Bronco steps down at Virginia; what's his legacy look like?

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After Virginia bungled its way to another loss against Virginia Tech last weekend, with the Wahoos damaging their chances of winning with some dumb mistakes and questionable coaching, I was not ready to discuss the result. A fourth straight defeat to close the regular season to make the Cavaliers 6-6 after a 6-2 start -- and losing that way to the dreaded Hokies -- was just too much to stomach.

I was upset at coach Bronco Mendenhall but not calling for his head. I did want some changes to be made to his coaching staff going into 2022, mostly on the defensive side of the ball, but I also wanted some accountability for foolish offensive play calling when, you know, we actually had a fantastic offense when we just ran normal plays and didn't call for lateral passes to offensive linemen with the game on the line. But I wasn't being rash and hoping to run him out of town. I thought the program was still on fairly solid ground, a topic I covered two games ago before the team traveled to Pittsburgh.

Just two years ago, Mendenhall's Wahoos beat the Hokies, won the Coastal Division, and went to the Orange Bowl, where the 'Hoos played pretty well in a loss to Florida. Virginia became bowl eligible this year for the fifth straight season, a feat not accomplished since the days of George Welsh. I knew Mendenhall wasn't going anywhere. I just wanted him to make some tweaks and adjustments to his staff and figure out what the heck was wrong with the defensive scheme, though I did acknowledge his job could be in jeopardy at the end of 2022 if things deteriorated enough.

I was thinking about what if anything to write as Thursday morning rolled around. It probably would've been a mix of a brief rehash of the Tech loss combined with thoughts on the season as a whole, something to pass the time while we waited for the bowl invitation to come.

And then things changed quickly around 5 p.m. Thursday. Virginia announced Mendenhall was resigning as the Cavaliers' coach. I got a bit more than I bargained for regarding staff changes, and a select few fans may have gotten what they wanted, but I wonder if they'll regret it in the long run.


Bronco Mendenhall is 36-38 in six seasons at Virginia with one game to go, as he said he would stay on to coach the team in the Fenway Bowl against SMU at the end of December. 

At first, I was shocked. The way I first found out was from a friend's text of a screenshot from a reporter's tweet. I thought it was a joke, perhaps a tweet from an account that is a parody of a real person or account. And then it popped up on my phone as an alert from the UVa sports app. It was official.

My initial thought was athletics director Carla Williams asked Mendenhall to make some changes, and he refused. As the season wore on, I began to wonder if it would be difficult for Mendenhall to fire some of his friends when it became more obvious he may need to. But this theory that Williams pressured Mendenhall didn't seem quite right once more details came to light. It became known that Mendenhall was going to stay on to coach in the bowl game. So I thought the relationship between Williams and Mendenhall must not have ended that poorly if he was going to do that. That is something you also have to appreciate about Mendenhall in this day and age of college football. He loves his players and wasn't going to abandon them. He is at least going to see this thing through the end of 2021. He did the same at BYU when he left for Virginia: He coached the Cougars in their bowl game in 2015 after it was announced he took the job at UVa. This approach is a far cry from the one used by Brian Kelly, who accepted the LSU job without telling anyone, and his team and players had to find out from the news. He did eventually meet with them, but still, you get the idea. He doesn't have the character of Mendenhall. And Kelly did this with the Fighting Irish having an outside shot to get into the College Football Playoff.

Watching him talk at his news conference, which took place at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, it all started to kind of make sense. Mendenhall, 55, just didn't look quite as engaged on the sideline this season. He looked tired and worn down. I saw other people say stuff like that on message boards and social media, and you don't really want to put much stock into it, but it meant I wasn't the only one noticing something different about him.

It sounded like his full heart just wasn't in the job anymore. So the more likely scenario seems to be that he knew he needed to make changes, and for whatever reason, he just didn't want to do it. Perhaps the thought of firing some friends didn't help, but he was exhausted and burnt out. He said the initial thought of walking away popped into his head the day after the Tech loss. He tried to ignore it and set out one path (I assume he meant making the necessary changes to the staff) but ended up circling back to his original thought Thursday, coming to the realization he was ready to take a break from college football and resign. 

He said he wanted to spend more time with his family and just see what was next in life and how he could make a positive impact in perhaps a different way. He didn't rule out coaching football again. Mendenhall and his wife are now empty nesters. They have three sons. One is playing football at Utah State, and two are on Mormon missions. He said he has been a head coach for 17 straight years and a football coach at some level for 31. He needed to take a step back to refresh and refocus. It's also definitely possible that Mendenhall is no longer enamored with college football because it has changed so much, just over the past few years. Players can now transfer more easily than ever, and the name, image, and likeness rules have probably commercialized college sports beyond the realm of what was thought possible by an old school coach like Mendenhall. Those rules also make it even more difficult for a school like Virginia to compete for quality recruits.

