Saturday Matinee Awaits Hoos in Dallas

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — For University of Virginia head coach Tony Elliott, being part of a football game that starts at 11 a.m. will be a new experience.

Not so for UVA offensive guard Noah Josey. He’s the lone player left in the program from the Virginia team that whipped Illinois 42-14 at Scott Stadium on Sept. 11, 2021.

That game kicked off at 11 a.m., and Josey is looking forward to the Cavaliers’ test Saturday at Gerald J. Ford Stadium in Dallas. Virginia (4-2 overall, 2-1 ACC) meets No. 24 SMU (4-1, 2-1) at 11 a.m. Central.

“I love breakfast and ball,” Josey said Tuesday at the Hardie Center.  “I’m not a big fan of just sitting around the hotel all day watching everybody else play ball. So it’s good to get out there early and get going.”

Dating back to last season, each of the Wahoos’ past 12 games has started at 3:30 p.m. Eastern or later. The Hoos will eat their pregame meal Saturday at 7 a.m. Central.

“Basically, we're getting on the plane [Friday], we're flying out, we're going to sleep, we're getting up, we're playing,” Elliott said. “Whereas normally you travel out and you have that night to kind of finish up any final preparation, and then you have more meetings in the morning. So now all of our meetings will essentially be done here before we get on the plane.”

With a later start, a big part of the players’ “mental prep can be done on Saturday,” Elliott said. “And now it's like, you gotta do that while you're brushing your teeth and getting ready to go to the stadium.”

The Hoos are 0-2 away from Scott Stadium this season. ACC teams are 0-9 against SMU in Dallas since the Mustangs joined the league in 2024.

It doesn’t “matter if you play them [in Dallas] or here, they're going to be tough,” Elliott said of the Mustangs.

NEXT MEN UP: The Cavaliers have lost multiple players to injuries in recent games, and Elliott provided updates on his team’s health during his weekly media availability Tuesday.

Omillio Agard, who started Virginia’s first five games at cornerback, has a torn ACL and will miss the rest of the season, Elliott said.

Elliott also announced that defensive end Devon Baxter had shoulder surgery Monday to repair his labrum. Wide receiver Rico Flores Jr., who was hurt in UVA’s most recent game, a 28-25 win over Syracuse at Scott Stadium, won’t play against SMU, Elliott said, and the severity of his injury wasn’t clear Tuesday.

Starting safety Brandyn Hillman hurt his ankle against Syracuse and will be a game-time decision in Dallas. Two other defensive starters—cornerback Jacobie Henderson and linebacker Maddox Marcellus—are banged up but expected to play Saturday.

“It’s that time of the year where you knock on wood and you pray you don't get to this point,” Elliott said, “but it's a gladiator sport where you’re going to have some collateral damage on the body.”

MENTAL LAPSES: Late in the second quarter Saturday, Syracuse took a 17-7 lead on a field goal that capped a drive extended by three UVA penalties. The first was a personal foul on defensive end Fisher Camac on an incomplete pass—a play that, had it stood, would have forced the Orange the punt from its 33-yard line.

“Fish knows I'm mad at him,” Elliott said, smiling. Without the penalthy, “we're off the field,” he added. “It's third-and-8. It's a throwaway. And he's being aggressive. I get it. It's a tic-tac deal. I can't question the official's call, but we gave him the ability to make a decision right there. We don't give him that, we're off the field in three plays. Instead, we have a 16-play drive that eats up the clock. And so now the offense is sitting over there kind of waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.”

It might have been a borderline call, Camac said Tuesday, but “in a moment like that, it's unacceptable. So I owned it, and I learned from it.”

That wasn’t the Cavaliers’ only self-inflicted wound against Syracuse. The game showed a “lot of things that we can grow and learn from,” Elliott said.

ELITE TALENT: This will be the second time Virginia and SMU have met in football. The first was on Nov. 23, 2024, when the No. 13 Mustangs rolled to a 33-7 victory at Scott Stadium.

Quarterback Kevin Jennings passed for 323 yards and two touchdowns that day, and he’s still a Mustang. Through five games this season, he’s completed 75% of his passes for 1,588 yards and 14 touchdowns, with five interceptions.

Jennings ranks among the best quarterbacks UVA has faced in recent years, and “I think where he's changed is he's a lot more mature,” Elliott said.

“He's got complete understanding of the system that they're running … And then he just has poise. You can tell leadership. The guys believe that he's going to be able to go make a play. He can make every throw. There's not a throw that he can't make. He's got the whole Mahomes arm-slot stuff. He can make all throws from all different deals, throwing really, really well on the run. So the biggest thing is you're seeing that the game is slowed down to him, and it's like he's just out there playing ball. He'll dance around with guys. And he knows he's going to throw it away, but he'll dance to see if they're going to give him an out. And then if he doesn't have the out, he'll go down or he'll throw it away. You can just tell that he's got the moxie and the poise and the confidence. He just believes that, hey, at the end of the day, regardless of what the situation is, he's going to go make a play.”

To keep Jennings from taking over the game, Camac said, the Hoos have “to swarm him. If it’s one [defender] he's probably going to make you miss. You can't just dive at him. He'll drop back. You've got to really collapse him, front, back, behind, and just get him on the ground any way you can.”

The Mustangs are averaging 479.2 yards and 34.6 points per game.

“They’ve got a very distinct style on offense,” Elliott said. “It's kind of like basketball on grass. They just kind of get out there, but they're physical, they can run it, they can throw it, and they've got great synergy.”

LATE SURGE: After scoring a touchdown on the game’s opening drive, UVA gave up 17 straight points to Syracuse. The Cavaliers finally scored again late in the third quarter, on a touchdown pass from quarterback Beau Pribula to wide receiver Da’Shawn Martin, and then added two more TDs in the fourth quarter.

Minor breakdowns hurt the Hoos on many of their possessions against Syracuse. The game is “60 minutes,” Elliott said, “but it's three hours of intense focus, and it's every play. Every play matters, and so then you've got to overcome yourself to make sure that you've got the mental toughness that this second-and-4 play in the second quarter can be the biggest play of the season … And it's not they don't want to, it's just that sense of urgency that we're continuing to build with this team.”

Asked about the Cavaliers’ second-half dominance against the Orange, Josey said, “I think we just found kind of the right level of intensity as an offense, defense and as a team especially. I think we had good leadership step up. The sideline was very vocal throughout the whole game, and I thought guys really stuck together throughout the whole game.”

Win no. 4️⃣ Game 6 recap #GoHoos 🔶⚔️🔷 https://t.co/KGH83srriE

— Virginia Football (@UVAFootball) October 12, 2026

PERSEVERANCE REWARDED: Coming off a one-sided loss at Florida State, Virginia was far from perfect against Syracuse, and that provided the coaches with a “great opportunity to kind of teach and grow this football team,” Elliott said. “But at the end of the day, they found a way to win, and they responded, which is something that was probably the biggest challenge to the team coming out of the Florida State game.

“How are you going to respond? Because adversity hit [in Tallahassee] and we didn't necessarily respond the way that I thought we were capable of. And this week, we did. Now let's go grow in success. I think that's going to be the challenge for this football team is, can you grow in success? Everybody's going to be fired up and eager to respond to adversity. It's just when you have success. Can you grow?”

Elliott said he’s proud of the way his team rallied in the second half against Syracuse. Now comes a significant challenge in Dallas.

“I'm looking forward to it,” Elliott said. “This is a really, really good football team that we're getting ready to play, and it's going to take more than emotion and excitement to win this one. We're going to have to play fundamentally sound, play as a team, execute our game plan to have a chance to win.”

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