The reason is simple. Since others own the hot take space, I chose to sit back and observe.

Like everyone else, I want to know what is going on in college football and how it is all going to impact Virginia Tech. How do the Hokies win in this environment? And not just for a season or two. What can the past teach us about how to sustain success long into the future?

To answer these questions I went back and looked at the four teams everyone had pegged as the best in the ACC when the conference expanded in 2004. Not coincidentally, they are the only four schools that have sustained excellence over an entire generation in my lifetime (since 1984).

Part of the utility of such an analysis is comparing teams across years. In order to do that, I settled on the simplest complex metric in existence today. Simple Rating System (SRS) “combines scoring margin and strength of schedule to rate teams. The rating indicates expected margin vs. an average team, adjusting for home field advantage.”

In an attempt to keep the analysis clean, I defined a generation as 17 seasons. In every case except Clemson, those 17 seasons played out over 16 years (the Tigers needed an extra year because SRS data is not available for the Covid season in 2020).

Here is a rundown of the four programs and how they stack up over the best 17-season period in their respective modern histories.

4) Virginia Tech (1994-2010)

• Best Season: 1999, 11-1, National Championship appearance, 24.5 and #3 in SRS

• Historically Elite Seasons (30+ rating): 0

• Peak (Best 5 in a row) Seasons: 1998-2002, 1 top-5 and 4 top-10 SRS

• Average SRS: 15.5

• Median Season: 1995, 10-2, Sugar Bowl Champions, 15.8 and #12 in SRS

What felt like a period of sustained, extended excellence for Virginia Tech could more accurately be described as a period of peaks and valleys during which the floor was high and, in peak years, the ceiling put the Hokies among the nation’s best teams.

A few things stand out with the Hokies during Beamer’s golden era.

First, and befitting a program in which development was paramount, the Hokies tended to build over several seasons toward truly exceptional teams. Only in 1999 and 2000 did the Hokies play at a level commensurate with those competing for a National Championship.

Second, Beamer really did have the Hokies consistently among the top-10 teams in the country. However, they were only a top-5 team in three out of the 17 years.

Even in top-5 years, the Hokies were not truly elite. The Hokies never had an SRS rating above 25, whereas the three other teams on this list all had at least one season with a rating over 30.

Still, consistent excellence was the name of the game. The median season, which was the ninth best, was the 1995 Sugar Bowl championship team.

3) Clemson (2007-2024)

• Best Season: 2018, 15-0, National Champions, 32.7 and #2 SRS

• Historically Elite Seasons (30+ rating): 1

• Peak (Best 5 in a row) Seasons: 2015-2019, 5 top-5 SRS, 2 NCs

• Average SRS: 16.7

• Median Season: 2007, 8-4, Chik-Fil-A Bowl appearance, 14.6 and #14 SRS

Without Clemson’s run of greatness in the second half of the 2010s, the Tigers would not have made this list. But oh that five-year run (arguably six, but there are no data for 2020).

Clemson finished in the top-5 every year from 2015-2019, and the Tigers won two National Championships in the process.

The best season, the undefeated National Championship run in 2018, put the Tigers in the conversation for the best team of the millennium, if not all of college football history. However, even in that amazing year, Clemson still finished with the second best SRS rating. Alabama, the team Clemson destroyed in the National Championship game, still finished the year with a higher rating.

Outside of those five years, Clemson was somewhere between good and very good. The median season, the 2007 team that went 8-3 in the regular season before losing in the Chik-Fil-A bowl. Even though the 2007 team finished #14 in SRS rankings that season, compared to #12 for the Hokies in 1995, there was a big difference between capping the year off with a major win and ending with a loss in an upper-middle tier bowl.

2) Miami (1986-2002)

• Best Season: 2001, 12-0, National Champions, 32.4 and #1 SRS

• Historically Elite Seasons (30+ rating): 1

• Peak (Best 5 in a row) Seasons: 1987-1991, 5 top-5 and 2 best SRS, 3 NCs

• Average SRS: 21.1

• Median Season: 2002, 12-1, NC appearance, 24.4 and #3 SRS

Miami is one of very few programs in the country capable of fielding a team that merits mention among the all-time best.

The 2001 Hurricanes would probably win a vote for team of the decade. The only other contenders would be 2000 Oklahoma, 2004 USC, 2005 Texas, and 2009 Alabama.

The Hokies barely lost to the Hurricanes in 2001 (oh, Ernest Wilford…) and hung with 2004 USC and 2009 Alabama into the fourth quarter.

For my money, that Canes team belongs in the same conversation that includes 2019 LSU among the all-time best college football teams. Sports Illustrated agrees, as the venerable media organization placed the 2001 Hurricanes atop a list of the top 25 teams of the last 25 years. As SI summarized:

The term “loaded” has never applied more accurately to a team than these Hurricanes. Thirty-eight players on the ’01 Canes were drafted by the NFL. They led the nation in scoring defense, allowing just 9.4 points per game, and in takeaways (45). Only one of their 12 wins [Virginia Tech!] was by single digits, and they beat five ranked opponents by an average of 32.8 points. They were so good, rookie head coach Larry Coker just had to keep from screwing it up.

The problem with Miami has never been the heights the team could reach. Rather, the issue has been consistency.

Two factors, above all else, have conspired to make Miami a wildly unpredictable program: cheating (especially paying players long before it was legal) and the coaching carousel.

If you run a Google search for Miami football sanctions hoping to learn about what happened in the mid-1990s, you will find that more refined search criteria are required because of the sanctions following the Nevin Shapiro scandal in 2011.

If Miami could ever get its act together for an extended period of time, the program could become a real juggernaut. But then, Miami would not be Miami without all the semi-legal swagger.

1) Florida St. (1987-2003)

• Best Season: 1987, 11-1, Fiesta Bowl Champions, 30.5 and #1 SRS

• Historically Elite Seasons (30+ rating): 3

• Peak (Best 5 in a row) Seasons: 1996-2000, 5 top-5 and 3 #1 SRS, 1 NC

• Average: 25.0

• Median: 1992, 11-1, Orange Bowl Champions, 24.9 and #1 SRS

In the 1990s, a top-5 finish must have felt like a birth right for Florida St. fans. In the modern era, only Nick Saban’s Alabama teams are comparable. Not until 2001 was there finally a drop off in FSU’s level of play.

During their run of greatness, the Seminoles’ average team was better than the 1999 Hokies. However, the only time during this run that FSU produced an undefeated national champion was in 1999 - the Chris Weinke/Peter Warrick team that came back to win the Sugar Bowl over the Michael Vick-led Hokies.

The one annual slip-up almost came to be expected, but beating the ‘Noles always required the opponent to be either great themselves (think Steve Spurrier’s Florida teams) or really good and play the game of their collective life (think 1995 Virginia).

In many ways, Bowden and Beamer followed the same formula. Florida St. pushed the boundaries a bit more with regard to NCAA rules, but the general blueprint was the same, especially when it came to staff stability.

The run of greatness ended following the 2000 season. After FSU’s 13-2 loss to Oklahoma in the National Championship game, Mark Richt left to become Georgia’s head coach. He was succeeded by Bobby Bowden’s son, Jeff, who proved to be a major downgrade.

In addition, in 2001, the Seminoles started redshirt-freshman Chris Rix who was not ready to play at a championship level. Those two factors were the primary drivers of the decline in the team’s on-field performance.

Final thoughts

Three of the teams featured in this article - Virginia Tech, Clemson, and Florida St. - were led by current or future Hall of Fame coaches. Miami had a coaching carousel, but the Hurricanes were at their best under Jimmy Johnson and Dennis Erickson, both Hall of Famers.

This commonality is important for understanding the critical drivers to sustained success in college football - it all starts with great coaching.

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It has been an offseason of great change in Blacksburg.

The dismantling of the 2024 team and coaching staff began before the season even ended.

New coaches and new players trickled in throughout the winter, then again in a burst after spring practice.

There are lots of new names and faces - so many that matching the former with the latter is nearly impossible. And does anyone feel like they know who is wearing what jersey number is this year?

Yeah, me neither.

There is no precedent for the amount of change undergone by the Virginia Tech football program in 2025.

Rather than fill your inboxes with random guesses, unsupported by the evidence that doesn’t exist, I laid low and observed.

I filtered out the hype (the positive press for running back Marcellous Hawkins arrived just as it became clear that Terion Stewart’s injury was likely to keep him out of the opening contest against South Carolina - color me skeptical), noted what the coaches did and did not say, and kept an eye out for emerging leaders.

The 247 Team Talent Composite ratings should be released this week (last year they dropped on August 27th), and at that point we will start to get a sense of the floor, ceiling, and likely outcome for the 2025 season.

In anticipation of that release, today I will review a list of variables that I believe will have an outsized impact on determining the result of the 50/50 games on Tech’s schedule, which will ultimately swing the fanbase’s perspective on the season.

I have grouped them by their likelihood to have a positive and negative impact on the Hokies’ season.

Factors most likely to have a positive impact

1. Surprise

   It’s been covered ad nauseum in the Techosphere this off-season, but no one knows anything about the formations or personnel groupings the Hokies will use early in the season. That will work to their advantage for the first two to three weeks, and could produce two wins that would have otherwise been losses. Remember, the 2024 Hokies were not a handful of plays from being 7-5. They were a handful of plays from being 9-3 (the last play at Miami and the two overtime losses, both of which Tech led late in the fourth quarter).

2. Less drop-off from the ones to the twos

   The 2024 team had plenty of NFL talent. The problem was that all the pros started, and when they got hurt, or just needed a breather, their backups were too often not up to the task. But wait, you might be thinking, the backups didn’t look that bad. True! But they also did not play much, a telltale sign that the drop-off in performance would have been too great to overcome. That’s how we got Kyron Drones and Bhayshul Tuten both starting against Clemson when, realistically, they were too injured to play. It’s how time and again Xavier Chaplin would get hurt, go to the sideline, and then limp back on to the field a few plays later. Virginia Tech’s offseason strategy in the transfer portal was clearly to load up on depth pieces. I expect snaps to be a lot more spread out this year at nearly every position, save for quarterback. Keeping guys fresher and healthier could net the Hokies one to two additional wins down the stretch in 2025.

3. Diversity of player types and skills within position groups

   One of the reasons we have so little idea about how the Hokies will line up and who is likely to play significant snaps is that there are so many conceivable options. Tech appears to have the players to line up, at least on defense, completely differently from one week to the next. On offense, there are multiple player types at running back and wide receiver, which will enable Philip Montgomery, the new offensive coordinator, to diversify his attack based on the strengths and weaknesses of each opposing defense. The result is that the Hokies could pose “bad” matchups for many teams on the schedule, which would add one extra win.

Factors most likely to have a negative impact

1. Inexperience along the offensive line

   This year’s offensive line features new players, guys playing new positions, and guys with little in the way of prior snaps or previous success. This one variable is a huge red flag. It could potentially cost the Hokies three games that they would have otherwise won.

