AbsolutVT03

are two very different things. In a real game, at real speed, with everything else happening even if you are right with the WR and even if you read his eyes right you still only have a second or two max to get your head around and find the ball. It's just an extremely difficult thing to execute. It's like asking why a QB doesn't put the ball between the numbers every single throw.

for the ball constantly while also keeping track of the receiver. Ideally the DB stays with the WR and then when the WR's eyes/body indicate the ball is in the air the DB turns and finds the ball. In practice that is very difficult for a variety of reasons. The reaction time alone makes it tough. It's not that VT (or any other school) doesn't teach it. It's that it's not easy to do and given the choice between finding the ball or staying with the WR it's better to stay with the WR.

in the CFP. That’s why it’s silly for ND to think the ACC wouldn’t push for Miami. If ND gets in it gets $4 million all to itself. If Miami gets in, then the ACC gets that money. It’s a no-brainer which is good b/c the ACC brass isn’t exactly Mensa.

championship game varies year to year and team to team. BYU gets dinged for losing. Alabama gets blown out and it doesn’t matter all. A few years back FSU won and ended up unbeaten but their less than impressive win in the ACC CG seemed to hurt their chances more than anything. It’s all just extremely arbitrary which is a big part of the problem.

been left out in favor of ND. The selection committee can say that didn’t influence its decision but I’m skeptical. Either way the ACC tiebreakers are anything but smart. The only way to guarantee a bid is to have your conference champ finish high in the rankings. So the smart move would to be to utilize those rankings somewhere in your tiebreakers. The ACC left things completely up to a committee that changes its criteria and logic from week to week. The can use whatever criteria or metrics they want to justify including or excluding anyone. Sure they got it right this time by giving Miami an at-large bid. But it very easily could have broken the other way and the ACC would have been out completely. This wasn’t a smart move at all. The ACC got a team in in spite of its best efforts to shoot itself in the foot.

I actually didn't get to see a platypus while I was there. Probably the only animal I didn't get to see that I would have liked to.

at least some of it. Hard to justify giving the Sunbelt and American bids (even if they had to) and leaving the ACC out completely. Really though it’s the SEC and Big Ten. The other teams are just supporting characters. ** Edited by AbsolutVT03 at 12/7/2025, 3:58:52 PM

Duke, Tulane, JMU. So it was basically two spots for Alabama, ND, Miami. It was hard to justify leaving Miami out because of the head to head win against ND. So it gets down to ND and Alabama. Alabama lost a championship game while ND doesn’t even have one. Do you penalize Alabama for losing it? ND for not having the option? Do you reward Alabama for having the best win or penalize them for having the worst loss? Does ND get credit for their losses being close and against two highly ranked teams? Or penalized because their wins were against lower ranked teams? There’s not a great answer there. I’m actually surprised that Miami got in. I figured it would be ND and Alabama.

And run a trick play. The traditional passing game had just carved Duke up on the tying drive. No reason to go away from it. I think the penalty starting them at the 40 made them panic.

aligned almost perfectly for them. Think about it. It took A multi million dollar investment in players A roster full of seniors and older A weak schedule (conference especially) Multiple late game/OT wins against some of those weak teams A down year by teams like FSU and Clemson A loss to a conference opponent that didn’t count as one A convoluted tiebreaker that resulted in the worst possible opponent in the championship game Those things aren’t all going to happen very often. And you won’t be able to build a team from the portal every year. High school recruiting doesn’t matter as much as it used to but it does still matter. ** Edited by AbsolutVT03 at 12/7/2025, 11:52:06 AM

think it is a bad idea. Now many of those reasons involve context and perception but those are both justifiable.

Franklin while not supporting any specific alternative.

very apparent that you have an axe to grind here. I don't really care why but let's not pretend like you are being logical and/or objective about this hire.

us being left behind in CFB. We should have hired a cheaper coach because it might not work out? Why are we even trying then? If we are going to base every decision around hedging our bets and what happens if it doesn’t work then what’s the point? It’s just a scared mentality.

