Synaesthesia

Like, VT didn't even have 100 yards of offense until the end of the 3rd quarter, they had like 12 rushing yards at that. Once Clemson went up 2 scores, it was clear that this wasn't working, no need to risk the health of Drones or Tuten, when you really need them to be healthy for the last 2 games, which could actually be won by VT. So, we got Schlee and Coney enter the game at the same time

Every single year, across all NCAA divisions, across all sports, there's dozens of new head coaches. If it were commonplace to be undefeated for the first 75% of your sports season the year after firing your coach, everyone would be firing their coach all the time. Why ever retain a coach who didn't start 9-0 in football, or 21-0 in basketball, just fire them and get the next coach to do it

Letting go of a 3-possession lead in the 3rd quarter is honestly more the defense's fault than anyone else's on the team. To zero in, it was the re-emergence of giving up giant chunk yardage plays, something that they had mostly done away with this year compared to the previous 2 years.

Way more cumulative hours of enjoyment watching men's and women's basketball, baseball, softball than the 12 or 13 games of most football seasons. People want to forfeit all of that just so they can feel despondent when the football team goes 7-5

You're down 3 touchdowns in the 2nd quarter, and you're letting the play clock run down to like 5 seconds each time? Great, thanks for helping VT run out the clock, which VT is already going to do a lot of, considering how much they run the ball. You're still down 3 touchdowns, and you're punting from inside opponent's territory, twice? Are you just conceding that the game is over and trying to get out of town? So after being shut out 28-0 in the first half, you get handed an incredibly unlikely gift in the form of VT's 2 best offensive players committing back-to-back turnovers on their own 25, that lets you get back into the game, put it within striking distance. By the 4th quarter, you're down 14 with 8 minutes left, and you're lining up for a field goal? You're down 2 possessions, and now you want to make sure you need an additional 2 possessions, with 8 minutes left? And you've already given up 35 points and like 250 rushing yards? What makes you think you're going to get some defensive stops now? Are you expecting to be handed another 2 turnovers? Finally, the cherry on top is starting to call timeouts with 4 minutes left, down 42-21. Oh, now you want to manage and preserve the game clock? After spending almost the whole game seemingly unaware of how little time remaining there was to try to get back into the game? I was shocked to be reminded that Bill O'Brien was their coach, I was fully expecting this level of clock mismanagement to be some random guy who just stumbled out of FCS or D2.

Might as well shade everything over the top and let them keep killing their own chances

It's over now, good bounceback win for VT

Their offense has only been working when it takes up a ton of game clock, and they've had nothing to show for it. Tech just did the same thing to them in terms of game clock, except is now up 2 touchdowns, and Tech gets the ball to start the 2nd half.

This isn't a slight against Tech, it's just that Stanford's peer group is only a small handful of universities in the entire world

Vanderbilt and Rutgers ended on a close margin but they were completely in control of those games for like 90% of it. I think it's hard to say VT didn't close out those games when they spent most of those games down 2 or 3 possessions, and were really quite lucky that the other team let them back into the game at all. Like, a more extreme example of this was the Georgia-Alabama game, I wouldn't say Georgia failed to close out a close game when they were down 28-0 in the first half. Alabama ended up winning anyway, but, if anyone failed to close out anything, it was Alabama letting such a large lead evaporate to begin with.

They showed the stat during the game of how few top 10 road games VT ever won, going back 30+ years. They were credibly in position to win that game, none of this nonsense of "oh well we were actually winning at halftime" en route to a 20 point loss. They looked way better than they've looked in years in any game, home or away, in terms of matching blow-for-blow with a good team. Yeah the turnovers are what mostly kept them in it, but VT forced those turnovers, it wasn't like Miami players just yakety sax fumbling the snap or having a ball slip out of their hands untouched. They did everything they needed to do to win except write a large enough paycheck to the "ACC Command Center" replay review office.

