Virginia head coach Tony Elliott, staff make adjustments ahead of fall camp

While the 2023 Virginia football season will not begin in earnest for yet another month, the Cavaliers will begin preparation on Wednesday for the second season of the Tony Elliott era. The Cavaliers will kickoff fall camp for Elliott and company's second training camp.

According to Elliott, the staff have made a few adjustments going into year two. The former Clemson offensive coordinator has an improved understanding of what this job entails and where Virginia differs from his alma mater.

“You look over there [Clemson], it’s kind of a well-oiled machine,” he said last week when meeting with the media. “And so a lot of things just from an operational standpoint were different. There were parts of the program that were further advanced.”

There are football aspects that Elliott wants to improve, of course, but he also mentioned navigating the logistics of the academic calendar and how he’s adjusted the program’s gameplan on that front.

Virginia has three different summer school sessions, and last year, players were still taking courses into the second week of August which is far from ideal for players trying to prepare for any season, let alone one when a brand-new coaching staff had just come in.

“So, this year, tried to get ahead of it and so we front loaded the summer and went summer [session] one, summer [session] two, and then the guys are here for summer [session] three, but they’re not in class,” Elliott explained. “That’s going to give us the flexibility to be able to have a true fall camp, so we’ll have more time together as a team.”

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Given the daily demands of summer courses, this updated structure should undoubtedly benefit the players over the next three weeks before the fall semester begins. It’s all part of the learning curve for the second-year head coach, and the hope is that the last year’s experience will result in a step forward for the program this year.

In fact, Elliott acknowledged his need to reevaluate his plan and adapt based on what he learned in year one.

“I have to grow and say, ‘you know what, I got to slow down here,’ right? We’re gonna get to there, but let’s make sure that we’re taking the proper steps and not just trying to jump,” he said.

One specific area in which Elliott noted a difference was last season is in the players’ dealing with the coaching staff’s expectations. The expectations aren’t different; rather, Elliott feels his guys have more clarity as to the structure and details of how the staff wants to operate on a daily basis.

“The expectations don’t change, because the expectations for us as a staff and as a program, they’re already set probably higher than anybody externally can put on us,” Elliott said. “We’ll be able to not spend as much time on just the fundamentals of how we structure practice, the expectations of [and] the tempo of practice because everybody has a better understanding.”

More specifically, Elliott added, “The coaches are going to be intense, but it’s being done from a place of love, so they [the players] are not questioning that anymore. They understand why it’s necessary to have the sense of urgency.”

Urgency is definitely the name of the game this year. After a thoroughly disappointing 3-7 record last season, the Cavaliers saw key names like Nick Jackson, Dontayvion Wicks, Brennan Armstrong, and Fentrell Cypress, among others, depart the program. As a result, Virginia was overwhelmingly voted to finish last in the ACC in the recent preseason media poll, so yeah, urgency is a necessity if the Hoos want to perform better than most expect of them.

To start, Elliott and his staff brought in some reinforcements this offseason, including Monmouth quarterback Tony Muskett and multiple offensive linemen. Among the offseason transfers were two former Clemson players, running back Kobe Pace and cornerback Malcolm Greene.

While all of the transfers will bring their respective experiences to Charlottesville, Pace and Greene may be of more help than the others. Both were part of the Clemson program that Elliott coached in, so they know what the internal workings of that program look like, and thus they have experienced much of the vision that Elliott is trying to implement at UVA.

“I can say what the standard is, but the players have to visualize that experience,” Elliott said. “When you have guys [Pace and Greene] that come from a situation where they’ve kind of had a standard, they can say things in ways that maybe I can’t.”

Dabo Swinney has built one of the best programs in the country at Clemson, and Virginia now has multiple guys that have lived in that program, one that is operating more smoothly and effectively both on and off the field. Pace and Greene won’t just be veteran presences this fall; they’ll be relied on for their specific insights into Elliott’s system, and that starts with day one of fall camp on Wednesday.

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