“I didn’t come all the way to Virginia as a Texas boy to win five, six games. I want to win the conference championship.”
Graduate quarterback Chandler Morris made that proclamation in January before transferring to Virginia. Ten months later, and with a 27-7 win over Virginia Tech Saturday, Morris has the Cavaliers just one win away from achieving exactly what he set out to do.
For anyone fortunate enough to see Morris after the victory against the Hokies, it was clear that he was taking in all the fruits of his labor. He was seen snapping pictures with young fans, holding up the Commonwealth Cup and smoking celebratory cigars with his teammates.
To Morris, winning the Commonwealth Cup is a defining highlight of his Cavalier career.
“It’s awesome,” Morris said. “I mean, I’m just very grateful for this opportunity, it means a lot to me and I’m so grateful for it.”
Having the confidence to demand a conference championship at a program that has not won one since 1995 is a bold move by a quarterback in a locker room full of players he had never played with. But actually making it happen takes program-changing confidence. Instead of being proud of himself for believing in the program, Morris is proud of the program for believing in him.
“The whole building believed in [our goals] and I’m just so proud of everybody involved in the building,” Morris said. “This is a great opportunity that we have.”
The opportunity Morris speaks about is indeed great. While the Cavaliers claimed conference titles in 1989 and 1995, they did not have to win a game to earn those and instead shared them with Duke and Florida State, respectively. In what is just Virginia’s second appearance in the actual ACC Championship game, Morris will have a chance to win an outright title for the first time in school history.
But what is the backbone of Morris’ success? How did an undersized quarterback like him speak such lofty goals into reality?
In some ways, winning the regular season ACC title is the culmination of his long and obstacle-riddled college football career. Despite reaching the Big 12 Championship with Oklahoma in 2020 and TCU in 2022, Morris has yet to play a snap in a championship game.
That is going to change. He has an unbreakable will to win — as seen through his success when the lights get brightest. His diving touchdown run to take an overtime lead against Florida State and his seven-yard run to set up a game winning touchdown against Louisville are just some of the magical moments he has provided. Morris does not see pressure as something to shy away from, and it shows in the way he leads the Cavaliers.
“There's a lot of pressure on us and everything like that, but pressure is a privilege,” Morris said. “We’ve worked to put ourselves in this position and also to put ourselves in this position to have this opportunity.”
Another testament of Morris’ drive comes from his willingness to not shy away from contact. Though it has caused a lot of wear and tear to his body in the form of upper body injuries, Morris never shies from lowering his shoulder if it means getting the extra inch. Coach Tony Elliott emphasizes to the whole team that football is a game of inches, but nobody takes that to heart more than Morris.
“He’s got a ton of fire, he’s a competitor, he’s a coach's kid so he knows what it takes [to win],” Elliott said in an interview with ESPN.
Morris prides himself on shaping the team’s mindset alongside Elliott to make the unrealistic seem realistic. Multiple times this season Morris has used the slogan, “don’t make a championship feel foreign” to demonstrate how a simple mindset change can affect a team’s play.
Morris bought into Elliott’s belief that, in this era of college football, it is easy for a team to make a one-year turnaround. But this is not guaranteed. A victory mentality along with leaders who exude it have to exist as well.
As the ACC Championship game against Duke nears, Morris will look to use his and his teammates’ experience of being on teams in postseason games before to prepare adequately.
“[Experience] is going to be huge … you got guys like Mitchell Melton and Jayden Thomas so it’s a lot of experience in championship games,” Morris said. “These past two weeks have been championship games and so [we] won’t change anything up and stick to [our] routine.”
Morris and Virginia are still not done yet. After all, his goal was to win the ACC Championship, not to make it there. Morris has a goal, knows it is within his reach and will do anything to make it reality.
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