A lot of transfer portal coverage goes to individual moves, but it is highly instructive to zoom out and look at the overall market.

Stable programs generally have a philosophy about how much they want recruit from the portal, but teams with new coaches tend to see large portal shifts, be them positive or negative. As a result, a market analysis is necessary each year to understand what is going on with each program.

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For this analysis, I looked at all 17 teams that will compete in the ACC in 2024, and counted portal acquisitions and departures, as well as average portal rating from 247. I filtered out all players below a 0.86 rating because the focus here is on guys who are expected to make an impact on the field (not guys who need to shift down a level or two).

High volume talent importers

This is now two years in a row that Louisville has been especially active in the portal. I still want to see one more year of data before pronouncing that the new norm in the Jeff Brohm era, but even if the number dips a bit next year, the Cardinals appear to have adopted a recruiting strategy that leans heavily on the portal.

Boston College has a new coach and was sorely lacking talent, putting it in catch-up mode. The same is true for UVA, even though it is year 3 for Tony Elliot (such is the talent deficit in Charlottesville).

SMU is new to the league this year, and despite winning the AAC last year, clearly there was an opportunity, and need, to upgrade talent. Whether the Mustangs can continue on this pace in the future is uncertain.

The NC State Wolfpack seem to be active in the high profile transfer market year-in, year-out, and 2024 is no different. Dave Doeren has once again acquired much more talent than he lost.

Low volume talent importers

Cal brought in more, and better, talent than they lost, which is important given the level at which the program has performed lately (middling at best). One has to think the Golden Bears would have been net exporters had they not gotten the life-line from the ACC.

Syracuse, like Boston College, has a new coach who inherited a roster lacking talent. Fran Brown came in with a reputation as a good recruiter, and so far he has not disappointed Orange fans.

Florida St. continues to be very active under Mike Norvell, but now that the program is back to competing for National Championships, the talent flow is bi-directional. Those looking for an expanded role were usually highly recruited players out of high school who would be capable contributors at another P4 program.

After last year’s surprising success in the portal, Brent Key has brought more talent to Georgia Tech this offseason than he has lost. The Yellow Jackets are continuing to trend up.

Pitt netted out positive, but the guys they are bringing in are not quite as talented as they guys they are losing, if the ratings are accurate. One does get the sense that the Pat Narduzzi era could be approaching its end.

Virginia Tech returns almost the entire roster from last year, but the Hokies still managed to net out positively in the portal, with potentially one more signee to come.

Low volume talent exporters

Considering the offseason coaching change, and how successful Mike Elko was at Duke, things have gone about as well as could be hoped for in Manny Diaz’s first spring as the head coach in Durham. Given the lack of support for the football program, Duke is a perennial candidate to be a major talent exporter.

Mack Brown has long been lauded for his recruiting prowess, but his appeal with high schoolers has not fully translated with transfers. Perhaps the writing is on the wall, with Brown’s age a clear indicator that his tenure is approaching its endpoint. Negative recruiting is surely a contributing factor for the Tar Heels.

Wake Forest does not have a sufficient level of support (read: NIL $) in place to net out positively in the portal, but Dave Clawson has done a good job of minimizing his losses and pulling in a few guys who can probably help the Demon Deacons.

Miami has lost significant talent from a roster that underachieved last year. Things just don’t seem right down in Coral Gables. Are the Hurricanes really going to churn through another head coach?

It’s no surprise that Stanford is a net exporter, given the tough academic standards. Keeping the losses to five players isn’t bad, but the Cardinal are losing some of their best talent, and it’s not like this was a deep and talented roster last year.

High volume talent exporters

And now we’ve reached the Clemson portion of the program. The Tigers have lost seven players to the portal who all have the potential to be starters at another P4 school, and Dabo still refuses to mine the portal to make up for the losses. Perhaps it wouldn’t be an issue if the Tigers weren’t missing on so many of their supposedly highly rated high school recruits.