2. QB/offensive coordinator fit

   I am not convinced that Kyron Drones and Pop Watson, currently numbers one and two on the depth chart at quarterback, are great fits for what Montgomery wants to do on offense. Drones has plenty of arm talent, but he struggles mightily with the deep ball, consistently overthrowing wide open receivers (ironically, the much maligned Grant Wells would have been perfect for this offense). Tyrod Taylor had this same problem early in his career and he learned how to “perfectly” underthrow his receivers, which led to more catches and a lot more pass interference calls against the defense. If Drones has not made similar progress in the offseason, then it could cost the Hokies one to two wins in 2025.

3. A program on the edge

   Brent Pry appears to have made a lot of good hires in the offseason, and the Hokies pulled a number of sneaky good players out of the transfer portal, but Pry has nearly lost the fanbase. A slow start combined with a tough back half of the schedule could doom Pry and usher in wholesale changes in the athletic department. AD Whit Babcock, who is approaching lame duck status, will not be given the opportunity to hire a third head coach. If the fans suspect a coming cascade, they could check out early and turn the vibes around the program from bad to toxic, costing the Hokies at least a couple wins and potentially the ability to hire strong replacements at AD and head football coach.

On balance

Overall, the offseason changes have moved the program in a positive direction.

I do believe the Hokies are due to revert to the mean. From a numbers perspective alone, it is inconceivable the Tech will continue to lose just about every one score game it plays in the Brent Pry era.

Eventually, that stuff evens out (like all the lost fumbles early in Justin Fuente’s tenure).

The team seems to understand what is on the line.

There has been little hype and almost no “noise” since the spring.

Seriously, since when has a Board of Visitors meeting had the ability to net so much coverage in August?

In his presentation, covered widely by the press, Whit Babcock said nothing that the casual fan does not already know.

Yet, the entire fanbase followed it down to the minutest detail because there was no news about the football program.

If we know nothing about the team, what are the odds that South Carolina knows much?

I really want to see the Hokies beat South Carolina because, aside from the obvious rooting interest, I want to know if this team and this staff know how to handle success.

Playing Vanderbilt in week 2 as a 1-0 team would provide that answer.

Pry might need a win over South Carolina to keep his job, but either way, a loss to Vanderbilt in Lane Stadium would seal his fate, even if the move is not made immediately.

The fanbase is so sick of muddling through. It’s time to find out if the folks in the Merryman Center know how to win.

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Over the weekend, I took a step back to check my priors.

Does it even matter whether or not the Hokies keep their starting quarterback healthy?

In the aggregate, the answer is a surprising, “Not much!”

Here is the breakdown of average regular season wins by starting quarterback health status dating back to 2014:

• Starting QB misses 0 games due to injury: 6.4 wins/year

• Starting QB misses >1 game due to injury: 6.1 wins/year

Those numbers are biased a bit by the horrendous 2022 team. If we filter that year out, the average wins/year when the Virginia Tech QB remains healthy increases to…6.7 games.

Surprisingly, there really is not much difference, on average, even if we remove the major outlier.

It is pretty clear, though, that another year of 6-6 will have the Hokies in the market for a new head coach, not to mention a new athletic director.

That means we need to look at the likelihood of winning enough games to keep the current regime in power.

Picking a number here is easy. Since 2014, the Hokies have won 6 games seven times and 8 or more games three times, but they have not once landed on 7 wins in the regular season.

As such, we’ll set 8 wins as the minimum Pry needs in order to keep his job.

With that as the dividing line, we do see a discernable difference in starting quarterback health.

• Win 8 or more games: 2 out of 3 years (67%) the QB did not miss a start (both were 9-win seasons)

• Win 6 games of less: 2 out of 8 years (25%) the QB did not miss a start (3- and 6-win seasons)

In that context, Pry’s job does appear to depend on the team’s ability to keep Kyron Drones healthy and in the lineup.

How can the Hokies do that, especially with so many new faces along the offensive line?

Simple - limit the designed QB runs.

Scot Loeffler, Brad Cornelsen, and Tyler Bowen

In years when the starting quarterback does not miss any games due to injury, an average of 25.4% of designed Virginia Tech carries (this metric excludes scrambles) were by quarterbacks.

In years when the starting quarterback misses at least one game due to injury, 31.1% of designed carries were by quarterbacks.

The delta of 5.7 percentage points may not appear compelling on its face, but once again an outlier is skewing the data.

In 2016, Jerod Evans started every game, despite leading the team (by a wide margin) in designed carries. In fact, quarterbacks were responsible for 47.6% of all designed carries that year.

The 47.6% mark in 2016 is the highest out of the years examined, comfortably surpassing 2019, in which 42.8% of designed carries were by quarterbacks.

And the 2019 figure is skewed by third-string QB Quincy Patterson carrying the ball so much in the North Carolina and Notre Dame games.

Excluding the anomalous years, the disparity in the percentage of designed carries allotted to Hokie quarterbacks increases significantly:

• Healthy QB years: 20.7% of designed carries

• Injured QB years: 30.0% of designed carries

In the last two seasons, Hokie quarterback carries comprised 35.8% and 33.0% of all designed carries.

All this begs the question: What is new offensive coordinator Phillip Montgomery’s track record on spreading carries around?

Phillip Montgomery

Phillip Montgomery’s recent college offenses do not utilize the quarterback much in the run game.

From 2014-23, in only one year was the quarterback position responsible for more than 30% of designed carries.

That was the most recent year, 2023, when Montgomery was at Auburn and QB carries comprised 33.1% of the total.

Even that does not tell the entire story. In 2023, Payton Thorne, Auburn’s starting quarterback, had at least 10 designed runs in only 1 of the team’s first 6 games. In the second half of the season, when Hugh Freeze took back some of the play-calling duties, Thorne had double-digit designed carries in 5 out of 6 games.

At Baylor, in 2014, designed QB runs comprised 19.5% of the total.

In between, during his eight years as Tulsa’s head coach, Montgomery also called the offensive plays.

In all eight seasons, quarterback carries made up less than 20% of the total carries. In three of those seasons, QB designed runs comprised less than 10% of total runs.

Will the Montgomery hire work out?

If nothing else, Montgomery’s play-calling preferences are a good fit for what ails Hokie quarterbacks.

The Hokies appear to have a stable of good running backs and plenty of up-and-comers at wide receiver.

The two big remaining questions are:

1. Can Tech win with Kyron Drones operating as a drop-back passer?

2. Can the offensive line open up holes without the quarterback being a major threat to run the ball?

Neither Drones nor the offensive line seems ideally suited to the task at hand, but then, that was the case for plenty of Frank Beamer’s 10-win teams.

It’s amazing how many warts elite tailback play can cover.

And if the running backs aren’t elite, is there any hope for 2025?

Well, entering the 2004 season, the offensive line was taking a step back, Bryan Randall was a dual-threat quarterback set to run a pro(-ish) style offense, and Kevin Jones had just left for the NFL.

The line ended up being pretty average, Randall blossomed into the ACC Offensive Player of the Year, and together they combined with running backs Cedric Humes, Mike Imoh, and Justin Hamilton to provide just enough offense, in combination with an elite defense, to win 10 games and finish in the Top 10 in the country.

With that in mind, one needn’t squint to see 8 Hokie wins in 12 regular season games in 2025.

The pieces are there.

This team has a chance.

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Recently, I went back and pulled 10 years’ worth of Team Talent data on Virginia Tech and its opponents.

Before I looked at the data, I didn’t think the metric would be very good at predicting the outcome of individual games, but I did believe it would prove surprisingly accurate at predicting Virginia Tech’s regular season record.

In this article, I will present my findings, and where the metric was not predictive of Virginia Tech’s record, I will examine possible reasons why.

Improving over time

In the 10 years since 247Sports introduced Team Talent, it has proven a good, if not great, predictor of Virginia Tech’s success on the gridiron.

The method of prediction here is simple - the team with the numerically lower talent ranking is predicted to win every time. No partial wins are allotted for games between teams ranked closely to one another.

Although one could create such a system, the idea here is that over the course of a season and in the aggregate, it should be a wash.

What I found surprising is that the metric became a better predictor over time.

In the first four years, it correctly predicted the 2017 team’s 9-3 record (I looked only at regular season and conference championship games) but overshot the 2015 and 2018 teams’ records by two wins each while undershooting the 2016 team’s win total by two.

Those results are nothing special. Most casual fans could have matched, or exceeded, that level of performance.

However, it accurately predicted the 6-6 records in 2023 and 2024, while overshooting the 2021 and 2022 teams’ win totals by just one each.

For the 2021 team to win seven regular season games, it would have had to beat West Virginia or Syracuse. The Hokies offense stalled inside the five yard-line in the waning seconds at Morgantown and gave up a nearly 50-yard touchdown pass in the very end of the Syracuse game at home.

The Syracuse loss is the one that, for all intents and purposes, ended the Justin Fuente era.

The numerically poor 2020 and 2021 recruiting classes weighed down Team Talent since 2022, enabling this one metric to predict a poor 2022 squad and middling teams thereafter.

The 4-7 prediction for 2022 would have been accurate if the Hokies had not completely melted down in the opening game at Old Dominion (17 penalties, botched field goal snap returned for a touchdown, game ending TD drive allowed).

The 2020 (Covid) team finished two wins shy of the prediction, but that was obviously a very strange season, one in which the pandemic had an outsized impact on Virginia Tech.

Justin Hamilton did not have a real offseason to install his defense, which was different in many ways from Bud Foster’s scheme. Midway through the season, Hamilton had to revert back to a hybrid system that incorporated more of the Foster scheme, which Hamilton had played and coached in some, but not a lot.

Tech also appeared to suffer disproportionately from injuries and subpar performances driven by poor physical conditioning. Each state had different rules reflecting their voters’ sentiments toward the broader pandemic mitigation measures (masking, lockdowns, etc.), and Virginia’s state government did the Hokies no favors.

Overshooting the mark by one win in 2019 is likely the result of anomalous injuries. The Hokies were down to their third string quarterback at Notre Dame and still had a chance to win. It took an 18-play Irish drive at the end of the game to seal a one-point victory.

That was also the year that the Hokies lost their winning streak over UVA. Both of Tech’s starting cornerbacks were injured and did not play. Bryce Perkins and the Wahoo offense took advantage.

Hendon Hooker and the Hokies kept pace in a back-and-forth affair until the very end of the game, when the UVA defense made a key stop to seal the victory.

Important variables

In reflecting on the differences between predicted and actual win totals by year, a few variables come to mind that deserve further elaboration.

First, good ole fashioned luck can still throw off predictions.

The 2015 team lost both home games that went to overtime, otherwise it would have finished 8-4, as predicted.

Conversely, the Hokies lost a couple of rain-soaked one-score games that, had they gone the other way, would have also gotten the team to eight wins.

To lose all four games in which luck played an outsized role is unfortunate. Had the team won all four of those games, an equally unlikely result, team talent would have undershot the team’s win total by two.

Second, leadership from upperclassmen appears to be a major driver of team success.

