We have posted a couple articles in the last week that have really resonated with Hokie football fans, drawing a ton of comments. Number one was my article about the Sun Bowl, in which my main point was that the Hokie football program doesn't have the edge, the toughness, that it used to.
Sounds like everyone single one of you agrees, based on the comments that followed the article. I specifically avoided using the word "soft," but perhaps I should have gone there.
If VT has gone "soft" as a program, then everyone shares some responsibility here: the coaches, the players, and even the fans.
And the administration. I've heard from a bunch of Hokie fans that "this all started when Jim Weaver started Hokies Respect" ... the thinking being that the emphasis by the administration on being nice and respectful has made everything associated with Hokie football, from the coaches to the players to the fans, well ... nice and respectful. And less successful on the football field. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
If you've been reading our articles here on TSL, you know we're not fond of Hokies Respect. In concept, it's a good idea. Don't mistreat opposing fans, don't be an obnoxious fool (drunk or not), etc. But I've never been guilty of that stuff, anyway. I remember making an effort, during the 2003 Hurricane Isabel game against Texas A&M, to personally thank A&M fans for making the trip and attending the game. I shook some random hands and told them "welcome to Blacksburg." And that was before Hokies Respect was a formal policy.
There's a finger-wagging aspect to Hokies Respect that makes it annoying, and the campaign has always been more than a little goofy and awkward. "You cheer, they score. You respect, they soar." Really? And remember the cheesy cartoons (scroll down after clicking that link) that ran on the video screen during football games, some of which ironically depicted the Hokie bird violently whacking misbehaving fans over the head? And the canned speeches from former athletes and other people prior to games are the definition of "stilted."
I've grown to dislike the campaign over the years. Eventually, being repeatedly told not to do something that you've never done before anyway gets really irritating. And remember, I haven't been in the stands since the 2011 season ... and yet, Hokies Respect still rubs me the wrong way.
To be fair, I was once told that Jim Weaver, who publicly took the brunt for the campaign, had it forced on him from on high. After hearing horror stories of WVU fans mistreating Hokie fans in Morgantown during the 2003 game, I'm sure Weaver thought it was a good idea to remind fans not to get out of hand (whether they needed to be reminded of it or not).
And there's a general trend in high school and college athletics towards more respectful behavior from players and fans. So it's not just a Virginia Tech Hokies Respect thing; it's everywhere.
Nonetheless, let's take the temperature of the fan base, or at least those of you who read my articles. Virginia Tech is going to have a new athletic director soon, and change is afoot, so what do you think Virginia Tech should do with Hokies Respect?
Attrition a hot topic as well
The second article that hit a vein with Hokie fans was Chris Coleman's article on attrition. Chris told me about the idea for the article, but he expressed concern that some fans might not like it, because it makes the coaching staff look like they're forcing players out of the program because they don't contribute on the field.
I personally am okay with that practice, feeling that it's a necessary step to being competitive, but we could see some fans saying things like, "We have an obligation to educate these kids that we recruited, Frank promised their parents he would take care of them," etc. Those are perfectly valid viewpoints in the struggle to balance the competition side of college athletics with the academic side (which has always been tenuous at best).
Number one, the article drew 115 comments, way more than either one of us expected, and number two, not a single response expressed strong disapproval of the concept of managed attrition. A couple of comments expressed that it was a "shame" that things unfold this way, and one commenter took the coaching staff to task for doing a "half-ass" job of recruiting, thus leading to this situation, but overall, the comments understood that performance-based attrition is a necessary evil, if you want to be competitive.
Beyond that, many of the comments were extremely complimentary of Chris' work. At Tuesday's Syracuse-VT basketball game, one member of the media even went so far as to compliment Chris on the article. (Not that other media don't do things like that; I just found it interesting that this person brought it up to Chris when he saw him.)
It's worth reminding you that about two and a half years ago, I wrote an article about oversigning, a practice that goes hand in hand with attrition. (They're inseparable, like peanut butter and jelly.) The article makes a nice companion piece to what Chris wrote, so I grouped them together under the tag Oversigning and attrition.
Thoughts on the National Championship and the ACC
Kudos to Florida State for wrestling the national championship out of the clutches of the SEC and returning it to Tallahassee. I remember reading an article years ago in the ACC Sports Journal, back before they had a decent online component to their print magazine (so I don't have a link, sorry), about how former Nick Saban assistant Jimbo Fisher was applying the Saban model to the Seminoles to return them to glory. Mission accomplished.
Message board poster Gobbler-100 put into words a thought I was having during the game, but couldn't put my finger on. Speaking about FSU, he said:
They played mediocre teams all year, were off for 30 days, caught nothing but straight hell right in the face for the first 25 minutes of the game, Auburn recovered the first 5 loose balls...and they still somehow won the game. They basically had to learn how to play big boy football against a fast, physical, strategically sound opponent in real time FOR THE NATIONAL TITLE.
That's a great point. You could tell in the first half, as Auburn built a 21-3 lead, that Florida State was clearly not ready for the SEC's best. The Noles just didn't see that kind of intensity coupled with that kind of talent all season long, not even from Clemson in Death Valley.