Closing thoughts

These numbers will continue to move, and updates to the database are not made in real-time anyway, but directionally, the the data make clear both the strategies employed by ACC schools, as well as who is doing well given their resources.

One has to think that Clemson would do well in the portal, if Dabo ever reversed course.

It seems like, in comparison, Brent Pry has found the sweet spot - be selective, get guys who are a good cultural fit, and prioritize those with local ties or prior relationships with a member of the coaching staff.

Perhaps you have noticed a recent uptick in preseason lists and prognostications from the usual suspects. Many are a variation on one (or more!) of the following:

“Hokies a Top 25 team”

“Is Virginia Tech a dark horse for the expanded playoff?”

“Hokies to challenge for ACC crown”

Although the regular season will not kick off for another five months, the spring interlude, with its still fluctuating rosters, serves as the beginning of the 2024 punditry cycle.

While it is fun and somewhat entertaining to see what the national press thinks of the boys in orange and maroon, I was curious about their track record when it comes to evaluating Virginia Tech football.

The best evaluations come from those with money on the line - oddsmakers, a group to which the media has dedicated increasing attention in recent years. So, as a proxy for the media’s ability to gauge the relative strength of the Hokies, I ran an analysis of Tech’s performance against Las Vegas.

What I found when I analyzed the data is a surprising disconnect between expectations and results over the last three years.

Hokies against the spread

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The precipitating event was the announcement that USC and UCLA would leave to join the Big Ten.

The entire process was a real world example of an extensive-form game. And it was a nightmare.

The result is that two-thirds of the current Pac-12 members will be in a worse position when the 2024 season kicks off than they were this season.

The ACC presidents were watching, and surely they took notes. They will not repeat the mistakes of their West Coast brethren.

Strategy games administrators play

Simultaneous game theory is a concept in the broader field of game theory, which is a mathematical framework for modeling scenarios where players (in this case schools) make decisions that affect the outcomes for all involved.

In a simultaneous game, each player makes their decisions or chooses their strategies at the same time, without knowledge of the other players' choices. The most classic example of this is the Prisoner's Dilemma, but many other games and real-world scenarios fit this model.

Key Concepts

1. Players: Individuals or entities making decisions in the game. In simultaneous games, all players are making their choices without definitive knowledge of the others' choices.

2. Strategies: The possible actions available to each player. In a simultaneous game, players must choose their strategy without knowing the strategies that other players will choose.

3. Payoffs: The outcomes resulting from the combination of strategies chosen by the players. Each player's payoff depends not only on their own strategy but also on the strategies chosen by other players.

4. Nash Equilibrium: A key concept in simultaneous games where players are in a state in which no one can benefit by changing their strategy while the other players keep theirs unchanged. It represents a stable state of the game where everyone has made their best possible decision, considering the decisions of others.

Types of Simultaneous Games:

1. Zero-Sum Games: Where one player's gain is exactly balanced by the losses of other players. In other words, the total payoff for all players is zero.

2. Non-Zero-Sum Games: Where the total payoff can vary, and players might have the potential to all be better or worse off.

Analysis Tools

• Payoff Matrix: A table that shows the payoffs for every possible combination of strategies by the players. It's especially useful in simultaneous games to visualize outcomes and strategize.

• Best Response: The strategy that will give a player the highest payoff given the strategies chosen by other players.

Real-World Applications

• Economics: Understanding market strategies where organizations must make decisions about pricing, product launches, etc., without knowing what their competitors will do.

• Political Science: Analyzing how countries or political groups might react to policy changes or treaties without knowing the actions other groups will take.

• Biology: Examining how different species might evolve strategies for survival without knowing the strategies of other species in their ecosystem.

In summary, simultaneous game theory is a way to mathematically analyze situations in which multiple parties make decisions at the same time, without knowing what the others will decide.

It is used to predict outcomes, understand strategic interactions, and identify the best courses of action in various scenarios ranging from economics to biology.

