Marques Hagans isn’t leaving Virginia for Penn State for money. He’s leaving to get the stink of the Tony Elliott regime off.
Hagans is about as UVA as you can get – a 2005 alum, two years as a grad assistant, 12 years on the football staff, under three different coaches.
He’s among those guys who are on the That Guy is Going to be a Power 5 Head Coach Someday Soon short list.
That’s why he had to get out from under the thumb of Elliott, whose first season was the kind of dumpster fire that foretells a change being in the offing sooner rather than later.
This is why you saw offensive line Garett Tujague leave to rejoin Robert Anae at NC State, and why it took Elliott a month to find his replacement, a guy in Terry Heffernan, late of Stanford, who had been unemployed for a month and a half after his head coach had been forced out, and had no suitors.
Football coaches who want to continue to be football coaches don’t want to work under head coaches who are on the path to being fired, and while that’s not going to happen in the near term at Virginia, the writing is on the wall.
Elliott went 3-7 in his first season at Virginia, and with the losses of several key guys to the transfer portal, the NFL or just deciding against playing football altogether, the 2023 season doesn’t offer a lot in terms of expectations.
The hideously ugly prep and transfer portal recruiting for the Class of 2023 doesn’t bode well for 2024, either, and 2024 is a key year in Virginia Football, because that’s when the $80 million football operations facility is set to open, and the donors who are making that possible are going to be jonesing for return on their investment.
Think back to the opening of the John Paul Jones Arena in 2006 to get a sense of how big spending on new facilities puts pressure on coaches who don’t win.
Dave Leitao’s first team in the JPJ era tied for the ACC regular-season title; his next two played missed the NCAA Tournament, and he stepped down in 2009 with a year left on his five-year deal.
I’m not sure Elliott finishes out 2024 if that team, his third, isn’t trending toward at least a .500 record, and if that’s the case, the search will begin that October for the next head coach.
Hagans’ move today to make what would seem like a lateral move will put him in that conversation.
He’d be in Year 2 leading a wide receiver group for a perennial national title contender, and importantly, he wouldn’t be part of the coaching staff that didn’t do enough to keep its head coach from getting fired.
Hagans is destined to be a Power 5 head coach. I think that destiny is going to be fulfilled at UVA, sometime in the first couple of weeks in December 2024.
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Chris Graham
