Hoos Riding Wave of Momentum to Charlotte

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — At the end of practice one evening last week, University of Virginia head coach Tony Elliott stood in front of his football team and delivered a concise message.

“It’s time,” Elliott said. “It’s time to change the freaking narrative in this game.”

UVA’s annual game with Virginia Tech was three days away, and Elliott was well aware of the recent history in that series. Not only was he 0-2 against Tech as head coach, but safety Antonio Clary was the only player on UVA’s 2025 roster who had experienced a win in the Commonwealth Clash. And that was in 2019, when Clary was a true freshman.

Clary is no longer a man alone at the Hardie Center. UVA closed the regular season Saturday night with a 27-7 win over Virginia Tech at Scott Stadium.

“I’m going to hold this moment forever,” Clary said.

To the winner of the annual game between UVA and Tech goes the Commonwealth Cup, which made its way around the locker room late Saturday night after Elliott hoisted it high amid his cheering players.

“You guys decided to change the narrative,” Elliott said, “and we’re not going back.”

Not since 1991, when they lost 38-0 at Scott Stadium, had the Hokies scored fewer than 10 points against the Wahoos. The win is proof, Elliott said, that the Hoos are “headed in the right direction. We want to compete for this state. We want to be a worthy rival. We want to show up and do our part for everybody involved. Not saying that we’re going to win every one of them, but I don’t think you can win any more until you get that first one and get that monkey off your back.”

A year from now in Blacksburg, UVA will look to record a second straight win over Tech for the first time since the late 1990s. The Cavaliers have more immediate concerns. For the second time in program history, they’re about to play in the ACC championship game in Charlotte, N.C.

At 8 p.m. Saturday, Virginia (10-2 overall) will meet Duke (7-5) at Bank of America Stadium, home of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers. With a victory, the Hoos almost certainly would advance to the College Football Playoff, and they’d clinch their first 11-win season.

“Just grateful for the opportunity,” quarterback Chandler Morris said late Saturday night.

Virginia (No. 16 AP/No. 18 CFP) went 7-1 in league play to finish in sole possession of first place in the ACC for the first time in program history. The Blue Devils were one of five teams that finished 6-2, and they won the tiebreaker.

Two weekends ago, UVA hammered Duke 34-17 at Wallace Wade Stadium in Durham, N.C.

“It’s hard to beat somebody twice in the same season,” Elliott said Sunday afternoon on an ACC teleconference, “so it’s going to be a tough, tough challenge for us.”

During his 11 years as an assistant at Clemson, Elliott said, he twice had to prepare for a postseason game against an opponent the Tigers had played in the regular season. Asked what lessons he learned from those rematches, Elliott said, “You gotta throw out what you did in the previous game, to be honest with you. This game is going to come down to execution, and I’m sure that we’re going to get Duke’s best effort. Since our game, you see that they’ve gotten back into rhythm offensively and been able to score a bunch of points.”

Since losing to UVA, Duke has won two in a row, beating North Carolina 32-25 on Nov. 22 and Wake Forest 49-32 on Saturday.

The Cavaliers are riding a two-game win streak too. Since falling 16-9 to visiting Wake Forest on Nov. 9, UVA has defeated Duke and, after a bye week, Virginia Tech. The Hoos went into their games against Duke and Tech knowing they probably needed to win to stay in contention for the ACC title game, and they believe that approach will serve them well this week.

“The past two games have been championship games,” Morris said, “and so you don’t change anything up. You stick to your routine and just understand that we are good enough and our best is good.”

Defensive tackle Jahmeer Carter said: “This week and this game are no different than any other week. We have to execute and play at a high level.”

Morris was one of the 32 transfers who joined the program this year, and the roster has almost completely turned over since UVA hired Elliott in December 2021. But several players who were in the program before Elliott arrived are still suiting up for the Hoos, including Clary, Carter, offensive linemen Noah Josey and Jack Witmer, and linebacker James Jackson.

Elliott, smiling, said he calls them the “forefathers” of the program.

“We’re not here without those individuals,” Elliott said. “First and foremost, all those individuals decided to stay. When there were some folks that said, ‘Hey, this isn’t a fight that I want to fight, I’m going to move on,’ those individuals decided to stay because they believed in the vision, and they had a hope for the future.”

Clary, who’s overcome several serious injuries during his UVA career, said the win over Virginia Tech “just shows all the hard work that we continue to put in. Obviously, in the past, we didn’t get the results we wanted, but guys stuck around and guys continued to put the work in, and now they’re getting rewarded for it. It’s special, especially for guys like Jahmeer. He’s been through a lot, like me, and he stuck it out. Things didn’t go our way all the time, but we’re still here, we’re still fighting, and we want this program to get where it should be.”

For his longest-tenured players, Elliott said, the Cavaliers’ breakthrough season is “confirmation that they made the right decision to stay when the easy thing would have been to leave and to go somewhere else and try to find quote-unquote greener grass. Now they’re getting to experience the green grass, at least this season.”

In the media’s preseason poll, Virginia was picked to finish 14^th in the 17-team ACC. Inside the Hardie Center, those prognosticators were ignored.

“Going back to the offseason, we knew the talent we had in this locker room,” Josey said. “And so when the preseason rankings come out, you don’t pay attention to them. This year wasn’t any different. So we knew that all we had to do was go out there and play our brand of football and everything else would work out.”

The Hoos made their first appearance in the ACC championship game in 2019, when they lost 62-17 to Clemson in Charlotte. That was the Tigers’ fifth straight title, and Elliott was a part of all those championship teams.

From all those trips to Charlotte with Clemson, Elliott said, he learned that the ACC “championship game is very similar to a regular week of preparation, in that you don’t go down until the night before. So you don’t travel until Friday, which is not a different rhythm than what they’re used to.”

Among the keys to UVA’s success this fall, Elliott said, has been the players’ belief “that every game is the most important game of the season, it’s the biggest game, and you prepare as if it’s the championship game. I think that’s done a lot for them in preparation for this. They’ve done a good job of blocking out the noise thus far … Now, the biggest thing is to get them to not worry about who we’re playing and all that kind of stuff and block out the noise, so that we can get a great week of prep to play our best four quarters.”

For Clary and many of his teammates, Saturday’s game was their last at Scott Stadium as players.

“It was special,” said Clary, who had one of Virginia’s two interceptions. “All the blood, sweat, and tears that I put onto that field, being able to leave that field victorious today on my last time in Scott Stadium, it was huge. Bittersweet, to be honest with you. I tried to hold back some tears today, but it ended the right way.”

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