Administrative exercises

As you read this, we are in the early stages of the non-zero-sum simultaneous game that will determine the fates of the 17 schools that are slated to play football in the ACC in 2024.

Last year, the so called Magnificent Seven schools announced their openness to pursuing more lucrative options than are present within the status quo. Those schools were:

• Virginia Tech

• Virginia

• North Carolina

• NC State

• Clemson

• Florida St.

• Miami

Currently, there are 15 voting members in the ACC (Notre Dame gets a vote). Stanford, Cal, and SMU have not formally joined the conference yet, and therefore do not get a vote at the present time. However, once they are official members, they would almost certainly vote against any changes.

If the Florida St. lawsuit fails, then this entire article will be moot. But that lawsuit is likely to succeed enough to enable FSU to leave the league.

For anyone who missed it, I presented a detailed review of the formal complaint in a recent podcast episode.

So, assuming Florida St. is able to leave, and that is surely the assumption the other university presidents are working under, then the Seminoles, as well as every other school, will have to choose one of the following options:

• Remain in the ACC

• Pursue the creation of a new conference

• Pursue admission to an existing conference

• Go independent

Independence is, practically speaking, not feasible for the vast majority, if not all, of the current conference members. For that reason, I will focus on the other three options.

Through the use of payoff matrices, each school can game out it best option(s) vis-a-vis every other school. For example, Virginia Tech matches up with Florida St. as follows:

All numbers (shown in millions of dollars in annual revenue from media rights compared to the status quo) are hypothetical, but proportional to current market expectations.

The baseline option, stay in the ACC, assumes no change in the current media revenue that goes to each school. Under that assumption, if the league dropped below 15 teams, it would simply poach schools from other leagues to get back to the contractually required 15.

Other options have potential gains (and maybe losses) approximated via an annual value in millions of dollars in media revenue.

In this game, we see that the best strategic option for both teams is to pursue the creation of a new league.

While FSU is more valuable on the open market, neither is likely to see a lucrative offer from an existing conference.

If we run the exercise between Tech and Wake Forest, we see different results:

For the Hokies, the best strategy remains the same: start a new league. However, in this case, the numbers are lower because the game does not involve another football power opposite the Hokies.

In contrast, Wake Forest can only lose money in this game because it holds little media value. Therefore, the best move for the Demon Deacons is to remain in the ACC.

The problem is, they may not have that option. Eight Schools can vote to dissolve the league, and we can infer from the machinations of last spring that there were already seven “yes” votes before the FSU lawsuit was filed.

The likeliest result

Current ACC members could wait and see how the lawsuit turns out before making a move, but the odds favor, at the minimum, FSU winning a much lower exit fee, sufficient to allow the Seminoles to depart in time to play the 2025 season elsewhere.

So, if one assumes FSU is gone, then one must assume others will leave as well. That means those plans are likely being drawn up in real-time.

If we play the simultaneous game to its logical conclusion, the results would be the following:

• Eight (possibly nine) teams will vote to dissolve the conference before the final ruling in the FSU case.

• Those teams will then form a new league, perhaps poaching one other school in the process.

• The seven schools that voted against dissolving the league (plus Cal, Stanford, and SMU) will scramble to find homes in existing leagues, all at a major loss in revenue and prestige.

Who will be the eighth team?

Remember, this is all about television money. The two teams likely to be in contention are Louisville and Pitt.

Which would drive the best television viewer numbers when added to the current group of seven?

My guess would be Pitt, and the deciding point would be rivalries.

Louisville’s only rival is Kentucky, and the Wildcats will not leave the SEC. Pitt’s biggest rival is West Virginia, and I suspect the Mountaineers would leave the Big 12 to join the proposed new conference featuring the Magnificent Seven plus Pitt.

If WVU decides to stand pat, Louisville and Pitt would probably both be welcomed into the new conference.