The near misses in the 2015 season produced a battle-hardened 2016 team, which featured great leadership from its oldest players. That helped the team generate results that were two wins more than the sum of their parts would have led us to expect.

The third factor that impacts accuracy is character among the non-team leaders. While the Sam Rogers’ of the world outplay their recruiting ranking and make others around them better, players like Trevon Hill have the opposite impact.

The 2018 team featured too many low-character guys. When the going got tough, they either imploded or quit. Often, they did both.

Brent Pry’s increased focus on team culture, including a concerted effort to recruit high school team captains, has reduced the variability in performance from year to year.

Now, Pry just has to recruit better players.

So, if you want to know how many games the 2025 Hokies will win, check back here in late August when this season’s team talent rankings are published. At the very least, those numbers should give us a good idea of where the Hokies are likely to land this year.

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Metallica performance last week was the Virginia Tech event of the spring, with the band finally playing “Enter Sandman” live in Lane Stadium.

The night appears to have been a memorable one for all Hokies (both those in attendance and, like me, watching clips on YouTube and X).

The band seems to have really enjoyed the performance, as well, with posts on X that go well beyond the obligatory niceties.

All this got me thinking about the other dates on the M72 tour as well past shows that Metallica has played.

The mother of all concerts

Metallica has been a big draw for decades, both as a headlining act and at music festivals.

One of the bigger shows they have played was Woodstock ‘94. Best estimates are that around 150k people were in attendance when Metallica took the stage.

Five years later, at least 100k saw the band at Woodstock ‘99.

The M72 tour has featured shows in other stadiums, most of which are in the 50k capacity range.

Those are all big numbers, but they pale in comparison to the biggest show Metallica has played - Monsters of Rock, which they co-headlined with AC/DC in August 1991 in Moscow, USSR.

Yes, Metallica played a concert in the Soviet Union, and it was one for the record books.

Between 800k and 1.6 million people showed up, including a sizable slice of the Soviet military.

And no, those figures are not typos. Check out the restored concert video if you don’t believe me.

It was like Yasgur’s Farm, except transplanted to Tushino Airfield along Volokalomskoye Shosse in Northwest Moscow.

The Tushino site, about five miles from where I lived in the Mitino district from 2013-14, now includes Otkritiye Stadium, where the Spartak Moscow soccer club plays its home games.

Back in 1991, it was just a wide open, Soviet military site.

Speaking of militaries, forget what you’ve heard about The Cold War. The communist jig was up when the August putsch failed, but the reason it failed is because the system had rotted from the inside-out.

Systemic rot was personified by all the headbanging Red Army soldiers in attendance at Monsters of Rock just five weeks after the failed coup.

Music and film, not the CIA and “soft power” NGOs, won The Cold War.

Metallica led off its set in Moscow by playing Enter Sandman and followed it with Creeping Death, a song about the tenth plague of Egypt, which gave rise to the Jewish feast of Passover.

The dual meaning of “Let my people go” was surely not lost on Soviet concertgoers. Lead singer James Hetfield screamed the line into the microphone as the crowd went crazy.

Meanwhile, back in the Kremlin, the apparatchiks threw back another swig.

That Metallica would play this song, indeed play the concert at all, reveals their true fearlessness as a band.

And, it should be noted, I cannot remember the band ever getting caught up in the politics of the moment, not in 1991 and not in 2025.

This is a band that keeps distractions to a minimum. The magic comes via their connection to their fans.

Lessons

Last week’s successful concert yields many important insights for a Virginia Tech football program that has been wondering in the college football wilderness for more than a decade.

I’ll start with lessons from the band before proceeding to lessons from the event.

What Metallica can teach the Hokies

1. Stick to the winning formula

2. Let the product evolve, but demand high quality

3. The connection with fans is everything

Sticking to a winning formula is not as easy as it sounds. In fact, finding a winning formula is much more difficult than most people realize.

Consider the Brent Pry era, which was supposed to be Beamer 2.0.

Pry got his start under Beamer back in the glory days. He promised a renewed focus on in-state recruiting. Heck, even Bill Roth returned to the booth to call games.

Whit Babcock went all in on the Greatest Hits.

What we’ve all gotten is more of the same (or worse) in the results column.

Leadership did not understand Tech’s winning formula.

Virginia Tech became a premier program by playing an unconventional brand of football. The Hokies made opposing teams uncomfortable by threatening to score on every single play - not just when they had the ball.

This threat required hypervigilance by the opposition, which often led to mistakes.

Fans of a certain age will remember how it looked when quarterbacks and punters and offensive linemen all visually trembled pre-snap.

Often, stress was induced by personnel quirks: quarterbacks who were the best athletes on the field, elite running backs who wen under-recruited, undersized, quick-off-the-edge pass rushers, and All-Americans on the pride and joy (punt block) team.

These players were effective because they had the requisite talent, but most importantly, it was an attitude thing. They program sold them on the ability to win big by being different.

Attitude led to winning, which led to increased confidence.

Attitude on the field has been in short supply in recent years, and the downstream effects have been glaring.

Can you imagine Metallica without attitude?

It’s not a pretty thought.

Metallica - Attitude = 60-something year-old has-beens

With attitude and strategy in alignment, then the question of product comes into play.

Notice, Metallica in 1991 did not look a lot like Metallica in 2025. Guys in their 60s can’t head-bang like guys in their 20s.

But the band recognized that in 1991 it was getting by on pure energy.

Take another look at the video from Tushino Airfield.

Most of the fans were so far from the stage that they couldn’t see anything. Facilities were probably on par with, or worse than, the original Woodstock. And all the songs were of the metal variety, sounding pretty much the same to the casual listener.

In short, Metallica had a narrow path to victory (selling tons of tickets and putting on a good show).

Fast forward almost 35 years and the band’s concert production value is much higher. The band plays in nice stadiums, which are decked out with everything that a gazillion tractor-trailers can hold.

Even the song catalogue has evolved. The band plays lots of metal, but also hard rock and catchier, radio-friendly tunes.

Despite advancing age, the band has succeeded in widening its path to victory.

And the one thing that has remained constant throughout the band’s entire professional journey is its unrelenting focus on connecting with its fans.

Contrast that with the football program, where players now shuttle in and out at an extreme pace.

It doesn’t help that the coaching staff doesn’t let the players talk freely with the media. How are fans supposed to connect with the team if they do not know anyone’s personality?

One last point on this topic. Chris Coleman of TechSideline recently talked about how many vacant store fronts there are now in Blacksburg.

The football team cannot be a vacuum into which all money flows, while everyone else struggles.

The program needs to value the town, not just “the fans”.

Home games fill up restaurants and bring in revenue that covers for slower times throughout the year, but the football team should also be actively working to support local businesses during the offseason.

Hokie X, and social media more broadly, has been pretty toxic for years. A lot of that would fade away if the fanbase had more of a connection to the team.

That can come directly (coach the players up on media relations then encourage all of them to talk to journalists all the time) or indirectly (word of mouth travels far in a small town - if the players go out of their way to get butts in seats at local restaurants, people will find out and truly appreciate them).

It turns out Jaylin Lane is one of the finest human beings the program has ever produced. Why didn’t I know that until the NFL Draft?

What the concert can teach Virginia Tech

1. The fact that the major athletic facilities sit dormant for most of the year is a huge missed (revenue) opportunity

2. The Spring Game has been dulled down to the point where it is no longer a draw - schedule other major events in the spring

3. The right acts can sell a boatload of tickets in Blacksburg

Lane Stadium is a college football cathedral. But even the church gets more out of its massive houses of worship than Virginia Tech does from its football stadium.

There are 365 days in a year and Lane hosts what, seven home games per year plus the Spring Game.

That means 98% of days the stadium is not generating income, which is atrocious from a business perspective.

There should definitely be more concerts there, but other events too. The same goes for other sports facilities on campus.

It’s a win-win. Events bring in money and they also give people something to do, which is no small thing in rural Southwest Virginia.

Early May is a perfect time to host big events. It should become an annual tradition.

With nice weather and the semester almost over, people are in the mood to have a good time.

And it’s not like a major concert, or other event, would be competing with much in the area.

After how well the Metallica concert went, I imagine booking other major acts has gotten a lot easier. Virginia Tech needs to capitalize on this momentum.

It would be a major strategic blunder to let the magic of this particular moment wear off without building something lasting.

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Can you quickly (and without assistance) name that Orange Bowl winning team?

Ding, ding, ding. Time’s up!

The Hokies have played in four Orange Bowls, all during the Frank Beamer era. The only time Tech actually won the game was on January 1, 2009.

The 2008 team that beat Cincinnati 20-7 is widely considered the worst of Beamer’s 10-win teams.

The offense that season was atrocious, save for Tyrod Taylor and Darren Evans, and the defense lacked stars. The team finished the regular season with an 8-4 record and, at 5-3 in the ACC, needed a tiebreaker to finish atop the now defunct Coastal Division of the ACC.

That Tech team beat Boston College in the ACC Championship on its way to winning the Orange Bowl and finishing with a 10-4 record. It’s 1738 final ELO rating is nearly 60 points lower than the 2011 team’s final rating, which was the next lowest among Tech’s 10-win teams.

(Note: ELO is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of competitors in zero-sum games; for this article I source the data from cfbdata)

About the first point, my assertion that the 2024 team was nearly as good as that 2008 team - it really does hold water.

Here’s the proof.

History repeating…to a point

Just like in 2024, the 2008 season began with a road loss to a middling-at-best team. In 2008 that team was East Carolina, and the final score was ECU 27, VT 22.

Frank Beamer then abandoned the idea of redshirting Tyrod Taylor, and the team (somehow) reeled off five straight wins, including a 35-30 victory at Nebraska (the Cornhuskers finished the year 9-4).

But the wins were ugly, the offense non-existent outside of Tyrod scrambling, and the Hokies hit a rough patch in the middle of the season.

First, they lost at Boston College, then the next week they got down to their third-string quarterback, Cory Holt, who had switched to receiver in the offseason. Holt played admirably and the Hokies kept the score respectable, but they lost by 10 at Florida St.

Just like in 2024, the team entered November with a 5-3 record. At this point in the season, the two teams also had very similar ELO ratings.

The 2024 team travelled to Syracuse with an ELO of 1697, while the 2008 team prepared to host Maryland on a Thursday night with a 1690 ELO.

Maryland, with its 6-2 record, was ranked #23 in the nation. but Tech had a few things working in its favor.

First, Sean Glennon was healthy enough to start and play the whole game. Although a non-mobile second stringer, he was very experienced. Against Maryland, he was efficient, completing two-thirds of his pass attempts for 127 yards and a touchdown.

Second, the Hokies were playing at home on a Thursday night - the crowd was electric.

Finally, the Hokies had a healthy starting running back in Darren Evans, and he played the best game of his career, rushing for a then school record of 253 yards on 32 carries (Bhayshul Tuten broke that record in his final game, against UVA, this past season).