And that would be the case regardless of who we hired. Any coach is going to have pros and cons, drawbacks, risks, etc. Instead of focusing on those the "reasonable" thing to do would be to examine the thought process and logic behind the hire. Does the hire make sense? Is there a clear line of argument for hiring him? How do those things stack up compared to other potential options? Franklin may not work out at VT but the rationale behind hiring him is solid. He is one of the best options available to us. If it doesn't work out then it doesn't work out. But trying to call people out for being excited for... one day... is pretty much the definition of killjoy.

Now 12 teams do but it requires them to win 2-3 games instead of 1-2. You have more teams but that also means you have to beat more teams. Every extra game you play is an additional chance to lose (regardless of how good you are). So let's use UVA as an example. Before the 12 team playoff their chances of winning the title would have been basically 0%. But if they end up winning the ACC then they will make the playoffs which obviously gives them a higher chance than 0%.

get to the national championship game. That's the bar and it's a high one. And that's regardless of how good the next coach is. One of the effects of the 12 team playoff is that the odds of any one team winning it all go down. That's just simple math and probability. So your goal is already harder than it used to be in the past. Then you factor in the conference competition in the Big Ten. Yes they are more likely to get multiple bids than the ACC but you're still going against teams that have a talent and/or money advantage way more often. And that doesn't seem like it's changing any time soon. Ohio State is obviously a machine. Michigan will always be committed to a winning program. Indiana has elevated itself. Oregon has Nike money. Should Penn State expect to beat those type of teams at the top of the conference regularly? Because if the bar is the title game then you're going to have to do that. I'm not even a big Franklin supporter but I said when Penn State fired him (and before he was ever even a possibility here) that I thought they had made a mistake. Regardless of how Franklin's time plays out here I still believe that simply because of the requirements for the next guy to be "better". The most likely outcome is that they end up with someone who has similar or worse results.

you given your apparently expert opinion.

what you mean with the “weight class” comment. Who is VT’s “weight class” exactly? ODU? UVA? Miami? GT? It illustrates one of the problems with the “big game” narrative in general. For many fans the definition of a “big game” changes based on the outcome. I’ve seen many people here complain about us losing a game that would not have been celebrated the same if we had won it. Franklin is 104-45. Are you arguing that the majority of those wins were not against “peers”? Regardless, my point still stands. We are not beating teams we should. If we start consistently winning games against teams with less or similar talent then we can worry about beating teams with more talent.

letters and the actual name instead of an acronym. But yeah I've never been on board with the coach abbreviations in any capacity.

start winning any games consistently and then maybe worry about winning big ones.

hiring of Pry to Franklin. They are pretty much polar opposites. Is it possible that the Franklin hire doesn't work out? Of course. There are no guarantees when it comes to hiring a new coach. But it is a lot better hire than Pry who compounded his inexperience by bringing in rookie coordinators. You say we should have "reached younger and hungrier" but there's just as much, if not more, risk in that. If you look at it from an objective point of view, VT just got a proven P4 head coach who has already established himself as an elite recruiter in the state. Short of pulling in an existing successful P4 head coach (few of which would be realistic) I don't think you could expect a better hire in terms of proven results. And if you think winning 8+ games a year is going to equal regret then you haven't paid much attention to VT's program in recent years. We've won 8+ games four times in the past 13 years and the last time was six years ago. We haven't played in the ACC championship game in 9 years. If Franklin was following Frank Beamer then you would probably have a better argument.

has made for a very choppy slow game. And that's going to favor a team like Charlotte in this instance.

have a long way to go before we start worrying about winning top 10 matchups.

ridiculous posts in this thread.

