This season is getting to be a real slog, and blowing an 18-point lead in less than 12 minutes didn’t help.
It’s getting difficult to find new ways to talk about the Hokies, or different angles to take when discussing a team that is … finding new ways to lose every week. Okay, I guess we could talk about those new ways (and I actually will a little bit in this article), so what I really meant to say is, it’s just getting difficult.
If you read last week’s MT, then you know that I traveled to Raleigh for this game on Thursday and then went to Columbia, SC to see the Gamecocks play against Missouri on Saturday. I didn’t get home until about 9:30 Sunday night, and my DVR didn’t record this game, and all I got to see was the condensed game on the ACC Digital Network on YouTube. So that’s a long-winded way of saying this one’s going to be a little short.
First, let’s talk about the penalties, specifically the ten false starts on the Hokies. That’s a mind-blowing, historical number, and Damian Salas at hokiesports.com has provided some new tools that enable us to take a look at penalties on a game-by-game basis and a season-by-season basis. So let’s do that.
Hokies on Near-Record Pace for Penalties
I’m betting that I’ve already carted out this quote from my post-ODU-game Monday Thoughts, but let’s do it again:
“ … the penalty numbers will come down for this year’s Hokies. Last season, the No. 100 team in the nation in penalties per game, Syracuse, committed just 7.00 per game. Teams don’t go around committing 15 penalties per game.”
That quote is like a Jelly-of-the-Month club membership. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
With 13 penalties in this one, including those ten false starts, Virginia Tech is now averaging 8.75 penalties per game. That’s a historic pace, running 0.08 behind the 1993 team’s 8.83 per game. Here are the ten worst seasons in penalties per game since 1987, per the hokiesports.com database:
That is not a list you want to be on. It’s yet another metric that is the worst it’s been in 30 years. They’re piling up. Here’s a look at penalties per game for every season from 1987-2022.
The data in table form is located here.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I don’t have the time to do an exhaustive study of pre-snap penalties, but suffice to say that this season has been fraught with them. Let’s specifically look at false start penalties, which first reared their ugly head against ODU (five of them), but unexpectedly accelerated in this game to never-before-seen levels.
Here are the seasons with 20 or more false start penalties since 1987:
- 2022: 27
- 2021: 24
- 2014: 29
- 2007: 30
- 2004: 25
That’s it. That’s the list. 2022 is about to set a new record.
(Note: false starts are not included consistently in the database before about 1998. It looks like they might have been lumped in with illegal procedure penalties at times before then. Damian Salas could probably answer this question for me, but I’m working under schedule pressure and have to keep moving on. I’ll come back and edit this if any clarifying comments are made or information is received.)
It is no surprise – and I’m sure others have reported on this – that the ten false starts are the most in one game since 1987, by far:
- 2022 NC State: 10
- 2014 UNC: 7
- 1994 Arkansas State: 7*
- 1992 Virginia: 6*
- 2022 ODU: 5
- 2012 Bowling Green: 5
- 2007 BC: 5
- 2003 Miami: 5
- *listed as illegal procedures, so might not all be false starts
It seems as if every week I’m reporting on something bad that has either never been done before or hasn’t been done in 30 years. It’s exhausting and disheartening. It’s whack-a-mole, but the moles hit back.
So what is the solution? Not the solution to fix everything – there are too many issues, and I’m not a football coach, nor did I sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But rather, the solution to make it through this.
Hmm, good question.
Looking Far Into the Past
These Hokies are currently 2-6. Are they on course to be 2-10? 3-9? 4-8? Even better? Time will tell. But regardless of what happens in the future – heck, they could go 6-6 and make a bowl – this team feels like a 2-10 or 3-9 team. They’ve lost five in a row.That puts them on par with the 1987 and 1988 teams, Frank Beamer’s first two teams that went 2-9 and 3-8, back when teams only played 11 games. Never mind the 1992 team. That’s ground well covered. They were a good team that didn’t know how to win. This looks like a bad team that doesn’t know how to win.
What was it like to go 5-17 over the course of two years? I honestly don’t remember, even though those were the first two seasons after I graduated, and I was really into Tech football. So let’s take a look at the schedule and results for 1987:
Frank’s debut was a hard-fought two-score loss to a 10-2 Clemson team (truth is, Tech only had 60 yards of offense and scored on a KO return, but bear with me), and the Hokies were competitive – just looking at the scores – with good teams from Virginia, Syracuse, and Miami. Tech stomped 2-9 Navy, beat 4-7 Cincinnati, and really only got whipped a couple of times, against South Carolina and inexplicably Tulane.
How about 1988, when Virginia Tech went 3-8?
Ooof! That’s a tough schedule. The eight teams that beat Virginia Tech had a combined record of 75-19. Wow. VT had two FBS (Division 1-A) wins over ECU and Cincinnati (combined 6-16) and a win over FCS (Division 1-AA) JMU. Tech got blown out a few times, but those were against teams that won ten or 11 games.
