I’ve always found HooBear to be a poster that offered meaningful and relevant posts, so I decided to start the final grades article with this post:

“UVA has 3 major problems: 1) small P5 school, so not much potential revenue for TV contracts and potential conference realignment; 2) lukewarm fanbase except in great years – VT, South Carolina, and NCSU aren’t really that much better programs, and their fans are solid to insane even in the bad years; and 3) we don’t have a strong enough donor base (or enough alums for even a strong small dollar fund) to create a competitive NIL.

Some or all of those have to change if we’re going to be competitive. Otherwise, it really doesn’t matter who the coach is. The team played hard almost all year and could easily have been 6-6, so it’s not all on Tony [Elliott] or the coordinators (although they clearly were too timid the first half of the season). But that feels like a ceiling under any coach unless/until the fundamentals improve.

And those fundamentals need to change in the next 5-10 years or we’ll really be on the outside looking in as we move towards a super 28, super 40, super 56, or whatever the final major college football structure looks like.”

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