The rest of you are now seeing the writing on the wall with UVA Football that I started warning you about after the West Virginia game.
Absolute best-case scenario at this stage is a 6-6 finish, and that’s assuming that even Cal won’t figure out how to stop the Virginia offense, which, that’s been fairly obvious for several weeks now, and then one win in the other two – either North Carolina or Virginia Tech.
More likely, it’s 5-7 or even 4-8 – after an 11-3 finish a year ago that saw Virginia get thisclose to sneaking into the College Football Playoff, and then enter the 2026 season with what felt like legitimate and realistic playoff aspirations, on the strength of having the most experienced roster in all of FBS.
ICYMI
- UVA Football: More to take accountability for after 51-7 loss at Wake Forest
- UVA Football: 51-7 is karma, and, bad news, karma ain’t done with us yet
OK, so, from the penthouse to the outhouse, you knew that already.
Where do things go from here, is why you clicked.
In the here and now, nowhere.
There’s a bye week coming up, which would seem to be a good time to make a change at, say, offensive coordinator, where a lot of our collective wrath has been the past few weeks/past few years.
I wrote from Day 1 about the Des Kitchings hire being a reach, given how he’d been relieved of his duties in his two previous stints as an offensive coordinator, at Vanderbilt and NC State, after just one season, so, the way things have played out the past five years, underwhelming offense after underwhelming offense, to me, no surprise.
But, no, Tony Elliott is not going to pull the rug there in-season, and I don’t see that it would do us any good if he did.
Ultimately, Elliott, whose experience as a player and an assistant, before getting the head coach job at Virginia, all came on the offensive side of the ball, is the final decision-maker on the offensive scheme and the game plans.
The only change that he could make that could make any difference, in my view, would be to take over as play-caller, which I don’t see him deciding to do.
The other question, then – does Elliott make a change at QB1 – I don’t necessarily see him doing that, either.
Not that he shouldn’t, but, he decided, for some reason, to tether himself to Beau Pribula being his guy, come hell or high water.
The rest of the season is going to play out as a test of the classic definition of insanity – trying the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result.
Spoiler alert: we’re not going to get a different result.
Which gets us to, Sunday, Nov. 29 – the day after the season finale at Virginia Tech.
I do see changes coming, maybe not on paper that exact day, but there will be clear communication to Elliott that day, if not the night before, from Carla Williams, who will have received her marching orders to that effect from the people who pay the bills, that he needs to cut bait on Kitchings, and probably, to be fair, on John Rudzinski, whose defense has underperformed this year, despite having extensive depth and talent at all three levels.
I can also see Keith Gaither, the special team coordinator, being a casualty.
Gaither has the best punter in the country this year, and the worst punt coverage unit in the history of the damn world wasting his prodigious kicks.
Should be a clean sweep at the top, and probably at the level down as well, to give the new coordinators the opportunity to bring in guys to work under them that they have familiarity with.
The money people are going to either see changes made by Elliott, or they’re going to suddenly have trouble finding their checkbooks – which could precipitate a possible change with Elliott and, depending on how it all goes, perhaps even with Williams.
The donors have demonstrated that they’re willing to throw an embarrassing amount of money at winning football games, which means it won’t be hard to find a long line of guys who have ideas on how to spend it if given the chance.
At the absolute least, TE enters the portal season knowing that 2027 is a make-or-break year career-wise, and he does so with new coordinators.
At the most, well …
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Chris Graham
