While the Virginia football team’s 2023 season starts with arguably the hardest game of the season, there are definitely a few games down the line where the Cavaliers could have a real shot. Those opportunities appear limited based on preseason projections, so coach Tony Elliott and the Hoos will have to be sure to not let those games get away from them.

Throughout the summer, we took a team by team look at UVA’s schedule. Now, let’s look at rankings for all of the 2023 opponents.

To rank the opponents for this season, I decided to create four tiers. Tier one is for teams that I believe Virginia has little to no shot of beating. In tier two are teams that are better than UVA on paper and will be expected to win, but the Wahoos can steal a win if they play extremely well or the opponent has an off day. Tier three is for true 50/50 opponents. Finally, tier four has opponents Virginia should have no issue beating.

Tier One

1. Tennessee. The Volunteers will easily be the toughest team Virginia plays all season. Coming off an impressive 2022 in which Tennessee had the best offense in the country, coach Josh Heupel and his staff are looking to make another push to compete for an SEC title. This team likely is just going to overpower Virginia. UT does a great job of valuing the football (11 turnovers last season tied for 9th fewest nationally), so Virginia will have to do an excellent job of maintaining long drives if it hopes to stick around until the later parts of the game.

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