The new conference would fit in a tighter geographic footprint and be chalk full of primary and secondary rivalries.

The conference slate would feature eight games (four at home and four on the road), with each team playing every other team once.

In keeping with the NCAA rules updated in 2016, the new conference championship would be played “between the top two teams in the conference standings following full round-robin, regular-season competition between all members of the conference”.

Would the new conference net the same media revenue on a per school basis as the SEC and Big Ten? It’s hard to say, but the one thing it would be devoid of would be completely interest-less games (think Minnesota vs. Illinois). That would increase the chance of splitting league games between multiple networks (e.g., ESPN and Fox).

My guess would be that the new conference will generate a little bit less, on average, in per school revenue than the P2, but its members will come out well ahead of the status quo. Depending on the revenue sharing agreement, top performing schools may be on par with, or perhaps ahead of (in some years), their SEC and Big Ten counterparts.

That, and the promise of a more exciting conference schedule, leaves me hopeful that the Hokies will come out a winner in this latest round of conference realignment.

Likewise, loyalty to local news networks was also a thing back then. Growing up in Montgomery County, Maryland, we always watched NBC 4. At 6:00 pm, that meant Jim Vance and Doreen Gentzler, who anchored that time slot together for 28 years. Bob Ryan was the meteorologist from 1980-2010, and the legendary George Michael covered sports from 1980-2007.

Evenings were crazy when I was growing up, with all three kids playing multiple sports. We seldom turned on the news at 6 and watched the whole hour. But before widespread adoption of the internet, if we needed an accurate forecast for the next day, we knew to flip on the tube at 6:48 in order to catch Bob Ryan. And then, my favorite, George Michael was on with sports by 6:52.

I’ve been thinking a lot about recruiting in Maryland and Northern Virginia lately, and perhaps that’s what sparked memories of George Michael. I’m sure he covered Tech’s run to the 2000 Sugar Bowl (National Championship game), but I don’t recall seeing much of the Hokies on a regular basis in Michael’s news segments.

Transcripts are not publicly available, and there is a dearth of recordings on YouTube. So, as a proxy measure, I went searching in newspapers. The Washington Post, to be precise.

The question top of mind is, what kind of coverage did the Hokies receive in the D.C. market in the program’s heyday, and what impact did it have on the program’s development? In addition, to what extent did the preeminent print publication in the DMV cover the major local team (Maryland) and the other semi-local teams (Virginia and Penn St.), and how does that compare to other major programs around the nation?

For this analysis, I pulled data from the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database and looked at 2001-2005. I searched each coach’s full name in order to filter out coverage of non-football teams. The unit of measure is a mention - any time the paper included a given coach’s name in an article.

To get a real sense of which teams The Post was covering, I have included seven teams in the analysis:

• The Home Team (Maryland)

• Secondary Local Teams (Penn St., Virginia, and Virginia Tech)

• National Programs (Florida St., Ohio St., USC)

The intent is for the national programs to serve as controls. FSU is an East Coast ACC team, Ohio St. was a Midwest Big 10 team, and USC was a West Coast PAC 10 team.

Growing up, Columbus might as well have been on the moon. However, in terms driving miles from the White House (the very heart of the DMV), it is less than 150 miles farther than Blacksburg. For FSU and USC, those with change to spare are flying. Those without are probably staying home.

Exciting Years

The turn of the millennium was a great time to be a college football fan in the DMV, as all the major local teams were good (and the Hokies were great).

Wins per season for the group ranged from a low of 6.4 (Penn St.) to a high of 10.8 (USC). During those five years, USC shared a national championship and one another outright. The Trojans played for a third, in 2005 against Texas, but lost a classic in the Rose Bowl to Vince Young and Texas.

The other team on the list that won a national championship during this time was Ohio St. (2002). While the Buckeyes won a lot of games during this stretch, Jim Tressel’s sweater-vest and proclivity for punting were the not the sorts of things one would expect to move copy far from home.

