BREAKING: Elliott named UVa's new football coach

After a weeklong search for a successor to Bronco Mendenhall, Tony Elliott has been announced as the new football coach at Virginia.

Elliott has been on Dabo Swinney's staff at Clemson since 2011. He was co-offensive coordinator for the Tigers' national title teams in 2016 and 2018, and was promoted to offensive coordinator and assistant head coach following last season.

A Clemson alum, Elliott was named the 2017 winner of the Broyles Award, given to the top assistant coach in the country. In the seven seasons since Elliott's promotion to co-offensive coordinator prior to the 2014 Russell Athletic Bowl, the Tigers finished among the top two teams in the ACC in total offense five times. Four times in that span, Clemson had a player earn both ACC Player of the Year and Offensive Player of the Year in the same season.

Pete Thamel of Yahoo Sports and ESPN's Chris Low were the first to report on Friday afternoon that Elliott had accepted the UVa job. The Clemson coordinator first emerged as a candidate to succeed Bronco Mendenhall last Saturday, when TigerIllustrated.com reported that Elliott preferred the opening at Virginia to the vacancy at Duke.

At one point early this week, it seemed the job would go to Virginia all-time great Anthony Poindexter, the co-defensive coordinator at Penn State, but Elliott re-emerged as the Cavaliers’ top candidate on Wednesday. He arrived in Charlottesville with his family on Wednesday evening to interview for the vacancy before returning to Clemson the next day.

Elliott has often been connected to openings in recent seasons, including turning down the head coaching job at Tennessee last year. In addition to the Duke vacancy, Elliott had conversations with both TCU and Virginia Tech about their jobs earlier this month, according to Tiger Illustrated.

JOIN CAVSCORNER TODAY!

If you are not already a member of CavsCorner, come join us and see what all of the buzz is about.

Click HERE to subscribe and get all of the latest news and join hundreds of other UVa fans in talking about Cavalier football, basketball, and recruiting. You won't be disappointed!