Jameis Winston was confused, apprehensive, and inaccurate. The FSU defense was struggling just to get lined up properly against Gus Malzahn's hurry-up offense. FSU generally looked out of sorts.
Then the FSU coaching staff took some of the load off Jameis Winston, and the FSU defense got its sea legs under it. Aided by a fake punt that worked and a kickoff return for a touchdown, FSU stormed into the lead, 27-24. After they fell behind 31-27 and needed to go 80 yards in 1:19, Winston had recovered to the point where he went 6-7 during that drive and made a great throw to win the game.
I don't usually save games played by other teams on my DVR, but I've got this one, and I'm going to keep it and rewatch the second half. It was that good.
I had another thought this morning as I contemplated FSU being national champions once again, namely that you could argue that many ACC teams are returning to their "historical norms," however you define that. I guess for a guy like me, the "historical norm" is the state of the program in the late 1970s to early-mid 1990s, before all the conference shifting started, television got so big, and college football exploded.
Florida State is the national champion once again. Clemson is a strong program. Wake Forest has gotten over its inexplicable mid-2000s fit of success and hasn't made a bowl game in four years. Virginia has sunken back down to pre-George Welsh levels. UNC is good, but nothing special. Georgia Tech and Boston College are solid, middle-of-the-pack teams.
After that, the theme starts to break down. Duke won ten games for the first time ever. NC State, winners of 7 to 9 games so often in the 80s and 90s, cratered to three wins and went 0-8 in the conference this year. Miami, the terror of college football in the 1980s, went 9-4 this year but is a pushover for anyone with a pulse ... even Virginia Tech's offense, which arguably doesn't have a pulse.
And where is Virginia Tech? Prior to the mid-90s, the Hokies were a tough team that was good for 7-9 wins a year, like NC State, but couldn't knock off the big boys and was clearly outclassed when taking a step up in competition.
Ouch. I really didn't intend for this section to be a slam on Virginia Tech, because I wasn't even thinking about the Hokies when I went down this mental path. But they clearly have some work to do.
Back to the national championship: like many of you, I thought Brent Musberger tilted too strongly towards SEC and Auburn love during the game. He failed to register what a damn good comeback Florida State made. At one point, the Noles had outscored Auburn 24-3, turning a 21-3 deficit into a 27-24 lead. 24-3 is pretty dominant, but that fact seemed to escape Brent. Even as the clock was running down on FSU's victory, Brent and Herbie spent a little too much time laying it on thick for Auburn, when the Seminoles had just demonstrated that, once they got their feet under them, they were clearly the best team in college football.
Charlie Strong to Texas, and what that means
A little over a year ago, when Louisville was offered ACC membership and accepted, it was eye-opening to find out that the Cardinals, at the time, boasted a bigger athletic budget than anyone in the ACC, despite receiving lower TV revenues from the Big East than ACC schools received.
Louisville also has a very well-rounded athletics program, and an aggressive, successful -- and um, very well-paid -- athletic director in Tom Jurich.
Jurich went hard to the hole in January 2013 and signed football coach Charlie Strong, who had just won the Sugar Bowl over #3 Florida, to an 8-year deal worth $3.7 million annually. That put Strong on course to be the highest-paid coach in the ACC upon Louisville's entry into the conference, almost a million dollars a year higher than FSU's Jimbo Fisher.
And yet it wasn't enough to stop Texas from poaching Strong from Louisville.
I'm about to tell you something you already know: there are a handful of programs in this country that can take anyone from anybody. Texas, with the highest athletics revenues in college sports, is one of those programs. Strong was on course to get paid more than a guy who just won the national championship (Fisher), and yet he's gone.
It wasn't just about money. I don't know if Jurich was willing to match Texas' money, which will reportedly be in the range of $5 million, but even if Jurich was willing to go that high, Texas just could have gone higher, until Strong and his agent cried uncle.
Louisville will never have the recruiting base that Texas has. Louisville can match the Horns in almost everything else, like facilities and perks, but they probably can't match the money, and they sure can't offer a recruiting base like the state of Texas.
If Virginia Tech is successful in hiring a great coach to replace Frank Beamer when the time comes, whether that coach is the next guy, or the guy after that, or whatever, Virginia Tech won't be able to keep that coach if the really big boys of the world come calling. Texas, USC, Alabama ... they can all get who they want, if they want them bad enough.
Alabama was rumored to be interested in Frank Beamer during the 2000 season, leading to a conversation between me and Paul Finebaum that I'll never forget, but of course, nothing came of it. Maybe that was loyalty on Frank's part, or maybe the rumor just wasn't true. But if Bama ever really comes calling for a VT coach in the future, that coach is gone.
Jurich reportedly will hire pock-marked Bobby Petrino (I mean his reputation, not his face) to replace Strong. Petrino is a hell of a coach, but he's got an image problem, to put it nicely. By hiring him, Louisville just pointed out in no uncertain terms that they don't care; they want to win football games.
That's yet more evidence that Virginia Tech is going up against schools who put winning on the bottom line, before all else. I'm not saying that to be preachy; I'm just saying that Petrino's history didn't slow Jurich down one bit, because the guy can coach.
I've got more I could say on some other topics, but I'll set those aside for another day and yield the floor to your comments.