ACC picks UVA 14th; Elliott to team: ‘Y’all believe it?’ … ‘hell no’

By Jerry Ratcliffe

Tony Elliott was aware that the ACC’s preseason football poll was coming out Wednesday, but he decided to wait to inform his team where it was predicted by media from last week’s ACC Kickoff event in Charlotte.

Elliott will delay telling his team the results — UVA was picked to finish 14th in the 17-team league — until Thursday, although most of them will likely already know by then.

Because of the offseason talent acquisition through the transfer portal, a king’s ransom in NIL packages spent, one of the lightest schedules among ACC teams and seven home games, most media that regularly covers the Cavaliers believe Virginia will finish higher than predicted. This sportswriter is one of them.

But I wanted to know what Elliott truly thought about the vote that has UVA finishing ahead of only Cal (15th), Wake (16th) and Stanford (17th). You can find complete polling results at the end of this column. So, I asked him, knowing that coaches usually have a disdain for preseason polls, but did he think his program was being judged on past performances, or did ACC media sleep on the Cavaliers a bit, and will he use the poll to motivate his team?

Elliott opened up and delivered some meaningful answers to all those questions and more, perhaps ranting a little, while providing honest responses.

Motivation?

“Yeah, I’ll talk about it one time, right?” Elliott said. “Because I’d rather them hear it from me and let me address it. I didn’t want to talk about it before the first practice … I wanted them to go out and just focus on the day.

“So I have an opportunity [Thursday] morning just to say, ‘Boys, this is what the world thinks about us. Y’all believe it?’ And they’re going to say, hell no. Then we’re moving on and we’re not going to talk about it again.”

Elliott takes preseason polls for what they are, educated guesses, even more so in the wacky sports environment of today. With practically every team restocking its roster via the portal, it’s more challenging for anyone voting in polls to keep up with the changes.

“We’re better than we were last year, so I’ll take (14th),” the coach said. “At least they didn’t put us in the same spot they had us last year (16th out of 17, ahead of only Stanford). So at least they acknowledged some progress that we’re making, but it’s really hard to tell because pretty much everybody’s got a new team, so I think some of it is you have to go off of historical data and you try to look at the amount of returners.”

Virginia has 54 new players on its roster, which may seem like a lot until you consider that Bill Belichick’s North Carolina team has 70 new players.

Elliott said that his team knows, and he’ll remind them that nothing externally is going to get Virginia where it wants to go. All that will have to come internally, via culture and the process.

Sure, he will mention it, poke his players with the outside disrespect, but at the same time, knows what that’s worth. Those types of motivation wear off quickly.

“I’m excited because I think we have the best roster that we’ve had and we’ve done some good things at times with less, so I’m excited to see this group have a little bit more and see what we can do,” Elliott said. “At the end of the day, if we underachieve, I’ll be the first one to tell you that we underachieved.”

What he’s not going to do is come out and tell his team that the pollsters were accurate, that they have no chance.

“I’m not going to tell these young men to work as hard as they can to be average or see themselves as average. Man, they want to win. I ain’t worried about what they say in the preseason. The only poll that matters is the one that comes out at the end of the season.”

The frustrating part of this for Elliott is the inference that the poll suggests he tells his team that it can’t get to where it wants to go.

“We know how hard it’s going to be, but man, why would we not believe that we can be playing on Dec. 6?” Elliott said. “We’re not going to let that poll define us and we darn sure ain’t gonna let people make us think less of ourselves.”

There’s plenty of evidence, at least on paper, as to why Elliott and his coaching staff are fired up about this season, his fourth at the helm of the Virginia program. The Cavaliers brought in 31 new players via the transfer portal, much in part to a generous NIL package that allowed the staff to acquire much more talent and depth than has been the norm in this program for a long, long time.

Each assistant coach I talked with at last Friday’s get together went out of their way to say they had never experienced an offseason like this one, that the three previous years compared to this one was like day to night.

Tyler Jones, the recently appointed football GM, said Friday that he’s heard other programs say they were surprised that Virginia had managed to land some of the talent, not realizing that things had drastically changed within the UVA program.

The Cavaliers’ transfer portal class was ranked among the top 24 in the nation, which is a dramatic reversal from a year ago.

At the end of last season, I distinctly remember Elliott saying that the biggest difference he had noticed between his program and Virginia Tech’s was depth.

I asked him Wednesday if that problem no longer existed, because it appears that Virginia has not only depth, but experienced, playable depth all over the field.

For years now, the offensive line coach and the secondary coach had to nervously see who reported healthy to practice and often had to put together patchwork units, playing guys out of position or with little experience to plug the holes. That shouldn’t be the case this year. In fact, depth on the O-Line and secondary should be the best it has been in years.

“We’re very hopeful,” Elliott said Wednesday. “We feel like we targeted the right guys (in the portal), we addressed some needs that we had from a body-type standpoint, some length, some speed at specific positions, but in particular, in the trenches.

“Man, I just tell the staff all the time, especially the defensive side of the ball, man, I just want us to look like the other teams that we play against, because it seems like every offense and defense we play against, they’re rolling out 8 to 12 defensive linemen. When you have that kind of depth, it makes a difference.”

Elliott knows he has the depth in place, wants to stay healthy and rotate all of his players to keep them fresh for four quarters, likely a huge key in one-score games, which a lot of ACC games come down to.

Fourteenth? I beg to differ. Here’s how the ACC pollsters saw it:

2025 ACC Football Predicted Order of Finish (Media Vote)
Rk  Team – Points
1. Clemson (167) – 3083
2. Miami (7) – 2679
3. SMU (2) – 2612
4. Georgia Tech (2) – 2397
5. Louisville – 2370
6. Duke – 1973
7. Florida State (4) – 1920
8. North Carolina – 1611
9. Pitt – 1571
10. NC State – 1505
11. Virginia Tech (1) – 1412
12. Syracuse – 1381
13. Boston College – 953
14. Virginia – 871
15. California – 659
16. Wake Forest – 576
17. Stanford – 426
First-place votes in parentheses
183 media voters