I don’t think NW would touch Bronco given that hazing lawsuit he was named in (regardless of the actual merits of the lawsuit). They need someone squeaky clean.
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Transfer portal for fall eligibility is closed unless there’s a coaching change (in other words, if we want a QB for this fall, it has to be one from Northwestern or one already in the portal who hasn’t found a new school yet (and given that it’s July, that’s a bad sign). Or a guy can still grad transfer, but who would graduate in May and not decide to transfer until July (besides Jahvon Quinnerly)?
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His buyout is 8 mil to start and drops 2 mil per year. So after year 3, his buyout would be less than a year’s salary. He’s probably got 2-3 more seasons to show that he can work out here, which is rough for him given that the schedule the next 2 seasons is not very user friendly at all.
I’m still hopeful he can get us going. Seems like a great person and good leader and the engineer in him seems very detail oriented and organized. If he brings that and hires guys to run the technical parts of offense and defense, he can make things work. So far so good on defense. I’m not very optimistic on offense.
I’ve been listening and reading the Athletic podcast series on Shanahan, McVay, Staley and McDaniel and how they developed and refined their offense. Those guys live and breathe football innovation. I don’t get the impression that Elliott’s football mind works the same way.
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I’d have a little more optimism re Elliott if I hadn’t actually watched a handful of the games last year. It doesn’t bother me that we lost a lot - despite preseason expectations, it’s always hard in a coach’s first year and the whole o-line did indeed leave. But what bothered me is how inept the offense looked and how overall unprepared the team often seemed on that side of the ball. It didn’t feel like a scrappy team that was figuring things out but just wasn’t quite able to get over the hump yet. It often just felt like a mess, including bad time management and decisions seemingly coming straight from the sideline. (Assuming I’m remembering correctly - always possible I’m not)
But, you have to think Elliott will have examined last season thoroughly, and hopefully with more buy-in from the players and another year of installing the system, we might look like what I’d hoped we would have seen last year (few wins, but progress). I’m not holding my breath though, especially with Kitchings still theoretically in charge of the offense. That was the hire that made the least sense to me at the time, and nothing that has happened since has made me feel more positive about it.
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His system didn’t march up weii with the players he had and that caused a lot of problems. Hopefully his recruits will buy in to what he is trying to do and eventually they will become a better team
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Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if the offense didn’t buy into CTE’s plan. They’d just produced one of the best offensive seasons in school history, were one of the top ~5 passing offenses in the country (and arguably #1) and they returned the QB and most of the receiving corps (with a lot of seniors). CTE walking in and saying “We’re completely changing everything” probably didn’t go over real well.
The defense, on the other hand, was one of the worst in school history and the players were probably perfectly happy to tear everything down and try something completely different. Why not? They probably bought in quickly and turned in a solid season.
I have questions as to whether it was a good idea to completely rebuild the offense at that moment but at this point its done. When he got buy-in from the defense, everything worked out pretty well. Who knows, maybe it’ll go well with the O as well? I’m a little skeptical but I have reason for hope. Still think they’re only winning 2 games this season, though.
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I think that’s a legitimate question. I also respect and think CTE did the right move by ripping the band-aid off. As a coach especially a new coach you need to go with what you know. I’m also of the mind if I fail I fail my way. The nuance and sign of a good coach is in the off the field work that gets players to buy in. On that fron I do question CTEs approach.
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Yeah. With the benefit of hindsight, it might not have been a bad idea to say “ok, this year we’re focusing on rebuilding the D” and throw everything into that. Then after most of the O skill guys graduate, he focuses on the O. The O of 2 years ago plus last year’s D could have won 8+ games. Then he’s got credibility and mostly new faces on O so they probably buy in better.
But, of course, that’s with the benefit of hindsight and I totally get the desire to change things to what you want. Win or lose with your best effort, not the last guy’s work.
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I agree. I also don’t think it’s case of changing for the sake of change. He kind of had to change things. The offense the Hoos ran in Bronco’s last year was a master child of Anai and basically no one else could scheme/run it. CTE isn’t versed in that and neither was the staff he brought in. Even if he wanted to keep that offense it would have been a watered down version of it, and while that may have been better than what we saw last year, it still wasn’t going to be what we saw 2 years ago.
Generally speaking suriing up the defense first is a good plan. However, that also does not mean the offense has to go into the toilet.
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I have no issue with Elliott coming in and starting to install his new offense right away. That’s fair and makes sense, even if it lowered our ceiling for last year. My issues were more that the new stuff we ran looked unimaginative and ineffective, the time management was at times baffling (a bad early red flag for any coaching staff), and you could see on the field that the players hadn’t seemingly bought in.
You can blame a solid chunk of that on the players, but it’s also literally part of a coaching staff’s job to get guys on the same page, get buy in, and improve execution as the year goes along. This year will be a much more fair chance to evaluate what the offense looks like when the players running it don’t seem to actively hate it (I hope), so will hopefully learn a lot more about what they’re trying to do.
