After last night's College Football Championship Game, I took a quick spin through the TSL boards and was mildly surprised to see comments going back about ten pages. Hokie fans seemed really interested in this one, more interested than they were in the 2015 Ohio State-Oregon game.
That makes sense. VT has a recent history with both Alabama and Clemson that has left a big psychic imprint on Hokie fans. Here's my take on recent games between the Hokies and these two teams:
Sep. 5, 2009: #5 Alabama 34, #7 VT 24: This game was not as close as the score indicated, as Bama outgained VT 498-155. Alabama clearly had the Hokies outclassed, although Ryan Williams had some impressive plays and the Hokies got a little BeamerBall from Dyrell Roberts on a KO return. This was Nick Saban's first national champion Alabama team.
Oct. 1, 2011: #13 Clemson 23, #11 VT 3: Clemson broke a five-game VT winning streak in the series with a suffocating defeat in Lane Stadium. It would be Virginia Tech's only regular season loss of the year.
Dec. 3, 2011: #21 Clemson 38, #5 VT 10: The Tigers annihilated the Hokies in Charlotte and brought Frank Beamer's great run at Virginia Tech back down to earth. From this point on, including this game, Frank's once-lofty Hokies would go 29-25 until his retirement.
Oct. 20, 2012: #14 Clemson 38, VT 17: Clemson outgained the Hokies 406-295 and turned a 17-10 half time lead in a 31-10 romp at the end of the third quarter. With this win, Clemson had outscored the Hokies 99-30 in three straight wins.
Aug. 31, 2013: #1 Alabama 35, Virginia Tech 10: This game was closer than the score, as VT played great defense and outgained the Tide 212-206. It was one of Bud Foster's better efforts as a DC. But the Alabama talent difference was enormous on special teams, as the Tide's huge athletic players ran circles around VT's small, unathletic special teamers on their way to TDs in the punt return (72 yards) and kickoff return (94 yard) phases of the game.
In short, Virginia Tech's two encounters with Alabama pointed out how far apart the Hokies were from being elite. Tech was very close from 1999-2007, but by 2009, the gap had started to grow.
As for Clemson, Hokie fans had perceived the Tigers as soft and beatable up until 2011, but by the time the Tigers were done beating Virginia Tech soundly three straight times in two seasons, Tech fans had to grudgingly admit that Clemson had bypassed Virginia Tech, both on the recruiting trail and on the field.
Perhaps more than any other opponents from 2009 to 2013, Alabama and Clemson documented Virginia Tech's fall from annual national championship contender to a program with a lot of catching up to do. Outside of those two teams, Stanford is the only other squad I can think of that slapped the Hokies silly during that stretch of time from 2009-2013.
The question is, can Virginia Tech catch up? Can the Hokies once again become a ten-win team with a shot at making the playoffs, if things break right in a given year?
Everyone's simple answer to that is, "Sure. Get back to recruiting better. Look how well Clemson recruits, and look how well Alabama recruits. "
That answer's not wrong, but it's only a partial answer. That answer is grounded in what used to make Virginia Tech successful, not what is necessary to make them successful in the future.
What used to make Virginia Tech successful was strong in-state recruiting, a dash of Bud Foster, and a weak ACC. But that's only part of the formula in the future, and as Clemson and Florida State have demonstrated in the last three seasons, "a weak ACC" is off the table.
Recruiting
Obviously, recruiting needs to get better. Alabama's special teams success in the 2013 game, when Christion Jones ran back a punt for a touchdown and a kickoff for a touchdown, pointed out that "depth" isn't just a question of being able to, say, rotate two defensive lines in and out, or to have a good backup cornerback to replace a guy who hurts his knee. It's a question of being able to field elite athletes at all positions at all times, including special teams.
Look at the lack of athleticism of Virginia Tech's players in the punt return and kickoff return highlights from that 2013 Alabama game:
In watching the championship game last night, I concluded that it wasn't a lack of talent, depth or physicality that did Clemson in, though a lot of their guys did get injured and gimpy in the two playoff games. Clemson's defensive line in particular went toe-to-toe with Alabama's offensive line and controlled them. Alabama's Derrick Henry had 158 yards on 36 carries, but one of those was a 50-yarder; on his other 35 carries, he only averaged 3.1 yards per carry and certainly didn't dominate Clemson physically. I thought he looked tentative when confronted by Clemson's DL, something you can't say often about Derrick Henry.
