As the fourth quarter wasted away on Saturday, UVa’s offense jogged back on the field looking to get in the end zone. They had failed to do so all day, and were simply looking to find something positive in an afternoon full of disappointment. All that was left to do at that point was scratch and claw to avoid the program’s first shutout loss since 2017. And perhaps the worst part of it all was that, given how the offense has looked of late, none of this was particularly surprising.
Virginia eventually did find the end zone, converting an unlikely touchdown on 4th and Goal. But in three of UVa’s last four games, they haven’t scored an offensive touchdown until garbage time, down by scores of 38-6, 35-0 and on Saturday, 26-0. It’s clear that whatever success UVa had early in the season has faded away, and the offense itself is lost as the season winds down.
Against SMU, UVa put up just 173 yards of offense, against a defense that allows 332 per contest. After a week filled with quarterback talk, UVa stuck with Anthony Colandrea, who was once again ineffective, throwing for 108 yards. He hasn’t had a 200+ yard passing game since the loss to Louisville on October 12th, and has just one game over 179 passing since mid-September. The offensive line was bad too-allowing nine sacks. In the last two home games, Colandrea has been sacked an unbelievable 19 times. Virginia was bad in all the other areas that matter, too, except for turnovers. They were just 3-for-15 on third down, and 1-for-3 in the red zone.
All of this is par for the course for UVa’s offense. Looking just at this year, here’s where UVa ranks in key offensive categories, nationally (out of 134 programs):
Scoring (23.2 points per game): 103rd
Yards per Play (5.3): 105th
Rushing Yards (135 yards per game): 92nd
Passing Yards (234 yards per game): 59th
Turnover Margin (-2): 81st
Interceptions Thrown (12): 106th
Sacks Allowed (42): 131st
TFLs Allowed (74): 110th
Explosive Plays, 20+ yards (45): 83rd
Third Down Conversions (33.9%): 120th
Red Zone Conversions (78%): 109th
Red Zone Touchdowns (41.5%): 132nd
So those are pretty bad. The passing yards number is the most passable, but even that one requires some context. UVa is averaging 234 passing yards per game on the season, but some of those numbers can be attributed to Tony Muskett’s garbage time stats, and oddly enough, successful wide receiver throws. Colandrea is averaging 193 yards per game, which would rank 104th nationally on its own. Over the last five games, including two where he didn’t play at all, Muskett contributed 347 passing yards in mop-up duty, which accounted for 34 percent of the passing yards thrown, in just a fraction of the snaps.
These numbers are tough to look at, but in line with what we’ve seen in the first two years of the Tony Elliott regime. UVa’s offense has actually dropped off in scoring ever-so slightly, from 23.3 points per game to 23.2 this year, with one game remaining. Yards per rush has improved by 0.6 yards per attempt, but is still below par at 3.72 yards per carry. Virginia’s yards per play average has remained incredibly steady over three seasons, going from 5.13 to 5.21, to 5.30 this year. Those yearly averages are all 100th or worse, nationally. Virginia’s offense has ranked 115th or worse nationally in red zone touchdown percentage in all three seasons.
In three years, UVa has scored 40 points just one time (43 vs Coastal Carolina). They’ve scored 35+ just twice, and have never scored more than 31 against a power-conference opponent. Conversely, they’ve had plenty of games where they’ve struggled to score. In 27 games against P4 opponents, UVa has failed to reach 21 points, a pretty low bar, 16 times. They’ve scored 14 or less eight times, including four times this year. Four times this season, UVa hasn’t scored a touchdown in the first half.
On top of all the failure, UVa’s offense is not a fun product to watch. There are very few big plays, and the entire operation feels designed to get five yards at a time, which is often a struggle. UVa’s fans would have been booing more during Saturday’s ugly loss, but it felt they were resigned to the outcome that they’ve seen so often, particularly at home, where Virginia’s offense was dreadful this season. In six home games, UVa scored 18.7 points per game, and in their five games against P4 competition, scored just seven offensive touchdowns, two of which came down by four scores. Conversely, UVa fans nearly saw more sacks allowed at home this year (28) as they did third-down conversions (30).
