As the game clock expired Saturday evening in Charlottesville, I willed myself not to join the masses publicly whining about the result of the game, or to run around with proverbial pitchforks in the aftermath. Plenty of others were doing it, and I may have ‘liked’ or retweeted a couple of frustrated voices (including those of former players, whose opinions may carry additional legitimacy). But I didn’t formally join the chorus myself. I knew the balance of emotion and rationality wasn’t right at the time.

So I told myself to take a day at least before putting digital pen to paper. It helps that I no longer post on any public message boards, of course, but it was helpful to step back from Twitter as well. I certainly monitored the discourse, including some very well attended and vocal beef sessions in Twitter Spaces run by prominent football alums and superfans.

But I stayed more introspective, and figured that after the dust settled I’d use the hoops exam break, or maybe the holiday downtime, to write a nice end-of-season recap of my feelings. Talk about resetting expectations for Bronco’s tenure, discuss some possible tweaks needed to scheme or recruiting, maybe talk about weaknesses on the staff. You know, normal offseason stuff.

Then Thursday afternoon came, and all that went out the window.

Look, I’ve spent this season firmly on the Fire Howell train. In 2018 we were 3rd in the ACC in total defense (yards allowed per game). That dropped to 5th in 2019 (and even that suffered badly second half of the season after Bryce Hall’s career ended). We were 10th last year and 13th this year, better only that *ugh* Duke. That trajectory applies to the scoring defense (points allowed per game) as well, from 3rd to 6th to 9th to 12th over the 2018-2021 span. This is from a staff that largely prides itself on its defensive bona fides, Bronco being a former DC himself.

I entered this week preparing to use this space to address Howell’s tenure as our defensive coordinator. If Bronco was the architect of the defense, Howell was certainly the foreman, the man in charge of building out the vision. A four-straight-years decline in the defense is plenty of year-over-year evidence that the defensive staff just wasn’t up to the task of winning us games. Maybe occasionally it was up to the task of keeping us in games enough so that the Perkins- or Armstrong-led offenses could win them. But the overall trend was more than just concerning, it had reached the point of being inexcusable.

Do I have quibbles with the offense and special teams? Sure! Anae used the RBs way too little ever since Jordan Ellis graduated (the trio of Hollins/Darrington/Taulapapa was much better than they were ever allowed to consistently demonstrate), and his love of gadget plays was beyond maddening, “too smart by half” as one Twitter poster put it. And honestly I just got the feeling that Special Teams wasn’t practiced all that much this year; the execution on blocks and coverage was poor (ugh the onside kicks at the end of the GT game), and the returners looked like they were just told to fair catch everything so that we wouldn’t have to ever practice kick/punt return formations.

But let’s be honest, if the defense is even league-average, we win a couple more games this year with the offense we had. Look at the All-ACC team selections, where UVA had seven offensive players selected vs only one defender (Nick Jackson) to make the cut.

So Fire Howell? Yes, or at least maybe. But not Fire Bronco. The culture is by and large good, the trajectory better than it has been in the coaching tenures prior, and the offense in great shape. I didn’t want to burn the program to the ground, just fix the things that need fixing, and change the staff as required in surgical ways.

Anyways, that’s what I was prepared to talk about coming into the offseason. “Where do we go from here?” kind of stuff, and of course was waiting for a little more fidelity about what churn (a part of any offseason at any program) we saw with players and staff.

But Bronco gone? That was beyond anything I was prepared to tackle.

So of course, we’re still in a place of “where do we go from here?”, but  now in a much different way.

And we’ll talk about that in time, though it’ll be fairly limited. Honestly I personally hate talking about coaching searches, for two reasons. One, I have zero clue what’s happening behind the scenes, nor does anyone else posting online, as these things are always shrouded in secrecy (case in point, no one, not even respected beat writers, saw either Bronco or Bennett coming way back when). Two, I have no idea which of the candidates would be good or not; predicting which coaching hires will work out at any school is always a fool’s errand, and it’s something again even the most experienced pundits continually get wrong.

Let’s start by reflecting on the trajectory of the Bronco Mendenhall era.