Only way I see it happen regularly is if a players gets instantly ripped down such that they land on both knees. If it takes a couple seconds, no call, if they can move their legs to land on the outside of their thigh, no call, etc.

Why don't I just have my defensive backs run out of bounds on every pass near the sidelines, if they can just get a finger on the ball, presto, incomplete pass, play's over

Score or not, just feels like the time where VT gets blasted by a big play

Like, Miami's only problem scoring touchdowns has been turning the ball over entirely

Them wasting so much time between snaps even while losing is going to be the biggest unsung factor if VT actually pulls the upset

Losing big at home to an unranked Duke team was way, way worse than losing big on the road to a top 10 Miami team. The perceived prestige of Miami's name is way higher than Duke in football, no matter how good or bad they actually are in any given year. Maybe if Miami wins the game 84-0 or something. VT has plenty of gigantic losses to highly ranked teams that don't really affect perception too much. The big problem VT has, going back throughout Beamer's career, is getting upset by lesser teams. That's why the 2019 Duke loss was sticky, and tomorrow's loss to Miami won't be.

- He reached a plateau of performing at such a high level every year, that it was too easy for everyone to convince themselves all they needed was just 1 or 2 more breaks. Look at how many VT fans still truly believe if they had beaten BC in the rain in 2007 that they would've gone to the national title game that year, for instance. This in turn made everyone sclerotic, afraid of change for fearing of breaking something and ruining a good thing, they knew how hard it was to get to that height in the first place, and how much potential downside was underneath them, so why take the risk? If we just get 1 more stop on defense, 1 more first down on offense, etc. - The increased visibility of the program, and the changing world around them. This point is made most evident by Marcus Vick's career arc. When VT was an up-and-comer, not only was there less media attention being paid to them, but the internet was still in its infancy. It was much, much easier to take a risk on a "discipline issues" kind of player because programs had an easier time minimizing it, or outright covering it up, when a player did something bad. But, by the mid 2000s, both of these had changed, now VT is seen as a premiere football program with all that commensurate attention, but also now the internet exists, everyone's on it, everyone has a cell phone that at least sends texts, information travels laterally at breakneck speed and now coaches can't just call up a bar owner and tell him to shut up and expect that to be the end of the story. Beamer eventually saw (probably through the "help" of Steger) that he couldn't risk the reputational image of the university as a whole by having players on the team who couldn't at least follow the bare minimum of rules. So, those kinds of players stopped being recruited, and fans start wondering hey how come VT football no longer plays with a vicious attitude? (Side note to this, going along with the changing world thing, many of the types of hits VT defense used to coach simply became illegal, so you need to recruit players who you will be able to coach into hitting in a very specific way that won't get you penalized.) You can even look to special teams for a microcosm of the 'success -> risk aversion' pipeline. VT did have some starters still on special teams in later years, but it wasn't like special teams was composed entirely of starters. Why? The same reason as everyone else, it's too risky. When Beamer and VT were down in the dumps and had nothing to lose, who cares if you lose a starter trying to block a punt? We might lose the game anyway even if we do block it. But if you're winning 11 games a year, instead of 4, all of a sudden the risk of that starter being injured looms larger. To draw an analogy, VT football under Beamer was like someone on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, who has already won $500,000 and is facing the $1,000,000 question, and they don't know the right answer for sure, they have a decent idea, but they'd have to take a risk to answer the question. Get it right, you win the top prize, $1M is yours. But, you get it wrong, and you fall all the way down from 500k to 32k. It's easy now, in retrospect, for people to appreciate just how far it was possible for VT football to fall. It's easy to understand why they would become risk averse when they did, I probably would've done the exact same thing in their position. But, even if it was the "right" decision to make, it did end up becoming a significant factor in the overall fall of the program.

Teams only win about 50% of 1-possession games in the long run (think 10+ seasons at least). If VT were 4-5 instead of 1-8 they would be basically exactly where you expect, and 3 games in the course of 2.1 seasons can't be easily differentiated from statistical noise. Now, if we were talking about Scott Frost and Nebraska, who went something like 1-20 in close games, OK that really is systemic, that's too far out of bounds to be just a statistical oddity.