Frank’s first two teams had terrible records (0.227 winning percentage), but they stood toe-to-toe with some good teams and only got outscored 564-379 (25.6-17.2)
How about Brent Pry’s first season, with limited data (just eight games)?
(The numbers are computer rankings. Click here for the author's power rankings.)
That’s a mixed bag. It’s a 0.25 winning percentage, comparable to Frank. Pry has beaten the worst two teams he faced, and he kept it close against an NC State team that is ranked and is 6-2. But he also lost to some mediocre-to-bad teams. His team has been outscored 198-155 (24.8-19.4), similar margins to Frank’s first two teams.
Two comments: (1) I don’t mean to compare Frank Beamer to Brent Pry and to say that Pry is the next Beamer. That kind of talk is disingenuous and already tired; and (2) looking at records and scores is a very crude way to examine a team. We are watching this team in real-time with detailed stats, and scoreboard-reading is insufficient.
Or is it? There are bad teams, and there are horrendous teams. When you look at this team up close and in detail, there’s a tendency to feel like they’re horrendous. But really, they’re just bad. I’m reminded of one of Cher’s lines from Clueless: "She's a full-on Monet ... It's like a painting, see? From far away, it's okay, but up close it's a big old mess." The 2022 Hokies are a Monet.
… what? You’re reacting to me quoting lines from Clueless? Hey, if you’ve never seen Clueless or don’t like it, that’s a you problem, not a me problem. Stick around, and I’ll eventually quote Pitch Perfect or Bring It On. I’m comfortable with who I am.
You want something that’s really botched? Colorado is 1-7 and has been outscored 313-130 (39-16). One slot down the alphabet is Colorado State, 2-6 and outscored 257-100 (32-13).
Yep. That’s what we’re reduced to. Comparing ourselves to other teams that ranked No. 3 and No. 6 in last week’s CBS Sports’s latest Bottom 25 (where the Hokies were last seen at No. 24), and examining scores from 1987-1988.
My Trip to Columbia
I could talk about my trip to Raleigh and my trip to Columbia, but I’ll stick to my trip to Columbia for Saturday’s game between the Gamecocks and the Missouri Tigers. I’ve got a son who’s a senior there, and I’m sorry to say this is the first game I’ve been to with him. I couldn’t make one in his freshman fall of 2019, and then COVID blew a hole in everything, and the time went by. I regret it.In a lot of ways, it was like watching a Virginia Tech game: Frustrating. South Carolina (5-2 coming in) was favored by 3.5 points but lost 23-10 to a Missouri team that came into the game with a 3-4 record and had been struggling on offense.
If you want to know how the game went, the scoring summary and stats tell the tale:
203 yards of offense for the Gamecocks. Apparently, this is a recurring theme in Shane Beamer’s 1.5 years there: the offense under OC Marcus Satterfield isn’t getting it done. The only reason I know who South Carolina’s OC is comes from hearing fans curse his name all game long. I had no clue a “Satterfield” was coaching SC’s offense prior to Saturday, but I sure know it now.
Anyway, it was the first South Carolina game I had been to, and college football is mostly the same everywhere you go. I didn’t get a good video of SC’s entrance, but I did get a good video of the break between the third and fourth quarters, when they played their signature “Sandstorm” to get the fans fired up:
They were down 20-10 going into the fourth. A lot of the crowd (which wasn’t close to filling up Williams-Brice) had already cleared out, especially the students. There were loud videos on the scoreboard. The signature “get 'em fired up” song played. Like I said, college football is mostly the same everywhere you go.
In case you missed the podcast today and didn’t hear this story: I emailed the SC football office early in the week and asked if I could come visit briefly with Shane Beamer at his office on Friday afternoon. I told his assistant that we were acquaintances from his days at Virginia Tech (there’s a story on the podcast about me hanging out with him in Frank’s luxury box during the 2006 Virginia Tech-Kent State game, when he had a week off from coaching at Mississippi State) and that all I wanted was five minutes and a chance for a picture.
She answered the next day, indicating to me that she had indeed talked to Shane, and he could meet briefly for five minutes at 1:50 PM. That was the latest he could do, but it was too early for me to make it (remember, I was going to a late game in Raleigh and had to make the 4-hour trip the next day), so I thanked her and said I wasn’t able to make it.
The point is, Shane carved out the time. It’s a quality that both he and his dad have, and I’m betting that some day in the future, if I email Brent Pry and request five minutes on a gameday, he’ll say yes. He’s that kind of guy, too.
But it’s a brutal business, and you have to win. It feels like the Hokies are far away from that, but it also felt like they were far away in 1987 and 1988, and it eventually happened. Right now, it’s very tough seeing the sausage get made. Here’s to hoping it does eventually end up as sausage, because I like sausage. I don't like losing.