State of Hokie Nation

It took me until today to fully realize the importance of last season’s game against Arkansas State. The Hokies were coming off an uncomfortably close 17-10 win against East Carolina on the road and rookie quarterback Logan Thomas went 8-of-20 for 91 yards, no touchdowns and an interception.

The Red Wolves were 1-1 when they came to Blacksburg having blown out Memphis but got pushed around by Illinois 33-15.

The Sun Belt Conference being what it is, only the most pessimistic of Hokie fans thought this game would be a challenge. The final score of the game was 26-7 but it was how the team got there that bothered many fans. Logan Thomas threw two interceptions and David Wilson was held to 85 yards on 20 carries. The offense as a whole looked shaky and failed to score from the one yard line in the first quarter.

But nobody cared that the Hokies held State to just 7 points and 269 yards. Nobody was interested in the 292 yards our tight end recruit threw for that game or Danny Coale’s five catches for 112 yards in the first quarter alone.

Did they know that the Red Wolves would finish the season averaging 469 yards and 32 points per game? No. Did they know that this would be the last loss for the Red Wolves until their bowl game? No. Did they know that the Red Wolves would finish the season ranked 25th nationally in scoring defense? No.

So many fans, particularly students, left the game early in disgust but that doesn’t mean the ones that stayed were any less upset. “Logan Thomas is a piece of shit quarterback,” I heard. “We need an actual quarterback back there, not a tight end. Somebody who can throw the damn football.”

Everybody I walked by seemed to expect that nothing would change when Tyrod Taylor graduated. We “knew” we were the better team, we knew that we would win this game and we knew we would win 10 games on the season. Many fans also “knew” we would win the ACC Coastal division and play in a BCS Bowl.

Fast forward to the beginning of this season. Fans once again “knew” a lot about this football team. Logan Thomas is already a legendary quarterback who will have no trouble learning an entirely new offensive scheme with only two other returning starters back around him. After all, he would be a consensus Top 5 overall draft pick. The defense will be the best it’s been in years despite having no depth whatsoever in the secondary.

Whoops.

Virginia Tech is now 3-2 with losses to Pittsburgh – who opened the season with a loss to Youngstown State – and Cincinnati. Everybody is looking for someone to blame and rightfully so. Neither of these losses should have happened. Anybody who knows anything about football and watched these games can tell you that the Hokies were the better overall team. Without turnovers in the red zone and slow starts, these games turn out differently and I’m probably not writing this article because while the troubles I’m attempting to address would still be there, there would be no sense of urgency for me to do anything about it.

Let’s say I write this article just after the 42-7 win against Austin Peay and the team ends up being 5-0 right now instead of 3-2. No one takes me seriously because, while there are difficulties, we’re doing well enough to make it back to the ACC Championship and, considering all of the losses on the offense, that’s good enough.

And right there is the underlying problem the Virginia Tech program is facing. Let me explain.
 

This team was built with and because of Frank Beamer. His coaching philosophy is this: we’ll find the best kids that nobody else wants, coach them up and put the best ones on special teams to create a mismatch.
 

That was in the 1990s when it was a luxury to have a cell phone, recruiting sites didn’t exist nor did the BCS nor Twitter and spread offenses were considered foolish. It is 2012 and the college football landscape is drastically different but Virginia Tech as a team has not changed their identity one bit.

The coaches still go out and find four, not five, star players where others don’t even look, they still emphasis special teams and they consistently crank out ten-win seasons. “Beamerball” fits the school as a whole perfectly and there is no reason whatsoever to make a drastic change from this.

The issue is that no changes have been made in nearly any capacity. Other teams around the country have seen how Frank Beamer succeeded and have mimicked his special teams philosophy, thus removing the decisive edge the Hokies had. Bud Foster is one of the best defensive coordinators in the country and is the only coach to seriously modify how he coaches during his time in Blacksburg, switching from a 4-4 to a 4-3 to better cover more passing teams.

Now we are absolutely required to have the better athletes and coaches to win games. In the ACC, this works well enough to get 10 wins annually but, as fans are all too well aware, this does not work out well out of conference or when the ACC has elite teams. The Hokies are 1-28 all-time against Top 5 teams, 17-58 against Top 15 teams and 48-79-1 against Top 25 teams.

But despite these pathetic statistics versus ranked teams, we as fans have grown a sense of entitlement. It’s as if we forget that Virginia Tech was an entirely irrelevant program before 1995 and that the Hokies have played in a single national championship and lost it. We get angry when Enter Sandman isn’t considered one of the greatest traditions in the country when it has been around for less than two decades.

To be perfectly blunt, Lane Stadium has lost some of its luster. The games are sell outs and the students turn out but they aren’t terribly loud unless it is versus a ranked team and throw paper fucking airplanes in the middle of them. Many fans, particularly students, leave the game early because “the game is already over.” That is simply not okay because it adds to the problem the players and coaches have.

Speaking of the players, they are saying the right things but are failing to do them on the field. It would truly be unfathomable for the Hokies to beat a ranked team 62-0 or 51-7 again. The closest we’ve come was a 31-7 win in 2009 against a #9 Miami team that finished the season 9-4 and ranked 19th. When Virginia Tech was still emerging as a power, players like Corey Moore came out with something to prove every single game. They finished games with tenacity and never in a million years would have allowed a loss to JMU or Pitt, especially not one two years after the other.

Antone Exum and James Gayle were great shit talkers this offseason but have been largely invisible or noticed for all the wrong reasons. Then the team gets back on Twitter after the games to tell us that it won’t happen again when it does two weeks later.

And the coaches have failed miserably to adjust to the changing recruiting times. Bringing back Shane Beamer and reshuffling some of the staff to help with recruiting has been fantastic but this move has come far too late. The ranked teams by and large bring in dozens of the nation’s highest rated players while the Hokies continue to get just one or two of those players per year. And with the explosion of recruiting interest, fewer and fewer players are flying under the radar for Tech to swoop in and pick up.

The program is now sending slightly more players to the NFL than it was in the late 90s and early 2000s and doing so in higher rounds but the teams they leave aren’t ranked as high or accomplish as much during the season. This discrepancy comes down to two things: the coaches as a whole have not done a great job adjusting to the new schemes and facets of the game and the program thinking it is better than it actually is.

Every underdog out there gives Virginia Tech its best shot and we more than often fail to hit back until late in the game or, like in this season, it is too late. This is why I said that the fact it took me so long to write this article is the underlying problem the program is facing.

We, the players, coaches and fans, are only acting when it is beyond apparent that the things we’ve been worried about for years have finally broken rather than trying new ways to fix the problem when they first pop up. We cannot assume we are the best but have to go out and prove it every game.

The Virginia Tech football team has woven itself deep into the identity of the university and I refuse to sit idly by and let things get worse. People say it’s easy to criticize when you’re not a player or a coach and those people are right. But when the players and coaches refuse to do what is necessary to keep Virginia Tech in the national conversation, somebody’s got to do something. Let’s all do something more than talk shit about a rookie quarterback’s mediocre day. Let’s all offer the support the team and coaches need but also be critical enough to make sure that change happens when it needs to. Let’s go back and earn the reputation we’ve built as a team and a fan base. Let’s go Hokies.