Clemson outgained Alabama 550-473, so the Tigers weren't out-talented. They simply made too many mistakes, by turning it over on a critical interception, blowing coverages for easy touchdowns, and giving up a key onsides kick because Alabama exploited a flaw in Clemson's alignment.
Back to Virginia Tech: we've talked about recruiting a lot in our articles, and there's not really any new ground to cover when looking at the past. There's no sense in continuing to bemoan how Virginia Tech and Virginia have lost the state to SEC interlopers, Florida State, UNC and others, including (this year) Duke and Rutgers, for crying out loud. Virginia Tech clearly needs to recruit better in-state.
But I think there's a perception that VT recruiting suffered because Frank Beamer got old, VT coaches didn't have Twitter accounts, and there are no under-the-radar recruits due to camps and 7-on-7 football.
Those are all true, but it's more involved than that. In recent years, Virginia Tech has added some recruiting support personnel in Chuck Cantor (Director, Player Personnel for Football) and Thomas Guerry (Director, High School Relations for Football), and in recent interviews, Justin Fuente has said he is going to add at least one more recruiting-related position.
Frank's retirement takes care of the aged-head-coach issue, and Cantor and Guerry and the interns that work under them make the Hokies look a little more jazzy on Twitter. I'm sure Cantor and Guerry do more than just tweet and do fancy Photoshop graphics, but the extent of what they do is unknown, because they are off-limits to media.
But they are only two guys and an intern or two. What's happening at other schools like Alabama and Clemson is that the recruiting support staff is enormous, and they scout prospects, evaluate film, communicate with prospects and coaches, etc. Many of them are former coaches who excel at evaluating prospects, and at the very least, they've got Cantor and Guerry outnumbered.
That segues into -- and is actually a subset of -- another major difference between Virginia Tech and places like Alabama and Clemson: support staff.
Multi-million Dollar Support Staffs
Jon Solomon of CBSSports.com wrote an excellent article about how much money Alabama and Clemson plow into football support staffs, how much they spend, and what functions those staff members provide:
Alabama, Clemson Roll Into Title Game with $3 Million Support StaffsA picture is worth a thousand words, so let me boil Solomon's article down into Hokie terms.
Here's Virginia Tech's entire football operation, from head coach to assistant coach to recruiting support.
Here's Clemson's:
And here's Alabama's:
Virginia Tech's list has 16 people on it. Clemson's list has 29. Alabama's list has 33. We're outnumbered, folks. And some of Clemson and Alabama's people have impressive resumes. Clemson Assistant AD of Football Player Development -- a non-coaching position -- is Brad Scott, a former head coach at South Carolina and a Clemson assistant coach for 13 years. No offense to any of Virginia Tech's support staff, but they're no Brad Scott, and they're not paid like Scott, either; he makes $208k a year.
This isn't news. We have highlighted this in articles before. One thing Solomon pointed out in his article is that this is a relatively new phenomenon in college football:
Shortly after arriving at Alabama in 2007, Nick Saban created a new cottage industry: football support staff. These people can help football programs in many different ways, depending on certain NCAA restrictions, such as recruiting, analyzing film, mentoring players, managing video, handling travel operations and building players' strength and speed.
So it hasn't always been this way, and the enormous support staffs, and all the functions they provide, are something that has gone on in the background and has helped the elite football programs separate themselves from a Hokie football program that up through 2007 or so was very competitive with the top programs in the country.
In order to compete at the truly highest levels, Virginia Tech is going to have to do this sort of thing. Those huge lists of people don't just "help football programs recruit better" âĻ more importantly, they take some of the load off of the coaches, who can shed some of their responsibilities and get back to doing more of their core function: coaching.
Here's a random example of the advantage that a large support staff gives you: Clemson and Alabama both used their support staff to scout potential championship game opponents, before they had even played their national semifinal games.
From Solomon's article:
Both schools used football analysts -- people with coaching backgrounds who by NCAA rule can't coach on the field -- to evaluate both potential championship game opponents even before the semifinal games were played.