And we knew that. He was never going to be a super accurate passer. He wasn't in high school. He wasn't at Baylor. He hasn't been here. And it's not like he isn't trying to be good. You can tell he wants to win. He wants to be a good QB. He just has limitations and isn't helped out by a suspect OL and lack of playmakers around him. It's also not his fault that he's the best QB we have. I'm not saying he should be above criticism. I get that he makes money (although who knows how much) and the QB position will always take an outsized amount of criticism. But posts like this one just seem to cross the line.

pay for paid content.

fluctuates. But to address your point, this isn’t “news”. News will be when we hire a new coach. And that will be reported everywhere. TSL has every right to ask that information on the pay boards stay there. And they are not the only site that does that. Your last paragraph is beyond petty and juvenile. You don’t want to pay for content then don’t. But don’t ruin it for others and try to take revenue from a small business that is one of the best places for VT sports.

stat is overblown and misleading. If you're playing a true top 5 team then you should lose most of the time. This is especially true if you are not a top 5 team. There's also the caveat of how you count Top X teams. Is it their ranking at the time of the game? End of the season? Are you using a specific poll or ranking or any of them or all of them? What if you beat a Top 5 team in game one but that team turns out to be vastly overrated? Conversely if you beat a team early that is underrated and they end up in the Top 10 that win doesn't count towards the stat but it probably should. The point there is you can massage the numbers to make a Top X stat look better or worse than it really is depending on the point you're trying to make. As far as VT and the new coach, whoever we end up with is going to have some flaws or cons or reasons he could fail here. It's kind of a crap shoot really. Even if we went out and poached a current, successful, proven coach from the SEC or Big 10 there's no guarantee it would work. Lincoln Riley and Brian Kelly are two examples of that (Kelly more so right now obviously). At this point I'm ready to support whoever we hire and let them get to work.

the point where losing big games matters then it means we will have improved a lot.

it. If you personally were offered two jobs. One you would make a guaranteed amount of money and the other you would make less but have a chance to "renegotiate" based on performance after a year, which one are you taking? The only way what you're proposing works is if the person being hired wants to be a head coach but there is little to no interest from any other similar schools.

If a coach can go somewhere else and get $4 million guaranteed then why is he signing a $2 million + incentives contract? He's not. I don't agree with the big salaries, buyouts and guaranteed money but as long as that's what the market dictates then you have to play that game. The idea that we're going to score some great coach with an unconventional deal with low risk and buyout to the university is just a not realistic.

"type" of coach. The bad news is there's no way to guarantee that. So no we don't "need" a young guy or an old guy or an experienced guy or an up and coming guy. We need someone who wins games. And we won't know if we have that someone until they get here and the season starts. That's why I'm not super hung up on one candidate or profile. I think anyone is going to be an upgrade over Pry. And I think just about anyone could succeed or fail. Good hires on a paper sometimes don't pan out (Fuente). Hires that look terrible or desperate sometimes win championships (Dabo). So whoever we pick, I'm going to support and give him a chance and go from there.

down to a two point try. If you can control when that happens and have it be for the win instead of the tie then you do it. Just because the right decision doesn't work doesn't make it stupid.

end of a half. Every situation is different because every team and game is different. If our current team as constructed, got the ball at the 20 with 40 seconds left I wouldn't fault any coach for playing it conservative. It's one thing to be aggressive, it's another to be reckless and stupid. Never mind that there have been VT coaches (multiple) that have been roasted for being aggressive before the half when it doesn't work out.

some cool and interesting stuff. Some of it can even be useful. But we are trying to shoehorn it into everything and it’s not nearly as “smart” or accurate as people seem to believe it is.

for next year. It will be the next staff's job to "lock down" current players.

But there's no doubt that the players that are still here are still fighting and giving effort. ** Edited by AbsolutVT03 at 9/27/2025, 10:36:05 PM

likely that guys might enter the portal and then decide to stay once the new coach is announced.

said I have no idea what kind of NIL deals and terms we have with guys. From what I understand, the norm is for the payments to be made in installments and the installments stop if the player isn't on the team. But we don't know if that's the case here. You are assuming that guys are shutting it down, entering the portal, and demanding to still be paid regardless. That's a lot of assumption to paint someone in the worst light possible. I'm sure everyone involved will abide by whatever agreements are in place. The main point wasn't the fine details of contracts that we know nothing about. It was that we don't know what is going on behind the scenes so making statements that they should be "escorted out" is a bit much. As a VT fan, I would love for guys to stay. As a neutral observer, I completely understand why a player would decide to redshirt and transfer. Regardless, I don't think it's productive to be salty towards the guys who portal. If you don't want to wish them well then just don't say anything and continue to support the guys that are available.