Expectations vs. Reality

Looking at the charts of wins and distance from the White House, my expectation would be that Maryland got by far the most coverage, then the other three local(ish) teams would all have roughly the same the number of mentions and likewise the national powers would be closely grouped behind the others.

Boy, was I wrong.

I added an logarithmic trend line for reference. Look at USC, in the top righthand corner. The Trojans got more mentions per season, nearly 3,000 miles away, than did Maryland, which is less than 10 miles down the road.

And it’s not like Maryland was bad. The resurgent Terps, led by Ralph Friedgen, played in an Orange Bowl and two Gator Bowls in that five-year stretch.

Out of the secondary local teams, Virginia Tech averaged the most mentions per season (87), but that was good enough only for fourth place out of the seven teams examined. Florida St., which won three less games than the Hokies, averaged 95 mentions per season.

So, what gives?

Peculiarities of the Washington, D.C. Media Market

One the one hand, the Washington Post mentions metric is indicative of the sports media scene in the capital region, but on the other hand, there is a catch regarding the outlier (USC). To explain, let’s return to George Michael over at NBC 4.

In addition to his local news hits, Michael hosted a show called The Sports Machine, which showed highlights across sports, nationwide. Some of that programing mentality bled into the 6 o’clock news, as well.

Washington D.C., as the nation’s capital, has long seen the nation’s news as its own. That fact was reflected in the coverage we saw on the 6 o’clock local news.

If there was even a hint of a local angle, and with senators and congressmen from all 50 states holed up in the capital there was always a local angle, the story was fair game.

Case in point was Bobby Bowden’s Florida St. Seminoles. They had dropped a notch following three straight national championship game appearances (1998-2000), but were still a force to be reckoned with in college football.

They were also an ACC member for the full five years of analysis, whereas Virginia Tech joined only in 2004. That mattered because the local team, Maryland, was an ACC member. In those days the road to the conference title still went through Tallahassee (ACC champions in 2002, 2003, and 2005).

At this point, you might be thinking, “OK, that’s great. But what local angle could possibly explain so much USC coverage?”

At first blush, I thought it was an error, but the number is indeed correct. The explanation - the Times-Post News Service.

In operation from 1962 to 2009, the news service was a 50-50 venture that enhanced national and international news coverage not only at the two papers, but also for many other regional papers.

So, while Pete Carroll’s Trojans were over-represented in the Washington Post, the reverse was true of Frank Beamer’s Hokies in the Los Angeles Times.

Beamer’s average of 39 mentions per year in the Los Angeles Times from 2001 to 2005 was second only to the Washington Post among major newspapers. Weird, huh?

The Takeaway

Media coverage does not necessarily drive recruiting. USC plucked one high school player total from the DMV in the 2002-2006 recruiting classes (those that followed the seasons examined). That player, five-star wide receiver Vidal Hazelton, had a strong start in L.A. before getting derailed by injuries. He later transferred to Cincinnati.

The same was true for Florida St., which also signed only two commits from the DMV, as well as Ohio St., which only signed one.

Still, one could certainly make a strong argument that local media coverage of major national programs during this period helped set the stage for the exodus that would follow.

The internet, with sites like Hudl, made it possible for every school to evaluate players from all over the country. And for players who grew up in the D.C. media market, there was a unique familiarity with those distant programs that would soon come calling.

All the while, Virginia Tech was caught in between. The Hokies were local, but not as local at Maryland, and they won a lot of games, but were still a notch below the USCs of the world. As a result, their coverage in the newspaper of record, The Washington Post, lagged.

In addition, although the lack of precise local television sports data precludes me from drawing a blanket conclusion on that medium’s coverage, in my own memory from having grown up in the area, I remember Hokie football coverage being intermittent, at best.

All of this should color Virginia Tech’s latest recruiting success in the DMV, and especially Maryland, in even more favorable hues.

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