Virginia

The university that Thomas Jefferson founded in 1819 had been playing football since the 1880s, and in all of that time the program had never reached 11 wins. George Welsh's teams in the late 1980s and early 1990s were the closest thing to a sustained run — an ACC title share in 1989, the program's most competitive stretch. Then a long plateau. Then a grief that reshaped what the team means to Charlottesville: three players killed in an on-campus shooting in 2022 that cut the season short and forged something heavier than football inside the program.

Tony Elliott was hired to rebuild and was one more losing season from the door. Instead, 2025 delivered the program's record. Eleven wins. Seven-and-two in the ACC. A Gator Bowl that required beating a ranked SEC opponent to close it. Chandler Morris, the transfer quarterback who won Gator Bowl MVP honors, was denied a seventh year of eligibility by the NCAA and is gone. Virginia brought in Beau Pribula from Missouri and Eli Holstein from Pittsburgh to compete for the job. Elliott returns; the question is whether his staff can replace the quarterback who carried the record season.

The 2026 question in Charlottesville is the one every program asks after its first breakthrough: was that a year or the start of an era? Virginia has one ACC title in its history, and the 2025 team gave the fanbase reason to believe a second one is a real target rather than a dream. Whether that belief compounds or recedes is what the next 12 months of football will tell.

Through three games, Virginia is 2-1: wins over NC State and Norfolk State, then a 38-27 home loss to West Virginia on September 19 as 10.5-point favorites — an early data point in the belief-compounds-or-recedes question above.