Dean Stephens

When Tony Elliott was four years old a truck hit him. Broken ribs, a punctured lung, a torn spleen. When he was nine, his family was driving to church outside Anaheim, California, and a car ran a red light. His mother Patricia did not survive that morning. Tony was not wearing a seat belt and he walked away without a scratch. Here is what he has said about it. "When you lose your mother on the way to church when you are nine years old, you don't understand." His parents had separated when he was five. His father went to prison. He got out, and about a month later he was locked up again. Tony and his sister Brandi went to an aunt and uncle in Atlanta who could not afford to keep both of them. So the two of them were split up. He ended up in Charleston, South Carolina, with his Aunt Blondale, who raised him alongside her own two sons. He got his sister back before his senior year of high school. He played at James Island High School. He had a few small school offers and an appointment to the Air Force Academy. He spent a year at the Academy prep school and left. He has said he went for the wrong reasons. So he bagged groceries at Publix. He worked construction for 8 dollars an hour, twelve hour shifts. Then he applied to three colleges. Georgia, South Carolina and Clemson. Clemson took him with no conditions. He walked on to the football team. As a freshman he broke his arm against Georgia Tech and missed five games. He earned a scholarship anyway. He graduated with an industrial engineering degree and a 3.55. He became a captain of the Clemson Tigers. As a senior he caught 23 passes. Then he went and got a real job as an engineer at Michelin. And he quit it. He volunteered at a high school, then went and coached receivers at South Carolina State, then at Furman. Then Dabo Swinney called him about the Clemson running backs job. Years before that, at a coaching clinic, Elliott had driven Swinney out to the intersection in Anaheim where his mother was lost. That intersection is on Sycamore Street. Swinney had him over to the house for homemade chili and offered him the job right there. Swinney's house is on Sycamore Street. He coached at Clemson for a decade. Two national championships. In 2017 they handed him the Broyles Award, which goes to the best assistant coach in the country. Then Virginia hired him. In his first three seasons the Virginia Cavaliers won 11 games total. Last season they won 11 in a single year. The most in the history of the school, and the first double digit season there since 1989. They made him the ACC Coach of the Year. Virginia is 3 and 2 right now and just got beat 38 to 7 at Florida State. Nothing is fixed and nobody is pretending it is. But tonight is the 101st Homecoming game at Scott Stadium, against Syracuse. And the man standing on that sideline used to bag groceries for a living.