the end the staff they signed up to play for isn't going to be here. Virginia Tech made the best decision for VT by firing Pry. It's only fair that the players make the best decisions for themselves in response to that firing. While I would love to keep everyone, I don't fault anyone for wanting to explore options given the current uncertainty. It's not a fun situation for anyone involved. As far as NIL goes, from what I understand, the money is usually made in payments. So any payments made would obviously be kept but any future payments would not be dispersed. But I imagine that depends on how things are set up. And at the end of the day that money is a sunk cost just like Pry's previous salary and buyout. Best thing to do is to wish the guys who enter the portal well and focus on who is still available.

lowest student fees in Virginia. Taxes and fees on everything else increase over time (as do the costs to provide those services) so student fees shouldn't be exempt.

won't be hurting financially but it's still not fun failing especially in such a public manner. Regardless I'm not sure why you feel the need to ask. He's not the coach anymore. No need to kick someone while they are down.

the 2nd Amendment. First off, from a logical/logistical standpoint it's virtually impossible. Beyond that I acknowledge that there are responsible gun owners, people who use them to hunt, etc. I don't think we should get rid of guns entirely and even if I did I don't think it could be done. And while I agree on the spirit of the 2nd Amendment, I also feel like the founding fathers never envisioned guns being as prevalent and lethal as they have become but I realize that's just my personal view. We don't have freedom and democracy because of guns. We have it because of people willing to uphold the laws and values that our country was founded on. Put another way, we can lose our freedoms with or without the 2nd Amendment. Guns don't keep us free. The unwillingness to support tyrannical regimes keeps us free. There are plenty of countries that have freedom without the guns and gun violence that we have here. That's why I think we could do more to address gun violence in our country. I think it's enough of an issue to where a holistic approach needs to be taken. And that includes looking at gun control, what is feasible, what's not. I think another big part of it is mental illness and how we treat that as a society. You are right that we will never legislate violence and hatred out of any society. But that doesn't mean we can't do more to prevent it. I just wish we could agree on how to make that happen. I appreciate the response. And as I said below, even though I didn't know much about Charlie Kirk and I likely would disagree with pretty much everything he believed, he was a human being with a family and friends and loved ones and he did not deserve to die. I wish more people would remember that in this and other situations.

sentiment of your post regarding finding/supporting things you enjoy I do have some qualms about the post. First off you aren't really in the position to tell people they won't "find joy" at Lane Stadium. I wouldn't "find joy" at a ballet but I'm not going to blanketly say someone else won't. Obviously losing is not fun. But it's not like we never win at home. It's not like games are never fun. And plenty of people go to games to see friends and share experiences with fellow fans. That shouldn't be discounted especially during tough times in terms of on the field performance. The other issue is more of a logical/financial one. If every fan checks out and stops supporting the program then there will never be "something to be invested about". I'm not saying we don't have money or that we shouldn't be getting better results for what we spend. But if everyone did the same thing you did then the program would wither and die. Sites like TSL would wither and die. You need people who stick with things during the down times. So while your post and actions make sense on a micro level they would be extremely damaging on a macro one. I'm glad you are happy with your decision but it pretty much fits the definition of a bandwagon fan. That's fine, you do you. But just realize that teams need dedicated fans to sustain things.

if you want a proven head coach. Why would someone like that come here if he can go somewhere else and get that security? That's not "greed" that's offering competitive benefits and compensation.

right? And they contradict the "assigned at birth" belief that many people have? You can't argue that someone who was born a male should have to play against men while also arguing that someone who was born a female should have to play against men because of a genetic anomaly. Regardless, your point about the female boxer has zero to do with a person transitioning from male to female to gain an advantage. She was born female. Competed as female her whole life. And it wasn't until she found success that suddenly her "eligibility" became scrutinized. It's basically the complete opposite of the point you're trying to question.