The bottom line is that this isn’t a black-and-white situation. His tenure was neither perfect nor terrible. His departure is neither a great opportunity nor the sky falling. Successes and failure were neither all to his credit or fault, nor totally to others credit or blame. It’s a multi-million-dollar operation that stretched out over six years, whose roots go back decades prior, and one that had peaks and valleys alike. It’s a complicated legacy and it’s fair and important to admit that up front.

About those roots. Look, Bronco walked into a shit situation. The program had had losing seasons in 7 of the 8 years prior to his arrival. If my math is right we’d beaten VT just once in the prior 17 seasons, losing 12 in a row. The talent cupboard was bare. The facilities were abysmal (more on this coming). The fan base and the donor base were apathetic. The peak Welsh years were so long ago that you’ve now had nearly a generation of students come through for whom the football games stopped being a core part of the University experience, meaning they’re out in the workforce, out in adulthood now not prioritizing game attendance or VAF giving for football the way those who graduated in the Welsh era do.

UVA of course is also hampered by its institutional standards, standards that by and large we love but at the same time are forced to admit handicaps our ceiling. Our academic requirements, both for admissions and during their UVA tenures, are about as real as they get in P5. We don’t throw around impermissible benefits, nor were we going to emphatically swim in the grey area of NIL rights. Donors at UVA give copiously to the academic mission first and foremost, and when they do give to athletics are just as likely to open their checkbooks for their favorite Olympic sports as they are for the flagship football team.

Bronco was hired in December 2015, when the basketball team was already entrenched in a groove of dominance under a now-ascendant Tony Bennett and Brian O’Connor had just won the College World Series. In some ways this took the pressure off Bronco, but in many other ways it hindered him because the fans and donors had long since abandoned football to enjoy the more successful programs.

Bronco started by telling UVA fans before the season “don’t go making plans during bowl season” before promptly losing to FCS Richmond and going 2-10 on the year. Any initial goodwill he had, any “new car smell” excitement promptly evaporated, and fans went back to focusing on being a basketball school.

We started to see progress the following year, predominantly in a blowout win over then-powerhouse Boise State, and became bowl eligible for the first time since 2011. But the season ended with a 10-0 loss to the Hokies at Scott Stadium and the most uninspired blowout loss to Navy in the Military Bowl, the team looking like it hadn’t practiced at all for the opponent nor had any interest playing in a cold, wet, anonymous bowl game.

The Bryce Perkins era took us to heights we hadn’t seen since the peak Welsh era (pre-expansion). We split with Tech those two years, home team winning each, won 17 games total, crushed South Carolina in the Belk Bowl before winning the Coastal the following year and playing well in an Orange Bowl loss to Florida. We were riding high.

So what happened between now and then?

First, COVID. The pandemic hit that following spring before the team could even convene for spring practices. Any momentum was lost as Bronco elected to take virus protocols as strict as anyone in a P5 conference. I’m not here to relitigate those; 2020 was a weird time and in the moment everyone was making the best choices they could, and Bronco’s precaution came from a place of genuine concern for his players and staff. It didn’t help that fans couldn’t attend games, meaning the team couldn’t capitalize on the Orange Bowl momentum with increased ticket sales.

It was an uneven and forgettable 5-5 season. Games were canceled and rescheduled throughout the year. Players were miserable. The season ended when we lost to Tech (badly) and the players voted to skip a bowl so they could end their COVID lockdown and spend Christmas with their families.

This year had the opportunity for a major bounce-back. The offense was elite under Brennan Armstrong in his second year as a starter, an elite cadre of skill position weapons was at his disposal, and he played behind a veteran offensive line. But the defense was a sieve, giving up 59 points at UNC, 37 to Wake, 40 to GT, 66 to BYU, and 48 to Pitt. The offense, though elite, could only do so much. I don’t feel motivated to rehash the VT loss; we all know how it was bungled.

So how to judge his tenure?

Bronco Mendenhall ended his six years with an overall record of 36-38 (49%), 22-27 (45%) in the ACC, with four bowl trips (and likely a fifth without COVID), but a 1-5 record against VT.

His predecessor, Mike London, spent six years here as well. Inheriting a much healthier program overall (fan support, facilities relative to peers, recruiting cachet), London only managed to go 27-46 overall (37%), 14-34 (29%) in ACC play, making just one bowl, and go 0-6 against VT.

