Elliott Spreads Credit for His ACC Honor

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In Dabo Swinney, he had a superb mentor, and in his 11 seasons as a Clemson assistant coach Tony Elliott was able to watch and take notes on how Swinney led a football program that dominated the Atlantic Coast Conference. Even so, Elliott said, he didn’t fully grasp the range of responsibilities that a head coach has to shoulder.

“You can’t be prepared for the complexity of all that goes into running the program,” Elliott said this week in his Hardie Center office. “As an assistant, you see one aspect or two aspects, but there might be 20 aspects or 20 entities that touch the program that you now have to get a hold of [as head coach].

“And then on top of that, it’s just the magnitude, the frequency, the intensity of things that come across your desk. There’s always something, and you have to learn how to figure out, OK, what is mission critical? What’s a crisis? What can be delegated?’ At first, everything is crisis level, especially for the folks that are bringing it to you. When they bring you something, if they come into the head coach’s office, they think it’s the most important thing in the world. As a head coach, you want to respect that, but then you have to learn where it ranks on things that you need to prioritize.”

UVA hired Elliott in December 2021 to succeed Bronco Mendenhall as head coach. Less than a year into his tenure, tragedy struck the University and Charlottesville communities, and Elliott had to start guiding his program forward after the mass shooting that claimed the lives of three of his players: Lavel Davis Jr., Devin Chandler and D’Sean Perry.

For an experienced head coach, holding the program together after such a traumatic event would have been difficult. For a rookie head coach, it was even more challenging. But Elliott pressed on and brought his team with him.

On the field, progress came more slowly than he would have liked. The Cavaliers finished 3-7 in 2022. (Their final two games were canceled that season]. They went 3-9 in 2023 and 5-7 in 2024. This year, though, Elliott has seen his persistence rewarded with a breakout season, and he was named ACC Coach of the Year on Thursday.

“It really doesn’t have much to do with me,” Elliott said of the award, for which he received by far the most votes of any coach. “It’s about the staff and the players, their belief, their commitment, their unselfishness. Because nobody’s recognized if we don’t have success, right? And so the success is tied to everybody. It’s not about just one person, just like the All-ACC team. Guys aren’t on the All-ACC team without their teammates. When the team has success, everybody benefits.”

By closing the regular season last weekend with an emphatic victory over Virginia Tech, its first in the series since 2019, UVA reached the 10-win mark for only the second time in program history. Never have the Wahoos won 11 games in a season, but that could change Saturday night.

At 8 o’clock, UVA (10-2) meets Duke (7-5) in the ACC championship game at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C. The Hoos, No. 17 in the latest College Football Playoff rankings, almost certainly would advance to the CFP with a win over the Blue Devils.

Elliott, who envisioned such success when he left Clemson in 2021, said he’s grown significantly as a coach since his first season at UVA.

“I think that it shows in my demeanor,” Elliott said. “I think that year one, I was not as approachable as I am right now, because everything was crisis mode. Not saying that I was rude or disrespectful to anybody, but my mind was just constantly going, and so it was difficult for me to be truly present in the moment at some times, because I was moving so fast.”

The look on his face back then, Elliott said, told people that “now is not the time. I’m busy. Where now it’s like, OK, I can figure out how to manage things to where now I can be present in the moment. So I’m a lot more approachable, so to speak, and I think it shows in the game-day demeanor. Part of it now is that I can delegate. I know that if something happens in the game, the coaches are thinking like me. We’re aligned in our thinking so they can correct the mistakes and I don’t have to feel like I have to correct everything. And they’re going to correct it in a way that it aligns with kind of who we are as a program.

“So I’m definitely a much, much better coach now than I was year one. And if I could go back, there would probably be some times where I would have toned the intensity down, because the moment didn’t require that level of intensity. It probably required a little bit more sensitivity. And I think that’s where I’ve grown, to be able to see, to distinguish, the level of sensitivity and intensity required for that moment to get the desired outcome.”

