Andrea AdelsonNov 13, 2025, 07:00 AM ETClose ACC reporter. Joined ESPN.com in 2010. Graduate of the University of Florida.Follow on X
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — When Tony Elliott walked into his first team meeting at Virginia in late 2021, he promised to develop the model program, one built on excellence in the classroom and on the field. He did it while looking at a representation of all he and his team would have to overcome: His players were sitting on white plastic folding chairs inside the indoor practice facility, because its outdated football building did not have a meeting room big enough to fit everyone.
Players like Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry. Players like Devin Chandler, who transferred in from Wisconsin.
Today, everything Elliott spelled out in those early days is on full display. No. 19 Virginia (8-2) is off to its best start since 1990. Despite losing to Wake Forest last week after quarterback Chandler Morris was knocked out of the game, the Cavaliers are still in the mix in the ACC championship race. They face a must-win game Saturday against Duke (3:30 p.m. ET, ESPN2) and are hopeful Morris will be able to play.
A new $80 million, 93,000-square foot football operations center opened last year, with spacious team meeting rooms and a large dining room featuring a chef who worked at a Michelin-rated restaurant in London. The 14,000-square foot weight room is nearly as large as the old 15,000-square foot facility.
In a recent sit-down interview with ESPN, Elliott acknowledged for the first time that he seriously considered retiring after their deaths, unwilling to accept burying three young men, unsure how to lift his team when he had no idea how to lift himself.
“There were days that I wanted to be like, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ I don’t have to do it,” he says now.
Three years after losing Chandler, Davis and Perry, Elliott is well on his way to delivering on the promises he made.
“It’s a beautiful thing to watch, and it is inspirational,” Virginia athletic director Carla Williams said. “I’m inspired to see how they have shown up every day since the tragedy. It’s very rewarding to see the success, and it just adds to the determination to see it through.”
AT THE TEAM’S first meeting in January, Elliott had all the new players go around the room, introduce themselves and explain why they chose Virginia. When it was Morris’ turn, he got up and bluntly said, “I came here to win a conference championship.”
“That’s the type of leader you want, and that’s when the majority of the room realized if we have a leader who’s that vocal, it’s time to do our part,” said senior kicker Will Bettridge, who has been with the program since 2022.
A few weeks later, Morris reiterated that sentiment in his first interview with reporters at Virginia. “I didn’t come all the way to Virginia as a Texas boy to win five, six games,” Morris said. “I want to win the conference championship.”
Reflecting on those comments, Morris told ESPN: “Talking to everyone affiliated with the program, you saw buy-in, a hungry program, everyone wanting to get this thing turned around. I knew there was a lot of support there, and we’d be able to go out and get the playmakers and people that we needed.”
Elliott and his players had no problem with Morris being so bold in the media. They all agreed with him.
Revenue sharing opened up a new world for Virginia. With athletic departments able to pay student athletes up to $20.5 million, Williams and Elliott set out to convince donors how important it was for Virginia to play the game its blue-blood football counterparts would be playing. The results soon followed.
Virginia made its strongest portal push under Elliott in the December 2024 window, armed with a large financial investment that it did not have previously, thanks in large part to a multimillion-dollar transformative gift from an anonymous donor. The school called the donation “the largest one-time cash contribution and the largest non-capital gift to Virginia football in program history.”
That allowed the Cavaliers to sign Morris and 16 other players, bolstering talent and depth at quarterback, receiver, defensive back and the offensive and defensive lines. Williams said Virginia was strategic in its build toward this moment: First the football operations center, then support for building the roster and support staff.
“Fortunately, we had several key donors who believe in the same things we believe in,” Williams said. “They believe in the way that we try to do things. They believe in long-term, sustainable success … the resources are massive. The folks who have been central to supporting the program did that before they saw the results, and that’s important.”
Though Elliott had posted three losing records in three seasons at Virginia, everybody inside the building knew that the foundation of the program was being reinforced. The future could really be different. Across the country, programs such as Indiana and Vanderbilt were holding their own against the blue bloods.