I think the 2020 campaign, with its starts, stops, cancellations, and safety protocols, took a lot out of him, and he referenced that in the news conference, saying he didn't have a plan for coaching during a pandemic. And even before 2020, he had said he was not someone who was going to want to coach into old age. Even after the successful 2019 season, his contract was extended through 2024, but a retirement clause was added after 2022. That was an indication that perhaps he knew the end would be coming sooner rather than later. Still, I think we all would've expected him to make it 10 years at UVa, just not 15. And there was another sign last week as well that maybe this was coming. Mendenhall didn't participate in the weekly coaches show on Tuesday. Instead, quarterbacks coach Jason Beck took part.

Mendenhall said that the way the final month of this season played out did not really play into his decision. I somewhat disagree with him. I mean obviously, I don't know his thoughts, but it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the 'Hoos beat Pitt and VT to win the Coastal and Mendenhall steps down, though I guess it is possible. It could be that the way the final month played out helped Mendenhall realize his decision was the correct one for himself at this point in time. The program is not exactly where he wanted it to be after his sixth season. I am confident he would say that.

And so just like that, we are left to assess Mendenhall's legacy at UVa. It is a bit complicated.

Pending whatever happens in the upcoming Fenway Bowl against SMU on Dec. 29, Mendenhall's record at UVa is 36-38 and 22-27 in the ACC -- nothing to write home about. But if you take out his 2-10 inaugural season in 2016, he would then be 34-28 and 21-20. And it could be fair to do that because the program was in bad shape when he took over. There is no doubt that he stepped into the worst situation at UVa since Welsh inherited a team in 1981 that had experienced two winning seasons in 29 years. When Mendenhall got there, the Wahoos had been to just one bowl game in eight seasons. Al Groh took over under much better circumstances (a word he loved haha) after Welsh in 2001, and Mike London took over the program from Groh in 2010 when it was backsliding but had gone 9-4 in 2007.

After the disastrous start, Mendenhall quickly improved the team to 6-7 in 2017, 8-5 in 2018, and 9-5 in 2019. A road win over Mountain West power Boise State, shutout of South Carolina in the Belk Bowl, and snapping Tech's 15-game winning streak in that rivalry to win the Coastal were major highlights of that three-year run.

But recruiting, though it improved after his first year, never quite took a big leap, and it was difficult for Mendenhall and his staff to make connections in Virginia and on the East Coast. And after so much promise coming off a 9-5 Orange Bowl season, there's no doubt that 11-11 over the past two years is pretty disappointing. And the way the losses came about were starting to become frustrating. Some of the decision-making was a bit London-esque. And Mendenhall, known as a good defensive mind when he got to Virginia, could not figure out how to help turn around that unit this year and last year, which was particularly puzzling since that was the strength of the team at times in 2016 through 2018 and maybe even the first part of 2019. The off-kilter dichotomy of having such a great offense and such a poor defense was one of the major things that made this season so frustrating.

Perhaps the attention to detail that Mendenhall seemed to have down pat at the beginning of his tenure started to wane from 2020 on, but some of the problems in the program weren't necessarily of his own doing. He was consistent in saying from the start that UVa needed a better football operations center to compete in modern college football. The McCue Center, across the street from John Paul Jones Arena, is a relic from the 1990s as considered the worst football facility in the ACC and one of the worst among Power Five schools. Though he was promised such a facility, the funds had not rolled in as quickly as he had hoped, something I am sure was frustrating for him since he took the team to the Orange Bowl and had been pretty much promised that the operations center would get done. The pandemic also affected the athletics "Master Plan," as it has been called, and though the operations center will still get done at some point, it appears as though it will not be as grand as was originally planned.

Mendenhall was not a big-time rah-rah guy and not a fundraiser, and he was naturally an introvert, so rubbing elbows with major donors for the football program was not something that was second nature for him. But he was a nice enough guy and, early on, was certainly improving the program, so I can understand his frustration if he and Williams were unable to secure more funding for the future of the program.

The players that Mendenhall brought into the program all seemed like super good dudes. Everyone was easy to root for. I have no major complaints about the character of the Cavaliers. Though the program took a step back the past couple years from the peak he reached in 2018-19, Mendenhall left UVa in a better spot than he found it. As he pointed out, the team is now bowling regularly, and that's just the bottom rung of expectations he has for the program. He said the goal was to win the Coastal, and he claimed that the team was six or seven plays away from doing that this year. That's probably not too far off, though a 6-6 overall record and 4-4 in the ACC is a tough pill to swallow for seemingly being that close to a division title. And it's no secret that the 'Hoos were just two missed field goals away from being 4-8 and 2-6 in the conference, with those wins at Miami and Louisville coming fairly miraculously.

Though Mendenhall was far from perfect and his tenure ended on a bit of a down note -- pending a possible feel-good sendoff in Boston -- he was responsible for restoring the team to regular bowl participation and was on watch for some of the biggest wins for Virginia football over the past two decades.
It is a bit difficult to wrap my head around the fact that the coach that captured the Coastal and took Virginia to the Orange Bowl just two seasons ago is now no longer going to be leading the program. I can't imagine this is a scenario anyone imagined would've been possible after the 'Hoos beat the Hokies at Scott Stadium in late November 2019.

Mendenhall provided a better launching pad for whoever the next coach is, and that's certainly more than can be said of the two coaches that came before him.

Bronco was a fine representative of the university, and I wish him well in whatever his next adventure ends up being.

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