coach Watch, after what we saw last night in Death Valley – the one down on the bayou.
The grisly details:
- Final score: #11 LSU 51, Clemson 10
- Total offense: LSU 644, Clemson 145
- Rushing yards: LSU 309, Clemson 40
“We got our ass kicked,” said Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, who was Elliott’s position coach, then brought back our guy as an assistant in 2011.
Swinney and Elliott won national titles in 2016 and 2018 during a 12-year run of double-digit-win seasons.
But Swinney has stubbornly resisted adapting to the realities of the transfer portal/revenue sharing era, sticking to what got him to the top of the business in the 2010s – focusing on high school recruiting and player development.
To that point: Swinney brought in 15 players off the portal in the 2025-2026 offseason.
For comparison:
- first-year LSU coach Lane Kiffin brought in 44.
- Elliott, at UVA, brought in 29.
Swinney’s resistance to adapting reminds me of the last couple of years of UVA Basketball under Tony Bennett, who made it clear that he was not fond of the new way of doing things before stunning the college sports world with his abrupt retirement on the eve of the 2024-2025 season.
Bennett’s retirement opened the door for UVA Athletics to bring in Ryan Odom, who has proven himself adept at rebuilding rosters on the fly – Odom’s first team went 30-6 with a nine-man rotation that featured eight transfers and a true freshman; his 2026-2027 roster retained four of last season’s transfers, and the projected rotation has four transfers and another incoming freshman.
Odom and Elliott share a similar philosophy when it comes to recruiting the portal – prioritizing productivity over prep recruiting rankings.
That has them taking guys who have demonstrated that they can put up numbers at the mid-major or Group of 6/FCS level over guys who were four-stars languishing deep on the depth chart at a Power 4 school.
And it seems to be working: Odom, as mentioned, won 30 games in Year 1; Elliott, after three sub-.500 seasons, led UVA Football to a school-record 11 wins in 2025, and the computers have his ‘Hoos as a good bet to be in the CFP mix in 2026.
Meanwhile, down at Clemson, Swinney is questioning everything – and sounding an awful lot like our Tony Bennett did in the months before his shock retirement.
“We didn’t do football stuff well,” Swinney told reporters after last night’s beatdown. “We’ve got to be better in things we can control. Give them credit. I won’t sit around and judge other people on what their resources are or what they can do, whatever, it is what it is. It’s our job to be the best we can be with what we have. It’s my job to get us better.”
It’s soon going to be somebody else’s job to get Clemson better.
His former right-hand man would be the first person they’d call if Swinney decides to follow Tony Bennett’s lead.
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Chris Graham