“How did the football schools become football schools?” Elliott asks. “They made a decision, and then people bought in, and they created a culture. That’s really what it takes. Virginia has everything that it needs.”
TONY ELLIOTT’S MOTHER died in a car accident when he was just 9. He was riding in a van with her, his sister, stepbrother and stepfather when it hit another car and flipped over. Tony, his sister, stepbrother and stepfather survived. He found his pregnant mother motionless next to the van in a pool of blood. Elliott compartmentalized what happened. He was still just a kid. He didn’t fully comprehend that he would never see his mom again.
Elliott eventually became one of the best assistants in the nation as the co-offensive coordinator and playcaller at Clemson, helping the Tigers win national titles in 2016 and 2018.
Then, 11 months into the job, Davis, Chandler and Perry were killed. Running back Mike Hollins was shot trying to help his teammates and was hospitalized. This time, Elliott had no choice but to confront the tragedy. It took decades for him to fully grasp losing his mother, which he described as “a gift and a curse,” in an interview with ESPN in 2015.
“I was hearing a lot of, ‘Everything you went through in your past, dealing with your mom and the adversity of your childhood, this is why you’re here,” Elliott said. “I didn’t want to hear that in the moment. That was 30 years ago. I’ve already done what I needed to do with that. I’m on the other side.
“I would get upset at times when people would say that, because it’s not what I wanted to hear. I want to be like everybody else. I wanted to hear the easy thing, like, ‘Hey, it’s not your fight. You don’t have to do this. Go start over. Go do something different.'”
“I just kept thinking, ‘I can’t invest in these young men and visualize what their lives could be like when they’re 30 years old, and then, boom, they’re gone. It’s too hard,” Elliott said. “Even in those moments when you’ve got to speak at those funerals, you don’t know what to say, and now you’re doing it again.
“It was not necessarily running from the situation as much as, ‘I just don’t know if I can do this anymore.'”
Virginia canceled its final two regular-season games in 2022. Players began to hit the transfer portal. But others opted to stay, including Bettridge, offensive linemen Noah Josey, Jack Witmer and McKale Boley and defensive tackle Jahmeer Carter — all starters today. In all, 24 players on the 2022 team remain a part of the program.
“A lot of guys maybe thought that we were broken, and thought that it was going to affect us, but it actually brought us together, and it made us even stronger,” Bettridge said. “I want to be known as someone who carried that legacy, and not someone who jumped ship when things got hard. Because hard times don’t last, but strong people do.”
The months passed, and Elliott tried to build a roster, while figuring out his own path forward. Soon, it would be time to return to practice, to establish a new normal. That first day back on the field was hard. But he got the confirmation he needed as he watched his players return to football for the first time in four months when spring practice started the following March.
“If God asked us on the front end: This is what you’re walking into. Do you still want to go through that door? Nobody would sign up for that,” Elliott says. “So, God has to put you in that situation.
“I did choose to come here. When we pray for things, we’ve got to take everything that comes with it, and that’s when I got it. When we got back on the grass, that’s really when it hit me like, ‘All right, this is right where you’re supposed to be.’ Now, get out of your feelings and go focus on what you need to do for everybody else.”
Nor was there shame in admitting the way he approached his job in Year 1 was simply not going to work.
“When I first came in, young, overzealous, not understanding the job, just trying to do everything so fast, and not really recognizing where everybody else was at, just trying to tell everybody to come meet me where I am,” Elliott said. “I now meet them where they are, and say, ‘Let’s elevate together.'”
ELLIOTT HAD A quote from Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh placed on the wall in the weight room of the new football facility:
Champions behave like champions before they’re champions; they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.
At Clemson, Elliott saw a program transform from an underachiever to a perennial national title contender. But he and Williams both knew the fix at Virginia would not be quick; the Cavaliers hadn’t won a conference title since 1995.
Elliott refused to run players off. Anybody on scholarship who has wanted to stay with the program has always been allowed to stay.
“When you see people who care deeply showing up every day, when everything around them is pushing them to not show up, for me — that requires patience,” she said. “I understand how difficult it is to focus on a game when you’re traumatized by tragedy.”