So will we be building any statues to Bronco for his relatively .500 tenure? No. But you’re kidding yourself if you think he didn’t at least elevate the program relative to where he inherited it.

And the players were incredible representatives of the university. We brought in true student athletes who embraced the University’s culture, gave back to the community, took their academics seriously, and rarely gave us any off-the-field headaches. The few that did cause a problem were promptly shown the door; no VT-level acceptance of criminals on the team.

Some corners never got turned, however. And before I enumerate them, I want to say I’m not giving him blame for anything just yet. We’ll get to blame in a minute.

The facilities upgrades were never completed. The George Welsh III Indoor Practice Facility got built, and that was massive. But the McCue Center, where the football team trains and the staff operates out of, is hot garbage. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s the worst football ops building in the ACC by a wide margin, and staff and recruits alike saw this and got turned off. We arguably recruited better in 2020 when everything was virtual because prospects never had to actually realize the facilities situation they were walking into; once campus visits started again this past summer, McCue was an incredible liability.

The Tech losses continued to mount. The fans didn’t recapture their love of the game in person like it was 20 years ago. The donor money didn’t materialize, even after the Orange Bowl. Recruiting plateaued, and even regressed in-state where the exodus of commonwealth talent is noted nationwide. Few recruiting in-roads were established locally/regionally, and the staff continually had to beat the bush on the west coast, along the Gulf Coast, and through the LDS/Poly-pipeline to fill out our classes.

I’m not going to go in depth on the nationwide-vs-local recruiting debate. I don’t have the energy. But recruiting nationally takes a ton more energy, a lot more ground to cover, more contacts to maintain, more time on the road, and ends up with players less tied to the school when things get tough. It’s no surprise that our first 2022 pledge to decommit was one out of Houston.

So what’s the balance?

The conclusion I’d been drawing before the Thursday news was that Bronco had basically plateaued at UVA. He was a 6-7 win a season guy, maybe a bonus win in the bowl. How you feel about that basically depends on where your expectations lie as a UVA fan. Do you look at our post-Welsh history along with our structural hurdles and say “6-7 wins a year is what I can realistically expect,” and be happy with that? If so, there’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe it means you’ve got good perspective. But clearly you also might not be okay stopping there.

Would that record keep you happy if the VT series had ended more evenly (not that we’re going to dominate, but even just going 50% against them)? Do you see what Dave Clawson is doing at similarly handicapped Wake Forest and say “why not us?”

I’m not going to say that any of these positions are right or wrong. There’s no specific level of “correct” fandom. Your hopes and expectations for the program are your own, and the reason Bronco Mendenhall gets paid millions of dollars a year (and his assistants most all make drool-worthy 6-figure salaries as well) is because sports fans are irrational about their love of their college sports teams.

There are some things that just aren’t Bronco’s fault. The guy took us to the ACCCG and the Orange Bowl for the first time ever, and even then the donors didn’t open their checkbooks to build the new football ops center. He couldn’t get blood from a stone.

Similarly, a West Coast guy with a predominantly West Coast staff was never going to have an easy go connecting with the local grassroots high school communities when UVA’s rivals have staffs full of guys with decades of relationships locally and regionally.

So if you’re of the mind to lay blame, make sure Craig Littlepage gets some. Craig spent 16 years running the football program into the ground. He mismanaged the Groh tenure, then let Jon Oliver mismanage the London tenure. He never led the way to get football facilities upgraded despite Groh telling him (and anyone else that would listen) point blank that UVA was falling behind in the facilities race even 15 years ago! And when it came time to replace London, he chose that West Coast staff that anyone could see was going to struggle mightily recruiting the Mid-Atlantic. In hiring Bronco, Craig promised him the new football ops center that then never came.

Did fans treat Bronco unfairly?

There are accusations flying in the wake of Bronco’s resignation that we treated him unfairly. That UVA as it stands today has a hard cap of success that Bronco got this program to reach, and it’s spoiled to complain that it hasn’t performed better.

I want to have it both ways here. First, yes, it’s unfair to blame Bronco for a lot of stuff that’s purely the result of institutional limitations. Bronco can’t make facilities be better, and in turn can’t make recruits want to come here. Bronco can’t force alums to care, to attend, or to donate. And if all you’re doing is looking at the 6-6 record and the VT game results and not recognizing the foundational issues at play here, you’re doing a disservice to this staff.

