AppWest

** Edited by AppWest at 9/28/2025, 10:12:48 AM

The sooner we stop trying to claim some fake moral high ground the better. Times have changed.

As far as I can tell, in the NIL world, we have roughly two paths that I’m thinking of as Iowa or Memphis (although I think these could dovetail nicely). By Iowa, I mean a school that became famous for churning out NFL players at a certain position group(s). For Tech, this would almost certainly be on defense, probably at DB. The idea would be to build a coaching staff that could reliably get 4+ star players at certain positions by developing a track record of getting them to the league or to elite tier P2 schools. Kids who just miss Knoxville and Penn State’s final cuts but are serious about going to the next level. The other view would be Memphis. Maybe a sore one given Fuente, but Memphis, in a lot of ways, has done a reverse Beamer. They have quietly had 8+ win seasons in 8/10 years and 4 10+ win seasons by finding overlooked offensive skill players within the region. To further push home the VT potential, they’ve churned out good kickers for decades too. They currently have a pretty mediocre head coach, but they’ve continued winning games by building smart rosters and finding kids below the top tier who can play. Obviously these two things are easier said than done, but I think these are the two best paradigms to move forward. I realize that Tech has decent NIL resources, but the reality is that while this college sports system holds, our best years are behind us. We can no longer sustainably compete at the top of the sport - the pack and the money has pulled too far away. The move now is to try to be in range to be brought along when the P2 form their own league and need to fill out the ranks a little further. Tech’s failure with Pry from my vantage point is that they overlearned the obvious mistakes of the Fuente years and nothing else. They brought in a guy to try to bring back the past and fix the in-state mess that Fuente left, because they thought that having things sound like the Beamer years would be enough to bring them back. They decided to pay coaches more for the sake of paying them more instead of buying coaches worth that money. It was all focused on looking backwards. Tech’s best path now is to focus the program on some tight specifics and spend like hell on an analytics team that can find value players who match an identity. Last week I joked that I wanted that HS coach who doesn’t punt as our next coach. It’s still a joke, but I do think that’s the sort of thinking success is going to take now. We have to go moneyball vs trying to woo in-state kids with a program their parents half remember or going punch for punch with bigger spenders. I saw someone earlier say that any kids who want to take a redshirt shouldn’t be at Tech to begin with - that sort of attitude has got to go. We need appropriately cynical people in charge, and we have to stop trying to turn back the clock 25 years. My ideal version of Virginia Tech football in 3-5 years is a roster that has started to send menacing DBs to the NFL, mobile quarterbacks and a Big 12 offense, and the ability to beat Clemson and FSU every couple of years. Anyway, just my 2 cents after thinking about what might be reasonable for the future. ** Edited by AppWest at 9/14/2025, 5:09:05 PM ** Edited by AppWest at 9/14/2025, 5:10:21 PM

Only argument now is starting his quarterly payments early.

It’s not fair to make some poor coordinator wear this ****. Dead cat bounce to at least beat the hoos

You see it all the time, sometimes you need a stopgap after a legend retires to get everything truly reset.

Before that ruling, it was not possible to reasonably anticipate that the existing model of college football was going to change overnight. I have plenty of marginal criticisms of the program over this time period, more than I have approval by a mile. My point is simply that I don’t hold anyone at Tech responsible for what I think will be the functional death of this program’s time as an elite - they could not have known when they signed a 30 year (?) commitment that cable rights and the financial system underpinning the whole system were about to invert. I don’t think, for example, that Missouri has been way better run than Tech since the mid 2000s. I think a lot of schools (hello Rutgers) were just in the right place at the right time trying to maximize their TV contracts and others weren’t. They made winning bets based on completely wrong assumptions. It sucks, and it could’ve been handled better(I hated Fuente), but I think no matter who was making decisions, we end up in this same spot 99 times out of 100. We bought in in one world and got our cards in another. ** Edited by AppWest at 9/7/2025, 12:07:24 AM ** Edited by AppWest at 9/7/2025, 12:08:34 AM

I was excited when we finally got in too. You could not have known back then that it was signing our own death warrant. I even thought we might survive NIL until the conference consolidation began in earnest, but it’s been clear for years now that no amount of on-field success was going to get us inside that velvet rope.

Get scooped into the coming super league will be playing the college football we’ve come to know in 20 years. And I think our path into that sailed 15-20 years ago. I think non-elite college football will look like, and be resourced like college baseball after the Shift.

Called it a back against the wall game. Obviously not a take on the likelihood of a firing, but no coming back from this.

Ago was the death knell for a school in rural VA.

We’ll have some outlier good years, but the good ol days are behind us.

The reality is that a school in rural Virginia was not going to survive the NIL era. Our time came and went.

Not sure anything could be more damning of this coaching.