Tech beat Maryland that night 23-13, which improved its record to 6-3. The Hokies would lose the next week at a very average Miami, falling to 6-4.

From there, Tech closed out the regular season with a couple of ugly wins to reach 8-4, before going on a run in the postseason.

In 2024, the inflection point was also the ninth game of the year. However, in that game the Hokies had three factors working against them:

1. Kyron Drones was injured and would not play at QB. Collin Schlee started and played the whole game, but he got pretty beat up.

2. The game was at Syracuse, traditionally a house of horrors for Tech football.

3. Bhayshul Tuten, who entered the game as the nation’s fifth leading rusher, did not play due to an injury.

Despite the headwinds, the Hokies got off to a quick start, building what felt like an insurmountable lead of 21-3 in the third quarter.

Syracuse, however, came all the way back and won 38-31 in overtime.

Virginia Tech’s postgame win probability was 89.0% for the Syracuse game, higher than the 87.9% probability from the week before, when the Hokies defeated Georgia Tech 21-6 at Lane Stadium.

Virginia Tech should have beaten Syracuse.

Had they done that, the loss the following week against Clemson would have again seen the 2024 team matching the 2008 team with a 6-4 record, this time through 10 games.

Even with the Syracuse loss, the Hokies finished the regular season with an ELO of 1675, nearly as high at the 2008 team’s ELO of 1690 after 12 games.

Had the Hokies not loss at Syracuse, which dropped their ELO rating 31 points, a 7-5 Virginia Tech team in 2024 would have finished the regular season with a higher ELO than the 2008 team, which went 7-4 against FBS opponents.

And, of course, the postseason is incomparable due to the transfer portal.

The difference in the two teams was health at quarterback and running back down the stretch.

Had the 2024 team enjoyed a comparable level of health at those two positions as the 2008 team (which, remember, was not amazing), the 2024 team very likely would have finished the regular season 8-4, and the vibes around the program this offseason would be completely different.

Where the similarities end

The 2008 Hokies were experienced on defense, but completely inexperienced at the skill positions on offense.

The young Hokies flashed a lot of promise late in the 2008 season, and with so many key players returning on offense, expectations were high entering the 2009 season.

The 2024 team is just the opposite, with almost all of the offensive skill position players departing after the exhaustion of their eligibility.

That fact, combined with similar questions on defense as the 2009 team faced, results in lower expectations for the upcoming season.

In fact, the best-case scenario for the 2025 team would probably look something like the 2008 team.

But that is just the view from a distance. The transfer portal introduces a higher degree of uncertainty.

The main takeaway is that the 2024 team was much closer to being good than most fans realize. Better conditioning alone probably would have enabled it to beat Syracuse and match the 2008 team in ELO.

As such, although Virginia Tech AD Whit Babcock does not want to set a win total necessary for Brent Pry to keep his job, we can safely set an ELO rating of 1725, which would translate to 7-8 regular season wins.

Anything less, and I would expect Virginia Tech to clean house in the athletic department, not just the football program.

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The Seminoles flirted (or at least attempted to flirt) with the Big Ten and SEC. But after getting what the next generation might call the side-eye, then winning a grand total of two games in 2024, suddenly the calculus in Tallahassee changed.

By the start of 2025, I don’t think Florida St. (nor Clemson, for that matter) wanted to win the suit. Cut loose from the ACC, they did not have anywhere better to go.

Landing in the Big 12, which would have meant road games at Cincinnati, BYU, and Central Florida, which would have been unacceptable for ‘Noles fans.

So, the parties settled the suit and agreed to a new revenue sharing model.

Last week, Stanford men’s basketball coach Kyle Smith, “proposed the ACC adopt an English soccer-style relegation model similar to the English Premier League.

I’ve talked to Jim [Phillips] about relegation, so this might be my moment, trying to go two divisions, so you’d have a top play top,” Smith said postgame Wednesday in Charlotte. “They’ll probably be mad I mentioned that, but I do think that would give you more opportunities if you played everyone twice in the top division.

(It’d be similar to the) Champions and Premier League(s in English soccer) — I’ve been working on this. … You would have two divisions and then at the end of the year, you’d relegate someone, but that top division would play each other twice so you’d get more Quad 1s, and it would be pretty neat.

For the last few months, I have actually been thinking along the same lines, except with the focus on how to make such a system of relegation work for football.

How it would work

Similar to Smith’s proposal, there would be two divisions. Although the ACC would probably opt for some sort of branding, for now we could stick with Smith’s English soccer comparison and call the higher division Premier and the lower division Championship.

The conference would be evenly split between the two divisions - nine teams in each - with Notre Dame being the only permanent “member” of the Premier division.

Of course, Notre Dame will want to keep its independence, so while the Irish would play all eight of the other Premier division teams, the Irish would not appear in the standings and would not be eligible for the ACC playoff (more on that below).

Each team would play eight intra-division conference games. The home/away split would be even.

Each year, the bottom two teams in the Premier division, as determined by conference records, would be relegated to the Championship division. At the same time, the top two Championship teams would move up to the Premier division the following season.

The regular season would only feature 11 games (leaving room for three non-conference matchups),

The ACC playoff would replace what is currently the last week of the regular season (Thanksgiving weekend). The playoff would be seeded as follows:

• Semifinal 1: Championship #1 at Premiere #1

• Semifinal 2: Premier #3 at Premier #2

• 5-6 matchup: Championship #2 at Premier #4

• 7-8 matchup: Championship #3 at Premier #5

• 9-10 matchup: Championship #4 at Premier #6

• 11-12 matchup: Championship #5 at Premier #7

• 13-14 matchup: Championship #6 at Premier #8

Notre Dame would play four non-ACC games, and the bottom three teams in the Championship division would be free to schedule an ad hoc game that last week. In reality, the bottom feeders will almost always choose to get a jump on the transfer portal and coaching market.

Why it makes sense

If one groups Notre Dame in with the ACC, the conference has plenty of blue-chip programs - four by my count (Notre Dame, Clemson, Florida St., and Miami). Virginia Tech has been mediocre for 15 years, but the fanbase and stadium are still top flight, which matters for television.

Beyond that group of five, there are a group of blah state schools and some small private schools with absentee fanbases.

Louisville and SMU are ascendant. I placed the Cardinals in the top group and SMU in the middle, but both have G5+ brand recognition. They are on the same level as Cincinnati and BYU in that regard.

The reason why the relegation setup outlined above makes sense is that it maximizes the number of good games between teams with strong brands in the regular season. Most of the top group schools will be in the Premier division most years. Likewise, most of the bottom group schools will be in the Championship division most years.

A similar money split as to what was recently agreed (60-67% of media money) would go to teams in the Premier division, with the rest going to the schools in the Championship division.

Most importantly, at the start of the season, every team is in contention to win the conference and get the automatic bid to the playoff.

The Premier division has the better teams, so it gets three out of the four conference semifinal bids. Still, the schools in the Championship division would have everything to play for.

The top two teams in that division would ascend to the Premier division the following year, and the team with the best record in the Championship division would nab the fourth seed in the conference semifinal.

Many of the other games played on Thanksgiving weekend would have major bowl implications, and because the teams should be evenly matched, the games should bring some measure of anticipation.

What else would have to change to make this scenario a reality?

The biggest change would be in scheduling. Football would have to shift to the basketball model in which schedules are made in the months leading up to the season.

That level of flexibility, once considered unthinkable, was proven feasible in 2020 during Covid.

Such a system would enable schools to schedule strategically. If you’re Brent Pry preparing for a season in the Premier division that would, hypothetically, include games against the four blue-chip teams as well as SMU, Georgia Tech, Louisville, and NC State, you probably want to play some G5 teams out of conference, in addition to UVA.

That last bit would be another change. Years in which conference rivals are in different divisions could see them agree to play a non-conference game. It happens every so often under the current setup, and I doubt the sky would fall if it became more common.

Finally, the biggest change would be Notre Dame agreeing to play eight games against the ACC’s best teams. The media split would likely be the biggest sticking point.

The Irish would get great access to the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, which would help them recruit those talent-rich areas with even more success. It would also still leave them with four other games, so Notre Dame could maintain rivalries with Navy and USC and play other interesting games.

Is there any chance something like this will happen?

I actually think there is a decent chance that this is the way of the future. The ACC, like the Big Ten, has a ton of dead weight. Isolating those schools and keeping the conference powers together (with requisite room for movement between the two groups) will improve the television product markedly.

Such a setup is the only way I can think of to keep the traditional basketball powers on tobacco road in the same conference with the schools that care about and support football.

If the ACC wanted to move to a relegation arrangement, the league would need to announce the change a year in advance, which would make the next season the one the dictates the initial division assignments.

If the relegation system proved successful, and I think it would, my bet is the Big Ten would be the adopt a similar setup. That league is so top heavy that their blue-chip programs are bound to look at the ACC powers getting more money and more interesting matchups and think, “Why can’t we do this?”

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However, non-champions only need apply when the champion is an elite team.

The likelihood of the ACC champion achieving elite status in 2024 took a major hit on Saturday, when Florida St., voted #1 in the preseason ACC media poll, lost to Georgia Tech (picked ninth) by a field goal as time expired in Dublin, Ireland.

Truth be told, the ACC was facing an uphill battle before that game even started.

At #10 nationally in the preseason SP+, Florida St. was the ACC’s best hope for an elite team.

Meanwhile, #16 Clemson (vs. #1 Georgia in Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta) and #19 Miami (at Florida) will face stiff tests in their opening games this coming Saturday.

There is a very real possibility that the ACC’s top three teams in the preseason SP+ will all lose their first game of the season.

Additionally, SMU, #27 in the preseason SP+ (fourth among ACC teams), needed a furious comeback to erase an 11-point fourth quarter deficit and win at Nevada in Week 0.

While political considerations will give the ACC every possible chance to land two teams in the playoff, the ACC appears primed to wrestle defeat from the jaws of victory.

That would make Virginia Tech’s playoff proposition an all or nothing deal.

Virginia Tech outlook

Based on historical SP+ data, the 2024 Hokies are a fringe 10-win team, but 9 wins are most likely. For new readers, or those who would like a refresher, here is the detailed analysis from last summer:

It was this analysis that enabled me to predict the resurrection of the Hokies’ season after starting 1-3 last year.

SP+ has the Hokies in the 74th percentile in its preseason ratings (#36 nationally). Virginia Tech’s offense is in the 69th percentile, while the defense is in the 75th percentile.

If one assumes the Hokies go 9-3, then the likeliest conference record would be 6-2, which would probably not be enough to get Tech into the conference championship game.

Such an outcome would be a good result, and would definitely get the Hokies invited to a solid bowl, but given the weakness of the conference, it would not be enough to secure a playoff bid.

How the Hokies earn a berth in the ACC championship

If the Hokies could find a tenth win, they would stand as good a chance as any other ACC team of securing a berth in the championship game.

Historically, 10-win Virginia Tech teams have featured elite defenses and above average offenses. These teams have, on averaged, finished in the 87th percentile in SP+.