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With some hindsight, I think the thing that might have been the best short term thing for the offense would have been keeping that QB coach guy whose name I can’t remember, and bumping him up to OC, and then keeping a lion’s share of offensive staff, too (we did retain 2J and Hagans). And essentially made the offense Anae’s offense minus Anae’s off-putting personality and Anae’s propensity to shoot himself in the dick at key moments against big rivals.
Would that have been better in the short term? Yeah, probably. But even in that scenario, a couple things:
- If the rumors are correct, and suggesting that Bronco fire a “meh” DC was an existential crisis leading to an emo departure and making up something about horses, then would keeping just the offensive staff (or most of it) really have been such a good idea for locker room cohesion?
- And if you’re keeping most of the offensive staff, then why are you hiring Tony Elliott? Who is an offensive guy. If they wanted to do that, just hire a caretaker, old hand type on an interim basis.
- Also, how good would we have been? And would that mediocre bowl have been worth essentially tying the hands of the new coach? (To be fair, I am always amazed at how much college fans love mediocre bowls in vaguely warm sounding cities, so maybe that would have been worth it).
And then you look at measures in between “promote whatshisname (Beck?)” and “do what we did”, and you run into the issue that Elliott probably wouldn’t have done a good job at running the in-between offense.
If anything, maybe Elliott’s mistake was not ripping the bandaid off even harder and faster. Retain fewer offensive guys and do more of the Pitino thing – where you’re just like: sorry, guys, I’m cleaning house. (But, yeah, that’s much harder to do with 100+ guys than 10+ guys in hoops).
I get that a lot of folks already think Elliott is a bad coach (heck, I’m closer to that than I was before the Pitt game), but I think the “Elliott should have kept Bronco’s offense, or more of it” theory is very under-baked.
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Beck
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I think Elliott philosophically thinks it’s too difficult to build an all around good team (i.e., the defense is always handicapped) if you run the Air Raid (and he’s not alone in that thinking). I think he probably did what he had to do. Maybe with some better early season luck and game management, the O wouldn’t have gotten so toxic and things would’ve worked out ok. I guess we’ll see now that it’s more of a true reset.
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Here’s the disconnect. For UVA’s football team, a mediocre bowl game isn’t some disappointing consolation prize like going to the NIT for the basketball team. A mediocre bowl game is a solid, probably above-average outcome to a season. In the last 40 seasons (going back to Welsh’s first year but skipping 2020), UVA has made it to 21 bowl games, ~7 of which were actually good ones. So, its in the top half of seasons going back a few decades (roughly a 48-85th percentile result).
And that 40 season stretch has been a relatively good one for UVA. In the 30 seasons between Ned McDonald taking over the team after the Korean War and Welch coming in, UVA had a total of 2 seasons above .500 and 3 seasons exactly at .500.
On top of that, a new coach’s first season is generally brutal. Al Groh going 5-7 was the best first season by a UVA coach since the end of WW2. A new head coach taking UVA to a mediocre bowl game in his first season would have been an unprecedented success. So, I absolutely get why a coach would want to clean house immediately, but if you get an opportunity to get UVA to a bowl game, you should take it.
Trading a mediocre bowl game for a, on average 3-9 or 4-8 result, in order to start the rebuild a year earlier, a process which, going by historical results, is only 50% likely in any given year to produce results as good as a mediocre bowl game (and maybe a 1/6 chance of producing something better) feels like a serious mistake.
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Yeah, I certainly get that perspective.
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Elliott’s scheme and play calling regardless of personnel was just plain bad at times. He had some routes that didn’t make football sense. Definitely not innovative.
Other side of the coin, you can’t ignore personnel. You don’t have to run what Bronco did but when you had the o-line that we did, maybe design plays to get the ball out of the QBs hands or avoid the power run plays?
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I’ve never understood that thinking. There are plenty of teams that can score in under 3 minutes and then their defense comes on the field and gets a 3-and-out.
If you have a good defense, shorter time of possession just means more possessions, not a shorter TOP over a full game.
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I’ll guess ill play the devils advocate here. I believe he should have kept part of the old offense in and slowly integrated his own. We are not built for smash mouth football and you should utilize the talents of the players you have. I don’t mean all the time. You slowly work your way in while still giving us a chance to win a couple more games. You also keep the team cohesion a little better .There were quita a few disgruntled players on that team by the end of the year which isn’t good for anyone. I believe if we win 2 or 3 more games the recruiting would be better. I quit watching after having 1st and goal at the 1.5 yard line and we ran the ball 4 straight times losing yardage on each play.I may be in the minority but it got frustrating
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I think the bigger argument for college teams is the practice/development/mindset angle. If your defense spends months never practicing against an offense that runs the ball, or drive blocks, or uses progressions/audibles, you’re limited in how good you can be unless you have top tier talent.
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