After notching a fifth straight victory on Saturday with a 49-14 rout over Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, 10 th -ranked Clemson will now turn its attention to the upcoming matchup vs. Virginia – and former longtime Clemson assistant coach Tony Elliott.
UVA (4-2, 2-1 ACC) won four of its first five games this season before coming up short against Louisville at home on Saturday, 24-20.
Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney had a message for Tiger fans ahead of next Saturday’s contest against Elliott and the Cavaliers at Death Valley (12 p.m., ACC Network).
“We’ve got to have a great, great week,” Swinney said during his postgame press conference following the win at Wake. “Virginia’s having a heck of a year. Tony, what a job he’s done. He’ll have them guys ready – you best believe he’ll have them ready. So, we’ll have a huge battle. We’re going to need our fans next week. We’re going to need our crowd to show up. We need to have that place rocking at noon – rocking at 10 a.m.”
Now in his third season as Virginia’s head coach, Elliott was a wide receiver at Clemson from 1999-2003 and was a team captain of the 2003 squad for which Swinney served as Elliott’s position coach in Swinney’s first year at Clemson.
Elliott later served 11 years as an assistant coach at Clemson from 2011-21, helping the Tigers to a 130-21 record in his tenure.
Clemson is 27-22-2 all-time against opposing head coaches who were previously Clemson head coaches or assistants. Next Saturday’s game will be Clemson’s first such contest since defeating former Clemson graduate assistant Gene Chizik’s Auburn squad in the 2012 season opener.
Swinney spoke about the importance of the upcoming game for his team, as the Tigers (5-1, 4-0 ACC) get set to kick off the “third quarter” of the 2024 regular season.
“There’s four parts of our journey that we break the year down in, and there’s also four quarters in your season,” Swinney said. “You get 12 games. This was the end of the second quarter for us, kind of the ‘middle eight.’ Now we start the third quarter this week, and we end with what we call the ‘primetime phase’ of our season. It’s our last game in October coming up this week.”
Added Swinney: “This is the biggest game of the year for us coming up. Again, an opportunity to really kick off the third quarter and keep momentum and stay in control of our destiny. They remember November, right, so we’ve got a chance to go into November where we hoped to be. But it’s all about how we play this week and just continuing to build. But I think our team took a step forward today.”
–Clemson Athletic Communications contributed to this story
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