The 2024 team will begin the season with an SP+ offense typical of Tech teams that win double digit games. The questions revolve around the defense.

That’s where the pillow-soft schedule comes in.

Tech could be favored in 10 games, and only three teams feature an offense rated above the 52nd percentile: Clemson, Miami, and Georgia Tech.

Given the high (for the Hokies) SP+ offense rating, Tech’s defense should not have to rise to truly elite status in order to win 10 games against this schedule. The tipping point is likely around the 84th percentile.

That would require a noted increase from the initial rating, in the 75th percentile, but it is possible.

And if Tech enters November with, at most, one loss, they will be in the playoff conversation.

Ultimately, the numbers point to Virginia Tech remaining on the outside looking in, but in year 3 of the Brent Pry era, such a season would represent continued progress. And depending on who decides to return for 2025, excitement about the future could reach levels not seen since the early 2000s.

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Aside from a few trips back to the U.S., I lived in Moscow from February 2007 through June 2014, then again from July to December 2015. During that time I earned a Master’s degree in the History of International Relations at Moscow State University, M.V. Lomonosov, worked at Ernst & Young, and did most everything people do in their 20s. I got married, became a father, and made lifelong friends. I also played a lot of football.

Militsiya

The first time anyone ever pointed an AK-47 at me, I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. In true What’s-a-Texas-county-mounty-doing-in-Arkansas? style, a traffic cop, the runt of the group of three who had just driven up in a little Zhiguli squad car, waved around his semi-automatic weapon and told our group to break up the football game we had going in the courtyard.

The area where we were playing was surrounded on three sides by Moscow State University’s imposing main building. Constructed just before Joseph Stalin died, it is the largest university building in the world. And it was my home for two and a half years.

That we were playing at all was a minor miracle, the result of having met Dorothy, a Bulgarian medical student, at the circus a month earlier. She was one of Irina’s acquaintances. Irina was the program coordinator for our study abroad group. Seventeen years later, she’s still a good friend.

The circus in Russia is beyond awesome, and if you ever get the chance, you should go. In my case, I should have stayed. But, loyalty being what it is, I left at intermission and returned to my dorm room to listen (not watch) the Clemson-Virginia Tech basketball game over the internet. That was the one and only year Seth Greenberg got the team into the tournament. Had Tech won that day, at home against a beatable Tigers team, they would have at least tied for the regular season ACC men’s basketball championship. They lost by a point.

A few weeks later, we (a group of about 12 American study abroad students, all in our early 20s) moved from an off campus dormitory to the main building. By chance, our rooms were in the same sector as Dorothy’s, and pretty quickly word got out that she had an “American” football.

What? What do you mean she has a football? Can she throw it?

Turns out she could! Her form was not unlike Juan Marichal throwing a pitch. High leg kick, tight spiral. She was even better than Christina, who played quarterback every other play for our VT co-ed intramural team, the Mechanicsvicks, in the fall of 2005. And Christina was really good. (Editor’s note: Jack has still not gotten over being caught from behind on the one yard-line after a long catch and run in a playoff game that ended with the ball 36 inches from pay dirt and the Mechanicsvicks on the losing end of the score.)

As a side note, in case you were wondering, Virginia Tech is not widely known amongst most Russian football fans. The NFL is where it’s at in Russia. College football is a tougher sell because most Russians have no concept of inter-collegiate athletics. They have club sports, but that’s it. I had people ask me why I cared so much about “student football”. Why not professionals? The notion that 100,000 people would crowd into a stadium and scream their heads off for three and a half hours in support of a bunch of students is completely foreign to all but the most diehard fans.

Anyway, back at the university, a bunch of us used to play out in the courtyard on nice days. The weather was uncommonly mild that spring, and everyone took advantage by spending as much time outdoors as possible. We got some pretty lively games going, too. At first the Russians looked at us like we were aliens, but after a while a few got the nerve to join in.

That’s what we were doing on the evening of April 16 (local time), when Nick, an American guy in our group, who was then a student at Oregon St., came up to me and said, “Uh, dude, the worst mass shooting in the history of the country just happened at your school.”

Looking back, I am really glad I had managed to make some good friends in the first 10 weeks I was in Russia. I definitely leaned on them in the wake of the shooting. It was rough. I don’t have to tell you all.

Sleepless nights

That fall, I returned to the university as a full-time Master’s student. After a bit of searching, I figured out how to get Bill Roth and Mike Burnup live through Yahoo Sports. The radio coverage was a lifeline, but the eight-hour time difference was brutal. Noon games were doable, but all the most anticipated games were played in primetime. That meant rise and shine around 4 a.m. on Sunday. And hard as I tried, getting any real sleep the night before was just impossible. Think about it, while Hokie Nation was tailgating, I was trying to sleep. It never worked.

Still, a win would make the sacrifice worth all the trouble. The only problem is that the Hokies lost all three games they played in primetime in 2007. And they didn’t just lose. They lost in the most excruciating fashion possible.

To this day, what sticks out most in my memory is the sound of Bill Roth’s voice, talking about Tyrod Taylor entering the game at LSU, combined with the way my sleep deprived eyes took in the particular hew of snot green that my wall, and seemingly every other wall in the country, was painted. Makes me shudder just thinking about it.

Tough Nuts

In the spring of 2009, I met an Azerbaijani student named Mehdi at the History Faculty building. He was a football fan, newly introduced to the game. While he didn’t play, his friend Sasha did, so he introduced us. Sasha was, I believe, in his third year at the university and he was studying the history of the Balkans region (the area around the former Yugoslavia).

Sasha told me he played on a flag football team and offered to introduce me to the guys. That first Saturday I met Alexey, the team captain and quarterback, we worked out for a good two hours. He is about 6’1”, shifty, stronger than me, and really knows the game. I ran fly pattern after fly pattern and he laid the football out just beautifully each time. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Alexey offered me a roster spot, and I happily accepted. The team, Tough Nuts in English, was prepping for a tournament that would take place in the end of May. The Scorpions would be there. We were a competitive team, but at that time, no one had ever beaten the Scorpions, who featured a 6’3”, 218 lb. safety named Sergey Ivanov.

The previous year, Ivanov had been a practice squad player with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If we’d have been in pads, he would have killed me. Literally. Thank God for flags.

At the tournament we won our first two round-robin games, which left us good and warmed up for our rendezvous with the Scorpions. We got the ball first and did not nothing on first and second down. On third down, Alexey called a wide receiver reverse that I would throw out of. We were lucky my wounded duck didn’t get picked. Fourth down.

There is no punting in 5-v-5 flag football, so on fourth and midfield, Alexey dialed up my best play, a 9-route. Ivanov was playing man coverage underneath on someone else. I had a shorter, less athletic guy manning up on me out wide. I got a step on him, Alexey’s pass was perfect, the DB didn’t turn around, and I waited to put my hands up until the split second before the ball arrived. Boom! Touchdown. We came to play.

I caught another touchdown pass later in the game, but as I recall, the real star for us was Andrei, who played wide receiver opposite me. He caught a bunch of passes and shut down Ivanov on defense. We held on to win by a touchdown. The Scorpions were no longer unbeaten.

At the end of the day, we were the only undefeated team in the tournament, so by the agreed rules, we should have been crowned champions. But the Scorpions were fixing for a rematch, and what were we going to do, duck ‘em? Not on your life.

The shame of it is that by the end of the day, we were gassed. We only had five and half guys on the roster that day. Kolya had a broken finger and could only rush the passer on defense, meaning most of us played every snap of every game. The Scorpions went 10-deep and substituted liberally throughout the tournament. We played hard, but just couldn’t get any separation on tired legs. And we also couldn’t get a fortunate (or merely not disastrous) bounce to save our lives. So, we lost the championship game, and walked away with silver medals. Honestly, though, the whole thing felt like the first Rocky movie. Everyone in attendance knew the times were changing, and there was a new football power in town.

Unfortunately, that was my high water mark individually. I dislocated my shoulder (for the umpteenth time) in practice a week before the next game. It was pretty gruesome. I put the arm back in myself and, genius that I am, tried to play in the tournament the following week. I was a shell of the player I had been at the previous tournament and, again short on players, we bowed out in the semifinals.

I graduated a few weeks later and returned to the U.S. One year and a thousand or so rejected job applications later (hurray Great Recession), I was back in Moscow. No longer a student, I taught English for a year before catching on with Ernst & Young.

I returned to the football field, but things had changed. The other guys had gotten a lot better.

Football takes off, and I’m grounded

Many Russians will tell you that August is when bad things happen. In 2010, it was the fires outside Moscow that engulfed the capital in a thick smoke, which, combined with six straight weeks of 95+ degree temperatures, made life absolutely miserable.

Once the smoke finally cleared, around mid-September, I got a few weeks of training in, then promptly got really sick and spent a week in the hospital. Upon discharge, I was on strict doctor’s orders to observe a couple weeks of bed rest and no strenuous exercise for a few months. It took a while to regain my (limited) strength and then get back in shape. Tyrod Taylor was well into his first preseason as a pro before I started rounding into form.

The injury bug bit again that fall, with another horrendous shoulder dislocation finally leading to surgery. My orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Ivan Radysh, did a fantastic job, and the newly renovated hospital was as comfortable as can be. Such a surgery is often an outpatient procedure these days, but I ended up spending a couple nights in the hospital and did not have to pay a dime out of pocket. All in all, a positive experience.

The guys as I knew them, circa 2010 - Kolya (Nikolas) speaking directly to the camera and Alexey (Big Green), the lefty quarterback, plus all the guys from the teams that we regularly trained with each week.

I want to say a bit about the core group of guys we trained with. There were probably 10 or so teams in Moscow at the time, but the opposing team I got to know best was The Zombies.

Lev, their quarterback and team captain, devised the most devilishly effective offensive system. In those days, our team was more talented, so Lev compensated by creating the flag football version of Paul Johnson’s offense. It was all predicated on misdirection. One false step as a DB and you were toast. The Zombies are a great group of guys, but I hated playing against them. It was so mentally taxing.

An interesting note about flag football in Russia, and Europe more broadly, is that it’s quite popular with girls too. While there is some co-ed play, a lot of the girls play on all female teams. I remember one time watching an all girls team play against an all guys team. The guys didn’t take the girls seriously. They should have. The girls won, going away.

Before things really intensified in Ukraine, Tough Nuts and The Zombies would travel to Germany each year to play in Big Bowl, a massive international tournament. In the first few years, both teams finished in the bottom half of the bracket. However, they improved every year, so much so that in later years they were competitive with even the elite teams and consistently finished toward the top of the standings.

National Champions

My shoulder surgery in November 2011 was successful, but the recovery time was still long. I eased my way back onto the field about eight months post-op, but didn’t get my (nearly) full range of motion back until a full year after the operation.

Even after recovery, I was never the same player I had been. Nine months post-op, I remember bobbling a wide receiver screen. The ball bounced straight into the air, and the charging cornerback plucked it and housed it. Everyone knew I was coming off a pretty serious injury and it was just a regular training session, but it was demoralizing nonetheless. It was also the first indication that my role was going to change.

