In the shadows of the closed bowl at Scott Stadium and a resurgent fan base, Washington State quarterback Zevi Eckhaus attempted to cover his helmet to hear the incoming play call with the Cougars backed up into their own end zone late in the fourth quarter.
Eckhaus eventually threw his arms up in disgust as Washington State called a timeout.
Scott Stadium had won, yet again.
“The quarterback couldn't hear,” Virginia receiver Trell Harris said. “I could barely hear myself think.”
That wasn’t the first time the crowd of 56,048 had gotten to the visiting Cougars. The UVA faithful had already forced Washington State into 5 false starts penalties on the night, including one possession where the same offensive lineman jumped on two plays in a row. Overall, this season Scott Stadium has forced 8 false start penalties in five games.
For a stadium that has laid silent for the better part of a decade, Scott has moved itself up the scouting report for opposing teams traveling to Charlottesville.
“We got word that staff down the road, they’re nervous about how loud it can get in there,” Cavalier defensive coordinator John Rudzinski said. “They might have to change a cadence or do it a little bit different and that can be very beneficial.”
Virginia is 5-0 this season at home, the most home wins under Tony Elliott and the most for the program since 2020. This week the Cavaliers prepare to play their fifth night game under the lights of Scott Stadium on Saturday when Wake Forest visits for a primetime 7 p.m. kickoff on ESPN, the most home night games ever in a single season at UVA.
Few are happier seeing this kind of impact from the crowd than Eric Ward, a lifelong fan turned Associate Athletics Director for Revenue Generation and Marketing.
“Full body goosebumps, as a lifelong supporter of the team and somebody who was there when it used to be like that pretty much every game,” Ward said. “It’s been a daily mission to help get it back to that.”
A sign of those times returning to Scott Stadium is Saturday will be the first time since the 2009 home opener with three straight home games of 50,000-plus fans. The 2009 home opener was the tail end of a 58-game streak of 50,000-plus crowds at Scott Stadium dating back to the opening of the south end zone upper deck in 2000.
Ward says typically there is a spike in individual game ticket sales right after the most recent home games, but this season people are buying more tickets in higher numbers much further in advance.
“All channels are firing on all cylinders, which is insane,” Ward said. “These past several days, we’re averaging thousands of ticket sales a day, which has never happened.”
Sources say no one is ready to talk about a soldout crowd yet, but there is potential. The last time Scott Stadium reached 60,000-plus fans was in 2011 against Virginia Tech with a crowd of 61,124, just under the 61,500 capacity. These are the kind of game weeks Tony Elliott envisioned when he arrived at Virginia.
Elliott wants game days at Scott Stadium to be the focal point for people in Charlottesville and across the Commonwealth.
“That’s what I wanna continue to build here,” Elliott said. “Where, man, you don’t plan a wedding during football season, like you don’t do those kind of things and like everybody’s focused on those seven Saturdays like nothing else matters.”
These types of results have been hard to come by though. During Elliott’s first three seasons at Virginia, Scott Stadium has averaged 41,167 fans per game, including a low dip to just 39,527 in 2024. Trell Harris was in his first season at Virginia in 2024 after transferring from Kent State.
While sitting out the majority of those home games with a knee injury, Harris looked around a half-filled Scott Stadium feeling there was no one to blame but themselves for the lack of atmosphere at home.
“I remember just being on the sideline and seeing that,” Harris said. “Obviously it was kind of unfortunate, but I mean, when you’re losing you can’t complain. We’re not getting our job done. So, how can you expect somebody else to come out and support you? I mean, kind of flip the page this year and as you see, Scott is packed.”
It begs the question, is simply winning the reason behind the increased fervor in Charlottesville? In short, yes, but it’s not everything.
“I think success, but also too, I think it’s a sense of responsibility,” Elliott when asked that very question. “Saturdays is about supporting the team, but it’s about tailgating. It’s about family bonding. It’s about time with your friends, and then celebrating your team and supporting your team and letting it culminate in the game, in the atmosphere inside the stadium. But there’s a lot more to it.”
If it was just winning, you would think the 2019 season would have averaged more than 47,863 fans over seven home games for a team that won nine games, an ACC Coastal Championship, and earned a spot in the Orange Bowl.
Ward has believed all along some of his team’s efforts behind the scenes were just removing barriers for fans to eventually come when Virginia eventually started winning. That has more than proven out with UVA off to its best start at 8-1 since 1990 and an increase in week-over week demand for tickets.
“I do think the efforts have helped, but I will say winning is the most important thing and not just winning, but doing it the way we’ve done it,” Ward said. “I think it’s obviously exciting and there’s a lot more talk around town and ultimately the product that we put on the field is really important for actually selling tickets.”
