As the football season winds down and the basketball season is just around the corner, there’s one person in Charlottesville that will certainly have to wrestle with some big decisions in the coming weeks and months.
UVa athletic director Carla Williams has been with Virginia since 2017. She has had to lead the department through plenty of tumult and issues much bigger than sports during her tenure, but now faces a pivotal stretch in her time in leadership, and plenty of big problems to solve between now and the spring.
Tony Bennett decided to retire out of nowhere earlier this month, and sets UVa up to have a new coach for the first time in a decade and a half. For this year, UVa will be led by interim coach Ron Sanchez, who has head coach experience and an opportunity to win the job full-time. If that happens, Williams’ job gets a little easier. But let’s not undersell how critical it is that she gets this right.
UVa’s basketball program has been the athletic department’s crown jewel over the past decade, and is the most visible program the school has, with a very high level of approval from the fanbase. It’s also been a program that probably didn’t require much oversight from the athletic director to operate. Bennett had bulletproof approval from the fanbase, and the donor class. If he needed something, the odds were that he was going to get it and could convince folks to do what he needed to win. Regardless of whether the next coach is Sanchez or someone from outside the program, they won’t have that level of support without scrutiny, at least not until they’ve proven themselves. So Williams will have to not only make sure she has the right guy in place for that job, but also ensure that they have the resources they need to be successful.
Another reason the basketball decision has to be a good one is the current state of the football program. Basketball doesn’t bring in the money that football does, but does bring in a good chunk of UVa’s money, especially as the football program continues to bleed potential profits.
Tony Elliott’s first two years didn’t go well, for some reasons out of his control, but also in general on the football field, between the lines. The football facility has opened and that should help, but Elliott has just 10 wins in his third season, and not a ton of hope for more wins before this season closes next month. UVa did get off to a hot start this year at 4-1, but have lost three straight, culminating in Saturday’s no-show against a UNC team that hadn’t won in six weeks. Virginia lost 41-14, dropping to 4-4, and heading into their bye before a rough stretch to end the season, featuring three ranked opponents before a trip to Virginia Tech, a place the program hasn’t won in 26 years. UVa will likely be a double-digit underdog in every remaining game.
If UVa goes 4-8, Elliott will be 10-24 through three years, with three of those wins coming against FCS opponents, and two more against teams from the Sun Belt. Recruiting has improved some, but isn’t at the level required to have hope for a major turnaround on the horizon. UVa is also going to lose a bunch of starters on both sides of the ball this offseason, and will need to be very aggressive in the transfer portal to field a viable team next year. Elliott is probably not quite on the hot seat this year, though the fanbase will probably be ready for a change if they continue to fade down the stretch. Especially if the results are like they were on Saturday, where UVa didn’t just lose, they got embarrassed. It does feel like Elliott would have to make some changes if he returns, after three straight rough seasons. And the seat would be red hot in 2025.
If UVa ends the season losing seven straight games, expectations for next year will not be high, from the outside, or from a fanbase that is clearly not bought in, despite some signs of improvement early in this season. Right now, it feels like UVa is a lot closer to losing some of their loyal fans that remain, rather than being close to adding new ones.
UVa had their biggest home crowd on Saturday, but it came in at just 44,550, meaning the crowd was nearly 30% short of capacity. And that will likely be UVa’s biggest crowd of the year, barring a major turnaround before the home finale against SMU, nearly a month from now. For the season, the Cavaliers are getting an average home crowd of 39,537, which included a dismal turnout of 32,688 for Louisville, the lowest-attended game in years. In the Elliott era, UVa has just one crowd over 45,000 (56,508 for JMU last year) and average 41,266 fans per game since he took over. In fact, Saturday’s crowd was the second biggest of the Elliott era. And attendance hasn’t just been a byproduct of results. Fans didn’t exactly show up for the beginning of his tenure, even though that 2022 team was expected to have a pretty good season. Elliott’s debut against Richmond drew just 41,122 fans. Two weeks later, UVa drew just 40,556.
Attendance doesn’t need to be fixed right away for the program to improve, sometimes you have to win before folks start showing up. Look at 8-0 Indiana, who started the season with less-than-full crowds but have now sold out the last two contests as they’ve gained momentum. But this is another problem that Williams will have to solve, regardless of who’s leading the football program. It does seem safe to say though, that there’s nothing that can be done to make changes immediately that will draw fans to the stadium. Barring some sort of Deion Sanders-like figure coming in and completely revitalizing the program, fans are on the outside looking in until they start winning a lot of games.
Even when they’ve won at a decent level, like in 2019, fans didn’t flood the stadium. UVa’s win over Virginia Tech to close out that season was played in front of 52,619, and 10,000 more empty seats. The week before that, a rolling UVa team drew just 37,329 fans for their win over Liberty. Still, I think the administration would be thrilled with any crowd over 50k at this point, and in 2019, they had three of them.
So add attendance to the list of problems facing the athletic director, and the bottom line for the department. A big part of an athletic director’s job is fundraising, and in this new era of college athletics, ensuring that programs have the resources they need to compete is pivotal. It seems that UVa has made some strides on the NIL front, and the two revenue programs didn’t seem to lose any players to other programs of late for that reason specifically. There are other cost-related areas of focus too, and it’s expensive to run an athletic department. That becomes even more true when the program has a football program that isn’t at the tip of the spear and maxing out to support other programs that don’t drive revenue.
UVa is probably going to have to practice some frugality, given everything that’s going on around the department, and across college sports at large. UVa has a job posted for a role titled “Assistant Athletics Director, Business Operations,” someone who would be brought into help manage budgets. The hiring range for the position, according to the UVa website, is $65,000 to $75,000, which seems pretty low considering the scope of the role and the size of UVa’s athletic department. But that might speak, at least to some degree, to the constraints of their budgets.
Donations to the VAF are not on par with what other comparable athletic departments have received, or have been earmarked specifically for major projects like the football operations center, which was necessary, but expensive. Football continues to leave money on the table because of lagging attendance but also is not driving a donor class to pump money into the program at the rate needed to accelerate things. Or at least that’s how it looks, from here. The lack of general excitement around the program, as well as money being redirected to NIL, doesn’t exactly create a favorable environment for fundraising.
All of this adds up to a lot of potential headaches for UVa’s athletic director. Between the sudden change in the basketball program, with an incredibly stable program plunged into uncertainty, and the football program continuing to wander in the desert, in addition to all of the other fiduciary responsibilities the job comes with, Williams has a ton on her plate. I don’t envy her position, but this is the most pivotal moment of her tenure. UVa needs Williams to guide the athletic department, and particularly the two revenue sports, on upward trends. This is a moment that could define UVa athletics for the next few decades, and frankly, could be a defining time in Williams’ career.
Williams has a path forward to playing this relatively safe. She has an interim basketball coach, and perhaps he wins the job through good performance, or Williams could simply opt to hire him full-time if she believes in his potential, even if this season isn’t an overwhelming success. And with football, Elliott seems very likely to return for year four at this point, and there’s still a third of the season to go. But this is probably not the time for Williams and UVa to play it safe, whatever that means. That doesn’t mean fire everyone and go hire the flashiest replacement, but it’s also safe to say that the department could use a big boost of energy. If the administration believes that they’re on the right track, they really need to be right about that, and quickly. If they’re unsure, they probably should try to shake things up, whatever that means, and try to sure up fan support for the two revenue programs.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown for UVa’s athletic director, who has a monumental year or so ahead of her, with some tough decisions surely coming.