In 5-on-5 flag football, the best athletes usually play safety on defense. I was no longer one of the two best, so I moved up to cornerback, where there was a greater emphasis on tackling. The results were mixed, at best.

That fall I rejoined Tough Nuts for the Moscow Cup, my first tournament in years. I don’t remember much about it, other than being happy to get out on the field and compete. We finished second, losing to a team with a really great aerial attack. These guys had big, athletic wide receivers and a quarterback who, while average, was good enough to just chuck it deep and let his guys go make a play. Really, though, that was just a warm up for the main event. The National Championship was only weeks away, and we knew we would see the best teams from the Moscow Cup, as well as all over Russia, in that, the mother of all Russian tournaments.

By late 2012, Tough Nuts had changed in terms of personnel since I first joined the team, three and a half years earlier. Sasha was off doing academic field work and Andrei, Kolya and I were in and out of the line up. However, Alexey had done a great job recruiting new talent. We now had a full complement of players. Lev had done the same with the Zombies, who were now a top tier team.

If memory serves correct, the Scorpions played in this tournament, but Ivanov wasn’t there, and they weren’t really competitive. Think Sonny Liston after losing to Muhammed Ali.

One thing that stands out in my memory is the play in which I finally got my confidence back. On what was perhaps the only inaccurate pass Alexey threw all day, I managed to reach up and snag a one-handed catch with my surgically repaired arm. It turns out a little of the ole magic still remained!

If I remember correctly, we ended up in the loser’s bracket pretty early, but we battled our way to the championship game, and a rematch with the team that beat us for the Moscow Cup.

The other team, whose name escapes me, didn’t do anything new or different in the rematch. Neither did we. And in the early going, the results were pretty similar to the previous time we had played them. By halftime, the final result seemed all but assured, with only the margin still in question. We trailed 14-0, but it felt like a lot more. We could not generate any offense, and we were holding on for lives on defense.

In the second half, the other team was driving for what probably would have been the decisive score. Our defense stiffened up, forcing a fourth and short. In a mental lapse, the quarterback rushed when he didn’t have to and overthrew a wide open receiver. Turnover on downs. It was the break we needed.

In the span of a few minutes, the momentum swung completely in our direction, and we tied the game. The clock was running down at this point, and the next score would probably be the game winner. I had not played much in the game, but Alexey called my number, and in I went for a critical defensive series.

After a couple incompletions, the opposing quarterback got desperate. He lofted a ball to midfield, where I was waiting all alone in medium zone coverage. It felt like the ball hung up in the air forever. By the time it finally came down, I had a frantic receiver bearing down on me. No matter. I made the interception, and we now had a chance to win the game in regulation.

Credit to the other team, they stopped us short of the goal line, and the game went to overtime. In OT, they got the ball first and did nothing with it. When we got the ball, Alexey was of the mind to end things. After advancing the ball almost to midfield, he called a wheel route to Andrei up the left sideline as the primary route. A perfect pass beat perfect coverage, and as he had done time and again, Andrei snagged the pass and managed to get his feet down in bounds. It was a thing of beauty. We were National Champs!

Life in 2024 and beyond

It’s been seven years since I last stepped foot on Russian soil, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the place. But even more than I miss the actual city, I miss those endless summer days when we would practice, in sunlight, until 10:30 pm. I miss the days when Ukrainian teams would come to play in Russian tournaments and Russian teams would take a night train over to play in Ukrainian tournaments. Mostly, I miss how carefree the times were.

But while the times in which we now live are challenging, the future seems bright. Lev’s sons are big and strong, and rapidly approaching college age. I saw a picture of them all together recently. Until I read the caption, I thought his sons were just random new guys on the team. It’s been that long since I’ve seen them in person. Turns out Lev is the Deion Sanders of Russian flag football.

Alexey, too, became a father a couple years ago. Although just a toddler, his son already moves well in the pocket. Perhaps by the time he’s of age, college football will have truly gone global. If he ends up being half the player his old man is, I’d love to get him in an orange and maroon jersey.

Today I am going to zero in on predictions and, specifically, what it is going to take for the Hokies to win X amount of games in 2023. In addition, I will present data that aim to contextualize the likelihood of Tech ending up in various win brackets.

The SP+ dataset used in this analysis dates back to 1970. Though it excludes the 2020 Covid season, 52 seasons sufficient to detect patterns and draw conclusions.

The key metrics in this article are described in terms of percentiles. A team in the 40th percentile has a higher rating in that metric than 40% of FBS teams. Running the analysis in terms of percentiles allows us to normalize performance across years, as the total number teams has not remained constant.

6 wins - bowl eligibility

Most prognosticators predict the Hokies will win somewhere between five and seven games in 2023. The dividing line between bowl eligibility and spending a second straight season home for the holidays is crystal clear:

• Offensive SP+ Percentile > 50%; and

• Defensive SP+ Percentile > 50%

Ok, no big surprise there. But let us now dig a little deeper.

Traditionally, Tech has been much better on defense than it has on offense. However, in the years in which the Hokies win precisely six games, they tend to be middling on both sides of the ball.

If, in late September, the Hokies are hanging around the 55th to 60 percentile in SP+ on both offense and defense, we are likely looking at a 6-6 regular season and a lower tier, pre-Christmas bowl.

Given last year’s disaster, I suspect most fans would take such an outcome, but fandom being what it is, most would be left wanting.

7 to 9 wins - the difference between good and great

Historically, Virginia Tech teams that win between seven and nine games average in the 75th to 80th percentile in SP+ Defense Percentile. The difference in win total is all determined by the offense.

Seven-win Tech teams are generally great on defense (80th percentile) and very bad on offense (37th percentile). In fact, only teams that win three games have averaged a lower SP+ Offense Percentile.

Eight-win teams feature nearly the exact same prowess on defense (79th percentile) and a mid-pack offense (49th percentile).

Bumping the SP+ Offense Percentile up to 57th has generally been enough to win nine games, if the defense is in the top quartile of FBS (76th percentile).

10-11 wins - from excellent to elite

Increasing the win total from 9 to 10 requires notable improvement on both sides of the ball. Double digit wins, in general, correlate with a defense that hovers around the 90th percentile. The difference between 10 and 11 wins comes down to offense.

A good offense (65th percentile) paired with an elite defense usually yields 10 wins, while an excellent offense (82nd percentile) with that same defense has historically generated 11 wins.

From the baseline, upward?

With a clear understanding of the metrics Tech needs to hit in order to hit various win goals, let’s now move on to what it will take to close the gap between the 2022 season and where the team seeks to go.

Last year, Tech was in the 6th percentile in Offensive SP+ and the 70th percentile in Defensive SP+.

The Hokies played defense commensurate with a bowl bound team. If Chris Marve and his defensive staff can increase their SP+ rating 5 to 10 percentile points, the Hokies would elevate their ceiling from six to nine wins.

On offense, there is just a tad more work to be done.

That said, looking strictly at the numbers, if the Hokies could have swapped in an average Scot Loeffler offense (2013-2015), the 2022 team likely would have finished the regular season with a 6-5 record - a win over ODU, and two wins out of Miami, NC State, and Georgia Tech.

An average Brad Cornelsen offense paired with the the 2022 defense would have been comfortably bowl bound, with wins over all four aforementioned opponents as well as a possible win in the bowl game, which would have meant an 8-4 record.

The point is, Tyler Bowen does not need to move mountains in order for Tech to have a much more successful 2023 campaign. He doesn’t even have to be Stiney (Bryand Stinespring) good! Average will truly suffice.

Steven Tyler: What will it take to let [2022] go?

Hokie Analytics: Eight wins, including the bowl game.

How good can the 2023 defense be?

The 2022 defense was almost spot-on with the 52-year mean SP+ Defense Percentile (69.7 vs. 69.9). However, the median over that length of time is actually 74.3, just shy of the seven to nine win cutoff of 75.

With most of the key players from 2022 returning in 2023, one could reasonably set the over/under at the 75th percentile for the defense in the coming year.

Even if the defense were to take an unexpected step backward in its second season under Chris Marve, it would likely remain north of the 60th percentile, which would support six wins if paired with a half decent offense.

So, a reasonably high floor and moderate expectations for year-over-year improvement have the Hokies in a pretty good position. However, questions around defensive line depth likely mean a fairly low ceiling. Think somewhere in the neighborhood of the 80th percentile.

Don’t get me wrong, that would be a great outcome for this defense, but at this point it is probably unrealistic to think the defense stands a reasonable possibility of pushing higher than that.

The Takeaway

Based on historical SP+ ratings for the offense and defense, the 2023 Hokies are better positioned for success than many might suspect. Five wins appears to be a reasonable floor, but the data suggest the ceiling for this team is actually nine wins.

That may sound ambitious, but is it? The schedule features a lot of losable games, but 11 of the 12 are also readily winnable.

The Hokies should travel to Tallahassee in early October as, at worst, a 3-2 football team. There is also decent enough chance that they enter that game undefeated and ranked around 22nd in AP Poll.

Let’s assume the defense improves from the 70th percentile in 2022 to the 75th in 2023. From there:

• A sub-Scot Loeffler era offense = 5 wins

• An average Scot Loeffler era offense = 6 to 7 wins

• An average Brad Cornelsen era offense = 8 to 9 wins

Ultimately, like so much in football, the 2023 team will go as far as their good health takes them. With that in mind, an over/under of 7.5 wins, including the bowl game, looks appropriate for this year’s Hokies.

Seems high, doesn’t it? But the numbers are the numbers. And by the end of September, we should have a pretty good idea of where this thing is headed.

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Still, high school recruiting is just one part of building a winning program, and these days it is really just a sub-set of roster management, along with the transfer portal.

Since Virginia Tech parted ways with Justin Fuente, a constant refrain has been the degree to which talent has dropped within the program.

So, this week I’m going to start by quantifying that assertion, then I will pull back the aperture and examine what Tech has done with the talent it has had.

Decline in team talent

From 2015 to 2021, Virginia Tech’s team talent ranged from 29th nationally (2019) to 40th (2021). Team talent is a metric derived from the 247Sports Composite that blends publicly available recruiting rankings to come up with a team-wide measure.

Virginia Tech’s two best years on the field during that span, 2016 and 2017, featured teams ranked 36th and 33rd in talent, respectively.

In 2022, Tech’s talent ranking slipped all the way to 52nd.

In Frank Beamer’s last year and throughout Justin Fuente’s tenure as head coach, the Hokies were an average to very good team, all the while maintaining a fairly tight team talent range of 11. So, while the 2022 ranking of 52 was still well within the top half of FBS, it was a greater distance from 2021 than the range of the prior seven years.

The 2022 Hokies were likely to take a step backward based on talent alone. But should the 52nd most talented team in the country really have looked as bad as Virginia Tech did last year? And if not, what does that say about other issues within the program?