That’s not to say there aren’t fair critiques. Anae’s play calling. The poorly executed 3-3-5 defense, and even poorer tackling technique. The clear de-emphasizing of special teams this season. All fair game.

But the other side of the coin I want to address here, to those beating the “you’re burdening Bronco with unfair expectations” drum the loudest, is this. What do you expect from Big Boy P5 football?

Those voices want UVA fans to be good little soldiers. To come out and fill Scott Stadium every Saturday even when UVA loses more than it wins, and to give money without complaint. And, well, that’s not how it works. “Fans” is short for “fanatics” for a reason. The reason so many TV networks pay billions to broadcast P5 football every week, the reason we spend millions collectively on gear and tickets, the reason we devote countless hours going to games and reading/tweeting about our teams online, etc., is because we love our team and want to see that team win a lot of games.

“Fair weather fans!” they’ll accuse. And, well, yeah. There’s a pretty direct correlation across all levels of all sports between historical and recent success and fan support. JPJ sells out for a reason, ya know.

And there’s a sizable portion of our fan base that remembers the highs of the Welsh and even the early Groh seasons. That remembers being ranked annually and beating our rivals regularly and being a destination for top, local recruits. And they want desperately for those things to be true again. Shouldn’t that be a good thing? Isn’t that better than them just giving up and tuning out entirely, or tepidly accepting perpetual mediocrity?

In a perfect world, would they handle their frustrations better? Would they make sure the BOV and donors and AD office and HS recruiting handlers and everyone else who had a hand in handicapping UVA’s program long before Bronco got involved hear about their gripes? Yes and yes. But fair or not, Bronco as part of being the head coach is THE figurehead. Like, that’s an unwritten but foundational aspect of his job description. He gets all the credit when we win and all the blame when we lose, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s why he’s far and away the highest-paid person associated with the program, earning more money in a year than most of these fans will see in a lifetime. He’s a big boy who’s been a head coach for a long time; he knows how this works.

He can handle it.

And if he can’t, if the “fire” of the upset fans is too hot for him? Then he’s in the wrong position in the wrong profession, and he might as well get out of the kitchen. I don’t make the rules of Big Boy College Football, but I’m not going to pretend they don’t exist either. This pressure cooker is the trade-off he accepted for making more money than his family will ever know what to do with.

So I’m not condoning per se those who have piled onto Bronco in the wake of the VT loss. But I’m not going to be naive about it either.

So what happened this week?

A lot of people want to speculate that the cause of Bronco’s sudden retirement had to do with Carla Williams or other members of the administration “forcing” Bronco to make staff changes with the defense, and Bronco resigning in protest / solidarity with “his guys” from BYU.

That’s horseshit.

I talked to a reliable source who’d talked directly with multiple members of the coaching staff, and Bronco didn’t need Carla to tell him changes were needed to fix the defense. He knew, and he was in the process of making those changes.

Only, ultimately, he didn’t. His decision to retire seems to be purely his own. His burnout very real. His heart was actually just out of it.

Look at it this way. He spent a decade as the head man at BYU where (1) he had an established recruiting base and pipeline, (2) the fans were passionate and dedicated year after year, (3) the donors weren’t stingy, and (4) he won a lot of games.

He knew coming to Charlottesville it wasn’t going to be a gimme. The team was bad, the fan base and donors were disengaged, and it was going to take a couple years to get things turned around.

But, as mentioned, he did turn some things around, he made the ACCCG and Orange Bowl, and then… relative crickets. COVID hit at just the wrong time, of course, and sapped a lot of his energy at that time. But worse than that, winning didn’t cure all. The football ops center he was promised still didn’t get funded and was even de-scoped in the Master Plan. The recruits spurned UVA for both our regional rivals (VT, UNC, Wake) and our national academic rivals (Northwestern, Stanford, Cal, etc.). And making matters worse, the team struggled to back-to-back .500 seasons, a backslide he’d never experienced at BYU.

