- 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.