Elliott said the tragedy helped him to “put life in perspective. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t take your job too seriously. You’ve got to take it seriously, but don’t take it too seriously to where you miss these moments, because you never know when you may not get another one.”

After the November 2022 shooting, Elliott said, he began seeing a therapist, “just to kind of process everything so that I’m not keeping everything inside. So it was big process of just trying to really establish balance back in life.”

He also made a commitment to taking care of himself physically. In his first year at UVA, Elliott said, he gained about 35 pounds.

“That’s the heaviest I’ve ever been,” he said. Stress eating contributed to his weight gain, Elliott said, but another fact was “not fully being at a place where I can manage the calendar, the day-to-day operations so that I can have time to work out, have time to eat. And so now you’re eating late at night, and then you’re picking the wrong foods. The result was a doctor who said, ‘Hey, if you’re good with having diabetes, high blood pressure, and all that kind of stuff, keep doing what you’re doing, or figure it out.’ That puts it all in perspective. You’re like, ‘I want to be here for my wife and my boys as long as I possibly can. So I better start doing something.’ And so now I’m in a better place, to where I can manage it better.”

After three straight losing seasons, many head coaches would have made staff changes. Elliott retained his assistants, almost all of whom have been with him since the 2022 season. In the wake of the mass shooting, staffers could have pursued other opportunities, he knew, but most chose to stay at UVA and help Elliott try to turn the program around.

“For me, the most important thing is loyalty,” Elliott said, “and they were loyal to me when they did that, especially when they had every justification or reason to say, ‘I don’t want to fight this fight.’ They could have thought about themselves. They could have thought about their careers.

“So that was the first thing. And so in return my loyalty was to make sure that the [staff’s] evaluations were fair. And I knew what we were dealing with, the challenges that we were facing, the things that we did have, the things that we didn’t have, the things that we needed, the areas where we needed to be better. And so I took all that into consideration. To me, to make a decision to move on from somebody, I want it to be a fair, just decision and not just an emotional decision and a reaction to maybe what the outside world sees, because the outside world only sees a fraction. They see the tip of the iceberg. I know what’s under the water.”

Not until the Hardie Center opened in June 2024 did the Cavaliers have a modern support facility they could showcase to recruits and alumni. The program also lacked the financial support that helped the Hoos rejoin the ACC’s elite this year.

“The first couple of years, we’re building,” Elliott said. “We’re working with things that we inherited. We’re trying to improve in the areas where we may not quite have what we need, but we’re figuring out a way. And what I saw was a group of folks that said, ‘We’re not going to make excuses. We’re not going to make justifications. We’re just going to show up every single day and we’re going to work towards the vision and believe in a future that we’re kind of living right now. And that’s what we’re going to do.’ ”

The program is reaping the benefits of staff stability, Elliott said. The assistants “know what Coach Elliott’s like. They know the things that he’ll tolerate, the things that he won’t tolerate. I think that now the beliefs are becoming unified, that they’re starting to believe in some of the things that I believe in, and there’s some things that they’ve taught me that I need to kind of let go. And so it’s not just about the head coach, it’s about the staff, because the staff helps the head coach develop, helps the head coach to grow.

“And so the staff has helped me develop and grow while I’ve transitioned to the head coaching position. Continuity to me is definitely important, but more importantly, it’s important for the players. The players know day-to-day what they’re going to get. And year-to-year, they kind of have an idea of what it’s going to be like.”

Elliott realizes now what he didn’t fully appreciate when he took the UVA job: that countless challenges come with the move from assistant to head coach, particularly in this era of NIL and the transfer portal.

“It’s a lot,” he said, “and it’s going to continue to be a lot. If anything, I would just say, give your coaches a little bit of grace, because the target is constantly moving. It’s so hard to plan and do all these things, because it’s constantly changing and you have less and less control.”

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