Those efforts and building up a challenging atmosphere for visiting opponents starts with the student section. The student attendance at Scott Stadium is currently the highest in program history, with Ward saying Virginia is anticipating a “near record crowd” of students again on Saturday night against Wake Forest.
Growing the student support has been a long-time initiative driven by Elliott. Ward says he still remembers their first meeting together and the students were top of mind.
“When I got my first meeting with him, one of the things he said is, I want to make this the hardest place to go win a road game in the ACC,” Ward said. “We want this to be the place that everybody fears coming to. And he fully understood at the time that we were not there, and it was going to take a lot of work to get there. But he’s been very intentional about supporting student engagement efforts.”
That intentionality bares out in Elliott handing out food or ice cream on The Lawn to students, sending letters or videos to the student body, and an always present mind to shoutout the student section after a good showing.
While the process has been slow, Ward says the student attendance has grown each year under Elliott from 25% growth in year one to another 30% in year two and has “skyrocketed” this season becoming one of the louder environments in the ACC.
“That’s why I’ve stressed the importance of the fan engagement, attendance, the interaction, making noise at the right times to help us have a competitive advantage,” Elliott said.
The UVA student section even gained national attention after what many dubbed “the world’s fastest field storm” to celebrate the program’s win over then-No. 8 Florida State. The school received the customary $50,000 fine from the ACC for the field storm, but no one seemed to mind, including the players who had barely a second to respond to the on rush of thousands of students.
“The craziest thing, I almost got trampled because I was right on the field, and I'm tired. It was a long drive for me,” UVA defensive tackle Jacob Holmes said. “I remember I was just shaking Daniel Rickert’s hand and then after JP got the interception, I was like, yeah, we did it and then about five seconds later, I’m getting trampled. It was a pretty crazy experience, but I loved it. It was probably one of the best days of my life.”
Other efforts Ward references were the “Fan First Games” early in the season, which included discounted tickets, as well as re-evaluating different seating sections. UVA also launched this past spring the “Football Fan Experience Council,” which put together 14 fans to brainstorm around improving the game day experience.
“I think we introduced a lot of new younger Hoos into our audience,” Ward said. “Then being able to see a winning football team right now is helping a lot with them becoming lifelong fans.”
The air around Grounds is certainly different with an 8-1 football team fighting for an spot in the ACC Championship Game and the College Football Playoff. For the players still walking around Grounds for classes, there’s been an uptick in fist bumps and handshakes.
Even players only a few months into their tenure at Virginia are being recognized amidst a breakout season for the program.
“I know that people are excited to watch us, so it’s been an honor. Trying to keep it rolling and filling up the seats has been a goal of ours,” UVA quarterback Chandler Morris said. “You just wanna be talked about in December, not right now.”
Tony Elliott admits he doesn’t get out around Charlottesville or Grounds much this time of year. His little interaction outside either the Hardie Football Operations Center or Scott Stadium comes at Chick-fil-A, where he jokes he’s on speed dial because the Elliott family is there so often. So while he doesn’t see as much of the talk around town, Elliott sees it on game days at Scott Stadium.
“There's so much pageantry with the game and it’s not just about the actual game it’s about the relationships and and the memories and the time that you that you spend with family and then you got babies that their first picture is in Virginia gear, and they can remember all of the games that they attended,” Elliott said. “It has an opportunity to be something really special.”
As the Cavaliers prepared to make the cross country journey back home from their win at Cal last week, Elliott’s postgame message could be summed up in one quote, delivered to the team before it ever headed for plane: “We don’t lose at home.”
Elliott’s dream at UVA is to get to a point where senior classes graduate without losing a single home game and that dream has been instilled in the players.
“The last couple games have just been electric, and I’ve loved it,” Holmes said. “It reminded me, every time the last couple games reminded me why I do this.”
UVA saw its second largest increase in season ticket sales in 21 years, with only the 2019 season having a higher year-over-year gain. Ward called this an impressive feat because this happened before any of this season’s success. But continuing to increase season ticket sales are a crucial long term goal for Virginia.
During the 2000s era where Virginia saw 58 straight games of 50,000-plus crowds, season ticket holders was at a much higher point. This led to more consistent large turnouts for home games and tens of thousands fewer single game tickets to sell on a week-by-week basis. Those season ticket sales will likely see another bump after a successful 2025 season and will ride the wave of the program’s momentum.
“The same people who are going to our football games are the same people that have helped JPJ become one of the best home court advantages in college basketball,” Ward said. “I think it’s starting to wake up the fan base to know that we can make an impact in winning these games and right now we’re 5-0 at home and we have every intention of going 7-0. If not 8-0.”
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