The expectations-results delta

To get an accurate measurement of Virginia Tech’s performance on the field since 2015, I created a dataset with rankings from the following sources:

1. SP+ (a rating system created by Bill Connelly that is meant to be a predictive comparison of teams)

2. FPI (Football Power Index measures a team's true strength on a net points scale; expected point margin vs an average opponent on a neutral field)

3. SOR (Strength of Record reflects the chance that an average Top 25 team would have a team's record or better, given the schedule)

4. Overall Efficiency (incorporates offense, defense and special teams efficiencies into a single schedule-adjusted measure of per-play efficiency)

5. PFF Overall Grade (team performance grade based on a scoring system applied to individual technique, execution, and decision making each play)

I averaged the five rankings to get an overall performance rank for each season. I then subtracted that number from the team talent rank to arrive at the delta (or difference) between reasonable expectations for the season (team talent) and actual outcomes (overall performance).

The story the data tells is not a pretty one.

Only twice since 2015 have the Hokies outperformed expectations, which is represented by a positive delta between overall performance and team talent.

After the 2022 season reset the depths possible for modern Virginia Tech football, the previous low point, 2018, was reclassified in the common fan’s mind from train wreck to merely meh.

One thing both of those seasons have in common is that the team massively underperformed in comparison to the talent on the roster. In fact, those two teams really serve as bookends, with a clear line of symmetry split right down the middle of the still-strange-beyond-belief Covid season (2020).

To classify each delta in plain language, I bucketed the results as follows:

• +/- 0-9 positions in the rankings = met expectations

• +/- 10-19 = slightly over/underperformed

• +/- 20-29 = moderately over/underperformed

• +/- 30+ = majorly over/underperformed

Underperforming in five out of eight years is, obviously, not going to get it done. However, the larger issue is the three years in which the Hokies majorly underperformed their team talent.

Injuries are ever present in football, but in none of those three years were they so extreme as to send the season into a tailspin. Josh Jackson getting hurt and the Hokies winning 4 of their last 11 games in 2018 is, I would argue, an example of correlation not necessarily equaling causation. Jackson’s backup, Ryan Willis, played winning football - the defense did not.

Talent replenishment does appear to be a key factor. Fuente talked openly about the dearth of young talent in the program when he arrived. In 2018, just before the words transfer portal entered the college football lexicon, those recruiting misses caught up with the Hokies.

Later, the 2020 and 2021 recruiting classes would again put the Hokies behind the eight ball, ultimately costing Fuente his job.

Recruiting only matters so much

Back-to-back subpar recruiting classes contributed to Tech’s recent struggles, but not as much as it might appear.

After all, the decline in incoming talent is factored into the overall team talent ranking - Tech fell from 36th in 2020 to 52nd in 2022, due in large part to the 2020-21 recruiting classes.

At the same time, Tech’s combined average of on-field performance rankings declined from 41st nationally in 2020 to 96th in 2022.

Clearly, last season owes its struggles to more than a brief downturn in high school recruiting.

Many other factors can conspire to ensure that a given season fails to meet expectations. Below is a list of such factors, along with commentary as to each factor’s particular applicability to Virginia Tech in the last five years.

• Strength and conditioning issues

  • Contributing factor - epidemic of skinny legs in the late Fuente era and the known issue with Parker Clements playing nearly every snap in 2022 despite not being able to lift in the offseason due to an injury

• Misalignments within the coaching staff and/or between the staff and players

  • Major factor - 2020 was absolutely the worst year imaginable for a coordinator transition, and 2022 featured a disjointed staff coaching players who were recruited to play in a different system

• Character/discipline issues

  • Contributing factor - 2018, ‘nuff said

• In-game coaching

  • Major factor - Clock management and communication stand out, but in too many instances in recent years it was clear that one or both coordinators got out-coached in a tough loss

• Schematic issues

  • Question mark - Scheme is always a popular topic for critique, but at present the only open question is Tyler Bowen’s offense (former offensive coordinator Brad Cornelsen’s schemes were great, though his play-calling could be head-scratching)

• Off-field distractions

  • Major Factor - Galen Scott’s dalliances, which led to his resignation in the spring of 2018, as well as Covid, which prompted the cancellation of spring practice and turned the entire 2020 season on its head, both had an outsized, negative impact on the program

The Takeaway

The 2023 offseason has been an unmitigated success for the Virginia Tech football program. Quality players were added from the transfer portal, the 2023 high school recruiting class was a step in the right direction, the Spring Game showed an improved team and gave the fanbase its first glimpse of young stars-in-the-making, and the staff is landing one highly ranked 2024 commit after another.

It has been a while since the program felt a steady breeze at its back. With ACC Media Days and the start of fall camp just around the corner, we will soon find out the extent to which that momentum is carrying over in other areas.

Coaches talk often after a loss about “having some things to clean up”. Recruiting is improving, and that is important, but the Hokies will need to demonstrate improvement in many other areas if they are to meet, or exceed, expectations in 2023.

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We regret you see fit to withdraw. I hope you may prosper and may your gates be bigger and better.

The understated adieu belies numerous issues that finally rose to the surface in late 1932, 11 years after the founding of the conference.

On its face, the split was amicable. Geography was cited, with the remaining members concentrated in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas and the departing members located in Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Dr. Steadman Vincent Sanford of Georgia, for whom Sanford Stadium is named, was a leader amongst both the Southern Conference founding group, as well as those that broke away to form the new Southeastern Conference.

Spokesmen for both conferences cited eased administrative challenges with two smaller conferences as a key selling point.

Speaking on behalf of the new conference, Florida’s Dr. John Tigert said, “Since in our judgement the time has arrived for a more compact organization for the administration of athletics, it seems wise for a division of the Southern Conference to be made solely on geographical lines.”

Writing in the Los Angeles Times on the eve of the 1933 season, Vanderbilt Head Coach Dan McGugin asserted, “While [the Southern Conference] accomplished much in improvement of standards, it was too large for general conference intercollegiate competition.”

That, however, was just window dressing. At it’s heart, the split was about money and values. And football.

“Although leaders of each group emphasized the friendly regard for the other and the hope for the continuance of cordial athletic relations,” noted a report by the AP published in The Boston Globe on December 11, 1932, “there was a feeling among some Southern Conference members that the group which resigned had an eye on the commercial value of a compact body composed of several of the outstanding athletic teams, particularly football.”

Sore feelings and echoes of the Big East split

North Carolina’s A.W. Hobbs led a Miles-appointed committee that met with the departing members. According to an AP article published in the New York Herald Tribune:

A.W. Hobbs, of North Carolina, chairman, said his committee was of the opinion it was within the right of any group to withdraw whenever it felt it was to its benefit to do so and that there was no resentment against the others for pulling out of the conference.

Speaking solely, he said, for himself, Hobbs told the conference he was not deceived by any fine words that might be employed. “We are going to be two separate groups. You may talk about your accepting the same rules as we have, but we are going to be two different conferences. There is no sentiment connected with this event. We have gone along together as far as we could and have come to a parting of the ways. The Southern Conference is at an end. I want to say there is nothing wrong with athletics and all we need is common honesty.”

In other words:

There is no bad blood between us and the lying leavers who certainly never deceived us.

Right…

While the split was certainly geographic, the divide formed along the spectrum that at one end favored tighter academic standards and at the other increased revenue. Sounds familiar, right?

And make no mistake, those that prioritized academics were not fielding teams as strong as those that prioritized revenue generation.

“Figured on the results of contests between teams in the two groups the past fall, the Southeastern Conference is just about twice as formidable in a gridiron way as the Southern Conference as it now exists,” noted an AP article published in The Baltimore Sun on December 12, 1932.

During the 1932 season, the SEC teams held a 12-6-2 record in matchups against Southern Conference foes.

VPI, as Tech was known in the day, was not a particularly formidable team, but it was not bad either. The team finished with an SRS (Simple Rating System) rank of 35th, which put Tech in the 71st percentile, nationally.

However, geography, leadership, and on-field performance all conspired to make VPI a bridesmaid in this particular round of conference realignment.

The top Southern Conference football schools, from its founding in 1921 through 1932, the last season before the split, were:

• Alabama

• Tulane

• Georgia Tech

• Tennessee

All four of those schools moved to the SEC for the 1933 season.

The split left the Southern Conference a shell of its former self. Like the Big East would do when it was cannibalized following the 2003 season, the Southern Conference immediately went in search of new members.

Initial reports of the split cited Forest Fletcher of Washington & Lee, Secretary of the Southern Conference, as to the conference’s future plans to consider adding William & Mary, Davidson, Richmond, Wake Forest, and Furman.

Indeed, those 5 schools, plus The Citadel, joined the league in time for the 1936 season, raising the conference’s total to 16 teams, all within the Maryland to South Carolina footprint.

Differences in priorities

Immediately, upon news of the split, came reports of possible rules changes in each conference.

“Both organizations have committees at work on proposed changes in rules and regulations which will be advantageous under the new circumstances, and these probably will be enacted at the Southern Conference meeting in Richmond Jan 12 and the Southeastern meeting in Atlanta late in February,” reported the AP in an article published in The Boston Globe on December 11, 1932.

“It was reported the Southern Conference planned a revision of its rules with an idea of making eligibility requirements higher.”

Meanwhile, the Southeastern conference removed the ban on radio broadcasts of football games.

The philosophical differences with regard to the management of the two conferences came to the fore in February. As reported in The Atlanta Constitution on February 13, 1933:

The new Southeastern conference has as one of its major tenets, the making of the college presidents responsible for the conduct of athletics and their respective institutions. This has not been true in the past, the Southern conference holding its associations or faculty chairmen responsible.

This had the effect of suddenly and most sharply calling attention of the various presidents to athletics at their respective institutions. They are responsible, and in most cases lamentably ignorant of their athletic management.

This change marked the first time the presidents would be in charge of athletics, and this elevation in priority held many intriguing possibilities.

The Atlanta Constitution noted, in an article published on February 16, 1933 about a secret meeting of the Southeastern Conference presidents, that they “are literally ‘on the spot’ and their action is likely to be most important. The entire system of athletic control might be changed.” (bold added)

Takeaways

The circumstances around the Southern Conference split have been largely forgotten 90 years later, but the impact nonetheless remains profound.

From the outset, the SEC was an innovative league focused on maximizing its on-field product, as well as its revenue from athletics.

What remained of the Southern Conference, which for the next 20 years would serve as the precursor to the modern ACC, maintained a more traditional mindset with regard to the role of athletics as subjugate to the academic function of the university.

These differences have carried through to the present. The SEC inaugurated the first conference championship game in 1992, which was 13 years before the ACC played its first conference championship in football.

In 2024, Oklahoma and Texas will officially join the SEC, taking the league to 16 teams. The conference’s television deal - made possible by the concentration of great teams, passionate fans, and huge stadiums - gives every member school’s athletic department a major revenue advantage over most non-league foes.

Meanwhile, ACC member schools are locked in an undervalued media deal through 2036, the grant of rights for which is so ironclad that no school is likely to leave for greener pastures within the next decade.