There’s one commonality in all of this failure, and it’s the scheme. UVa has traded out position coaches at receiver and offensive line, but the two holdovers from the Bronco Mendenhall regime didn’t produce good results in 2022, either. And in watching what UVa does offensively, it just seems too complicated for the results they’re getting. Watching SMU on Saturday, everything looked simple, and was designed for players to be able to play free, make quick decisions and focus on executing them. At Virginia, sometimes it seems like plays take forever to get called, there’s confusion about who should and shouldn’t be on the field, and sometimes it seems like guys don’t do what they’re supposed to on a given play.
There’s been a lot of talk about a QB change, and Elliott seems unwilling to consider it. Following Saturday’s loss, where Colandrea threw for 108 yards and was sacked nine times, Elliott said “if it was clean pockets and missed throws, bad decisions, I think you make a change,” indicating that the fault lies with other players, primarily. And the offensive line was bad on Saturday to be sure, though some of those sacks could be categorized as coverage sacks with nobody open, or at the fault of the QB, potentially.
But let’s not lose sight of the fact that Elliott is an offensive coach. This is what he’s supposed to be good at. He won the Broyles Award at Clemson, awarded to the nation’s best assistant coach. He presided over offenses that were talented, yes, but effective. That success has not come with him to Virginia.
Perhaps he’s delegating too much, but the scheme is the scheme that they’ve collectively installed, and it doesn’t feel like it’s one that his UVa players can execute. And we’ve seen it attempted by a bunch of different players over the three years, so it's not necessarily the right scheme, wrong guys, at this point.
In 2022, Elliott inherited an offense led by a quarterback that had thrown for 404.5 yards per game the year prior. He also had several dynamic receivers, led by Dontayvion Wicks, who had 1,203 yards and nine touchdowns in 2021, had a bad year with this staff, and picked back up where he left off in the NFL. Yes, the program lost a lot of other players, and it may have been foolish to assume he could pick up where the previous staff left off and have the same success. But they weren’t even close to having success. That first year was a warning sign of things to come; the players that remained from the previous staff, who had all played a lot of college football, could not pick up the new scheme and make it work.
So where does UVa’s offense go from here? Well next, they’ll have to take their show on the road, playing in Blacksburg in sub-20 degree weather, in a stadium where the program has basically played one good half of offensive football in a quarter century. Assuming that game goes as last few have, a loss will take Virginia into another offseason, where change has to be considered across the board.
Facing facts, UVa has a bad offense, and it's not getting better. Elliott will need to take a hard look at where things are, and decide if he’s okay running the same offense and crossing his fingers that its finally going to start working, or if he’s going to go another route. If UVa loses on Saturday, and go through the offseason with no major changes on offense, this staff will be doomed to fail, and it will be a failure of stubbornness. Des Kitchings might know a lot about offensive football, and perhaps the play calling isn’t the problem, but it’s very obvious that there is a problem, and it has to be fixed through change.
Elliott seems to prefer to run the program as a CEO, and that’s a fine approach, but with that role comes hard decisions. Perhaps Elliott could take a page out of his mentor’s book, as Dabo Swinney runs the Clemson program in a similar fashion. Swinney replaced Elliott with internal hire Brandon Streeter in 2022. Clemson’s offense wasn’t good enough, and after one year, he dismissed Streeter and went out and got the best offensive coordinator he could find, TCU’s Garrett Riley, and turned the offense over to him. Since that change, Clemson’s offense has improved. It’s still Dabo’s program, and he can have as much input offensively as he wants, but he decided rather than being comfortable with the current approach, he wanted to delegate the offense to a schemer who could come in and make things less clunky. Elliott, if he wants to be above the fray offensively, should consider doing the same.
Ironically, Elliott is now in a similar situation that his predecessor faced, just without success at UVa preceding the current crisis. Mendenhall was a defensive coach that presided over a program with a bad defense, and ultimately kept the same people in place. They tried to change the defense to a 3-3-5, but that failed. At the end of the 2021 season, Mendenhall decided that he’d rather pause his career than stay at UVa and bring in a different person to run the defense. Now, Elliott, an offensive coach presiding over a bad offense, faces a similar situation. And if he opts not to make changes, with the staff, scheme or otherwise, he’ll end up using the same moving company that Mendenhall hired a few years ago.