Things he assumed would materialize after 2019’s success (the recruits, the fan support, the capital projects, the sustained winning culture) eluded the program. And, purely speculating now, that frustrated him, and he himself realized he’d maxed out at UVA. He knew he was going to need to change the defensive staff to inject fresh energy into the program, but at the same time he also knew it was going to make little difference to the long-term program trajectory.

The structural issues are still there, the facilities will still be terrible and scaring away recruits for years to come. Bronco had high expectations of performance based upon his exacting nature and his long-term success in Provo, and it disheartened him when he finally realized that at UVA those expectations weren’t going to be met, not soon anyways, maybe not ever. You have to also wonder if he wasn’t a fan of NIL changing the nature of recruiting and player attitudes, but again, that’s speculation.

He was probably going to retire in a year or a few anyways. His contract actually had an “out” clause starting next offseason, and he didn’t want to be a Saban-type coaching into his Social Security years. So at the end of the day, after thinking through the needs to revamp the program and ultimately realizing it was only going to make but so much difference in the grand scheme of things, maybe he just said it was best if someone else took it on, someone more motivated and committed to the cause.

Back to the ‘What Now?’ question.

We wish Bronco well because we’re classy, and we buckle up for a rocky short term with optimism for a brighter long term.

That football ops center that was promised to Bronco six years ago? Still nothing but a promise to whomever Carla eventually offers the job. Only now McCue has six additional years of wear and tear, more staff squeezed into tighter spaces therein (or in trailers), and newer and shinier facilities at our rivals’ campuses.

Bronco’s leaving the program in a better state than he found it in many respects. The discipline culture is much improved, as is the relationship with admissions and the university’s academic side. Fans are more accustomed to winning, an expectation of making bowl games annually reestablished.

There’s also the fact he’s leaving without an expensive buyout, which does free up the AD to hire a new coach and staff with fewer salary limitations.

But in other ways, the new coach still has a steep climb ahead of him. The recruiting will continue to struggle barring someone with a staff full of incredible salesmen or established relationships, and without the LDS pipeline to fall back on. The 2022 class is going to fall apart, and even the existing roster is going to have to be fought for hard to keep talent from transferring out.

It’s premature to project just what the 2022 season will look like, much less give long-term predictions, until we see what staff gets hired, how well they hold the roster together, and even then, they’ll deserve a year or more to get on track before we even think about judging them.

For now, let’s just focus on how we should feel.

My suggestion: Do your best to accept that this is happening whether you like it or not. This is beyond less-than-ideal timing. But the fact that it’s a shit situation doesn’t change the fact that it’s real and that we’re going to go through it together regardless.

In life, in general, it’s always healthiest to try and take the least jaded view possible. So thanks, Bronco and staff, for your embrace of UVA and your efforts to do the best you could as a stranger in a strange land. You didn’t ask for the challenges placed before you, but instead you chose to embrace them and *ahem* run into that wind. It didn’t always work out, but often it did, and hopefully the fan base is able to appreciate the highs you took us to most of all.

Carla, good luck in the hiring process. You inherited Bronco from Craig, so this tenure only minimally reflects on you. Even the ops center I largely give you a pass on because, coming from UGA, you couldn’t fathom just how little UVA’s big donors care about football. But I think you realize it now and are making steady progress, even if slower than we’d maybe prefer. You’re doing what realistically can be done. But this hire will be your defining moment. Maybe that’s not fair, given the abrupt timing of it all. But as I mentioned above in the “is Bronco being treated unfairly” section, getting held publicly accountable for these results is part of the trade-off for your seven-figure salary. Of course, we want you to fire Tina Thompson ASAP as well and fix women’s basketball, but obviously getting the football hire right is going to end up the biggest task of your career to date. Godspeed on that.

To the fans, be patient. All we can do now is wait, support the players, and give our best to whoever the new coach is, whether it’s someone familiar or not. We’re years away from knowing how this all turns out, so hang in there. And chip in to the ops center while you’re at it, if you can. We’ll go through this grind together, and until then, we’ve got Tony Bennett and our wide cadre of title-winning Olympic and non-revenue sports to fall back on until football again finds its footing.

Being a UVA football fan hasn’t been easy for decades. Why should that change now? But we’ve made it this far. Let’s go a little further together as well.

Wahoowa!