If you've watched enough college football, you know about how many possessions are likely left in the game for any arbitrary amount of game clock. In that game itself, you've seen one team already give up several long scoring drives, both in terms of play count and game clock, to the other one. If I were watching a game play out in the exact same manner between 2 totally different teams, I would've had the same thought, that it's a dangerous amount of game clock left in a 1-possession game where 1 team has not shown a consistent ability to stop the run. TV announcers see it, fans see it, how frequently games come down to which team gets the final possession. It just so happened, that due to how poorly they played elsewhere in the game, that VT happened to be in the situation of changing possession too late in the game without a larger lead. To put another point on the intuitive understanding of game flow, I'll bet many other people besides me were saying to themselves late in the 1st half, when VT got the field goal, "if they don't score something on this drive, the game is over."

All those years VT would lose games to teams like ECU, they were games that VT was a strong favorite, games they should have won. Even 2 years ago, VT wouldn't have been a favorite, this result would've been expected, not an upset.

Losing this game severely curtails the likelihood of VT finishing with more than 7 or 8 wins in the regular season, though.

What the fans want is to see fantastic plays being made by players wearing a jersey bearing the identifying marks of Virginia Tech (or whatever their favorite school is), to hear people on television in that practiced, professional cadence, to say positive things about Virginia Tech. To that end, the uniform is everything for fans. The player is nothing until they put on a uniform with the desired brand. Given the importance of the uniform branding, it's only natural fans care so deeply about the appearance.

I'm talking about at the end of the regular season heading into the postseason, after conference championships but before playoffs and bowl games, and only teams in the top 25. This thing talks about teams "in the discussion," but realistically the only way a 10-win team is going to make the playoffs, without getting an autobid from winning their conference, is if they're a huge name program (also they probably needed to at least play for their conference championship game). Like, to just pull an example off this chart, could 10-win Ohio State beat out 11-win Virginia Tech if the field was really wonky that year (wonky field as in, all the good 12-win teams lost their conference championship to some 8 or 9 win team)? Yeah, sure. Is 10-win Northwestern, or Boston College, or Virginia (lol) going to beat out 11-win Virginia Tech for a spot? Not a chance, the playoffs are still primarily about creating the most compelling content for television, and the average person who doesn't care about any of these schools would rather see Virginia Tech or North Carolina than Wake Forest or Bowling Green. Also remember that the vast majority of those teams that win 11 or more in any given season win their conference championships too, they're going to get an autobid. 2017's week 15 rankings are an example of what most normal years look like. 2021's week 15 is the extreme unusual case (autobid taken by mid-major, huge glut of 10+ win teams in the top 25).

I did purposely draw this with the skew, and with the mean between 7 and 8. I think the team has a higher maximum upside than maximum downside, just because returning production is so valuable to college football teams, and VT is top 5 in the country in this respect (and that returning production finished the season 6-3, i.e. on pace for 8-4, so it's not chopped liver). Then you get into all the other factors, VT's average margin in their wins, the fact that their 3 ACC losses came to teams a combined 32-9, how there's probably only 1 team (Clemson) who's a definite favorite over VT and the others are tossups (Rutgers, GT, BC, Syracuse, Duke, Miami), how of those tossups VT easily beat 2 of them last year and 1 just lost their coach, etc. Essentially, if the team handles the psychological aspect that you note, and they don't suffer any injuries to the most critical of players, there's a favorable environment to see a path where VT doesn't need as many lucky breaks as you might think to win a lot of games this year. But, it's like a hot humid day in the summer, the conditions are there for a severe thunderstorm, it doesn't mean one will definitely happen on top of you, but the ingredients are there and it's more likely than if the temperature was 20 degrees colder.

I think it boils down to there being a disconnect between what they think VT culture is (or was, in the distant past), and what the current VT culture actually is.