On the one hand, it makes an ACC split very unlikely. On the other hand, it dooms member schools to an ever widening gap with SEC schools. And for schools like Virginia Tech, that were once in a super conference with most of those SEC schools, it is a bitter pill to swallow.

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Last week I compared Virginia Tech’s SRS (Simple Rating System) annual ranking percentiles during the program’s peak years to the years before and after that era.

This week I will explore Tech’s performance, as well as that of other conference members, and consider it in the context of realignment.

Former Virginia Governor and current US Senator Mark Warner played a big role in the Hokies getting an invite to join the ACC in 2004, but without a decade of on-field success and the National Championship game appearance in 1999, the Hokies would have been no different from East Carolina (a point Techsideline has rightly hammered into my head).

Political support can take a team only so far.

The Backdrop

To review, here is an overall look at Virginia Tech’s football program from 1902 to the present day (keep in mind there were some missed seasons due to pandemics and wars, and years in which data are not available):

Since 1902, the Hokies have had stops in the Southern conference, Big East, and ACC, as well as 44 years as an independent.

Interestingly, the broad SRS percentile trend seen in the line graph above - downward from 1902 to 1950, upward from 1950 to 1999, peak from 1999 to 2009, and downward again from 2009 to the present - does not align directly with conference affiliation.

Independent (1902-1920)

Virginia Tech was a thoroughly average program in its first 17 years of intercollegiate competition on the gridiron. And that’s not bad! Few teams are awesome right out of the gates.

The middling SRS percentiles resulted, in part, from a consistently weak strength of the schedule. The 1905 team’s percentile was only 69.1, despite the team winning its first eight games and finishing 9-1, with the only loss coming to Navy in Annapolis by less than a touchdown.

Most notably, after a decline in on-field performance from 1909-11, the team was trending up prior to the U.S. entrance into World War I. That success carried over into the 1917 season, but then the influenza pandemic struck in 1918, which, combined with preparations for a 1919 war offensive (that never came to pass), forced Virginia Tech to play a mixed schedule featuring some universities and some clubs. As a result, that season is omitted from the database.

The 1919 season was a step down from the pre-war seasons in terms of performance, and 1920 was worse. The Hokies entered the Southern Conference (SoCon) on a slide.

But my, what a conference they joined.

SoCon - Super Conference Era (1921-1931)

Virginia Tech was a charter member of the Southern Conference along with:

• Alabama

• Auburn

• Clemson

• Georgia

• Georgia Tech

• Kentucky

• Maryland

• Mississippi State

• North Carolina

• NC State

• Tennessee

• Washington & Lee

In 1922, the SoCon added six more schools - Florida, LSU, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tulane, and Vanderbilt - to form a 20 team super conference (just imagine what the TV contract would be for that group in 2023).

In 1924, Sewanee and VMI joined, and Duke followed in 1929.

The first split took place in 1932, when 13 schools left to form the SEC.

During the super conference era, Virginia Tech was mostly irrelevant on the national stage.

The 1922 team was the only Gobbler unit to finish in the top 30 of the SRS, and the 1927 and 1932 teams were the only others to finish in the top 50.

While Tech’s performance did not stand out in the aggregate, the team was actually midpack in the SoCon. As impressive as the list of conference members looks today back in the 1920s and early 1930s, most of these teams were subpar.

However, by the late 1920s the balance of power had begun to shift to the Southeast.

SoCon - ACC Plus Era (1932-1952)

If only Tech could have maintained its level of semi-success in the two decades following the creation of the SEC, it might have had a stronger case to make for inclusion in the original ACC.

That said, clearly football prowess was not the only consideration in forming the new conference. UVA’s truly hideous football program (last by a comfortable margin in SRS Percentile among conference teams from 1933-52) failed to derail its inclusion in the new league.

Virginia aside, the other schools that left to start the ACC comprised seven out of the top eight conference teams in SRS Percentile.

SoCon - The Leftovers Era (1953-1964)

After losing out not once, but twice in the realignment sweepstakes of the 1930s and 1950s, Virginia Tech played 12 more largely mediocre seasons in the SoCon. There were a couple noteworthy campaigns in the mid-1950s (‘54 and ‘56, to be exact), but nothing approaching consistent success.

Part of the issue was the overall weakness of the rest of the league. Due to strength of schedule, there was a definite ceiling on Virginia Tech’s prospects nationally, which was reflected in the low SRS Percentile of this period.

Independent (1965-1990)

If Tech could not join a major conference, the next best option was to go independent. The Hokies did just that beginning in 1965.

In 26 years as an independent, spanning from 1965 through 1990, the Hokies logged one top 25 SRS finish and nine SRS Percentile finishes between 70 and 80.

Overall, Tech was a middle-of-the-pack independent, on par with San Diego State, Southern Mississippi, Boston College, and Colorado State. That said, the team had turned in enough solid years as an independent to be attractive to a basketball conference looking to sponsor football.

Big East (1991-2003)

Finally, in 1991, the Hokies were on the right side of realignment, joining the Big East. During their 13 years in the conference, VT finished in the top 10 nationally in SRS four times (1998-2001).

The Big East was a solid football league, and as good as the Hokies were, Miami was an order of magnitude better. With Syracuse, West Virginia, and Boston College consistently turning in good seasons, there were few easy wins in conference.

However, the conference structure made it unstable, and when the next round of realignment came, Virginia Tech was ideally positioned to make a move.

ACC (2004-2022)

The ascendant Virginia Tech program of the Big East years continued its winning ways in the ACC through 2011, but has been in decline ever since.

The Hokies have finished in the top 30 nationally in SRS in 10 out of 18 years in the league (the 2020 pandemic season is excluded from the database), but after raising the level of play in the conference early on, Tech has regressed to middle-of-the-pack status in a middle-of-the-pack P5 football league.

While the Hokies are a strong third in the conference in SRS Percentile since joining the ACC, they are sixth, with an average SRS Percentile of 64.7, if we consider just 2012-22.

The Takeaway

Tech fans have every reason to feel on edge about where things are headed in the latest round of realignment.

The current situation is rooted in the 1932 Southern Conference divorce. Tech was on the losing end of that one. If the SEC does elect to add more teams in the near future, do not discount those old SoCon ties.

And I mean that as both a pro and a con. After all, while there is a history of Virginia Tech, LSU, Alabama, and Clemson all playing in the same super conference, there are reasons why that conference broke up in the first place.

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This week I have a very simple aim. I want to convey the following:

• How good Virginia Tech can be over a sustained period of time

• How bad Virginia Tech can be over a sustained period of time

• The sum of the program’s efforts on the field over the last 125 years

• How the Hokies have performed in comparison with other programs

I saw midday Thursday that Bill Connelly just published something similar, albeit behind a paywall and from a national perspective. I thought about a last minute change of topic, but I had already written hundreds of lines of code this week and sifted through reams of data in order to assemble a table with 125 years of information that sheds light on the heights and the depths every team in major college football has reached. And, while Connelly went decade-by-decade, I zoom in and out on specific eras of Virginia Tech football.

Alight, enough preamble. Here is a brief intro to SRS, the rating system I used for the analysis:

Simple Rating System (SRS) is a team rating mechanism which takes into account scoring margin and SOS. A team's SRS rating is how much they would be expected to win (or lose) by to a perfectly average team. You can calculate the expected score margin between two teams by calculating the difference in their SRS ratings, after accounting for home field advantage.

Each school will differ a bit in the number of years for which there are data. The key factors are:

• When the school began playing football (the full database spans 1897-2022)

• Time missed during WWI and/or 1918 Influenza pandemic

• Time missed during WWII

Because the number of major college programs fielding teams changes from year to year, I have converted the ratings each year first rankings, then to percentiles, which is the primary metric I will reference throughout the article. The best team in a given year finished in the 100th percentile and worst in the 0 percentile.

Now, on with the show!

(Note: Great as the graphs to come are, the show of all shows is Carl Palmer’s drum solo in the below video. We’re talking Michael-Vick-escaping-a-sure-sack-at-BC-and running-70-yards-for-a-touchdown levels of insanity on this one!)

The first 89 seasons: 1902-1994

For the first 89 years of its existence, the Virginia Tech football program was all but irrelevant. There were just three Top 25 years and no team during that time finished as high as the 80th percentile. Historically speaking, the 1993-94 seasons were a peak, and if past was prelude, the team should have taken a major step back in 1995. That, obviously, did not happen.

From the first Sugar Bowl through the last: 1995-2011

Beginning in 1995, Virginia Tech reeled off a 17-year run of elite play. They finished as a Top 25 SRS team in 14 years and a Top 10 team in 8 years. The team reached a maximum SRS percentile of 98.2, and the only bad year during this stretch, the injury plagued 1997 campaign, still ended with an SRS percentile in the top half of what was then called Division 1-A football (now FBS).

During the peak Beamer era run of excellence, the Hokies had the fourth highest average SRS percentile of any FBS team. They were truly among the best of the best in college football.

Return to Mediocrity: 2012-2022

The on-field performance basically dropped off a cliff from 2009 to 2012, even if it didn’t feel that way until the Pitt game in 2012. During the last 10 years, it has basically been a steady flow of mediocrity, with just two Top 25 SRS years (2016 and 2017).

Comparison to major rivals

The following scorecards display all-time numbers for each program, or at least back to 1897.

Virginia Tech

Virginia

West Virginia

All-time, West Virginia beats out Virginia Tech as the better program. The Mountaineers twice finished a season with as the top-ranked team in SRS and notched more Top 10 and Top 25 finishes. UVA is a somewhat distant third, with only one Top 10 finish in the history of the program. All told, outside of the peak Beamer years, Virginia Tech has been a mediocre football program, seldom great and rarely terrible.

The Takeaway

I suspect I, like many fans, have something resembling a Hokie inferiority complex, given the fact that Tech came so close so many times to winning a National Championship, and each time has fallen short. Taking the long view demonstrates:

1. what an incredible job Frank Beamer did

2. that Virginia Tech can be a national power over a period of decades and not just an occasional flash in the pan

3. that since 1902, nobody other than Frank Beamer has achieved any measure of real, national level success at Virginia Tech

The above is both terrifying and reassuring. Brent Pry does not have to be a miracle worker. He merely has to succeed at Frank Beamer levels. Of course, no one other than Beamer has done that, but the fact that Frank did means it’s possible. And that, along with a great week on the recruiting trail, has things looking up a bit in Blacksburg.

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The Big 8

Out of the eight teams in the original Big 8 when it merged with four teams from the Southwest Conference, six would be in this reformulated Big 8. Only Iowa St. and Missouri would be in other conferences. Discerning readers will notice that there is a Big 8 and a Big 10, both of which have nine teams. What can I say? Historical branding just seemed the way to go.

Oklahoma is the only modern blue blood school in this conference. Under Tom Osborne, Nebraska was consistently ranked among the elites in college football, but the program has been pretty pedestrian for the last two decades. In fact, since 1998, Nebraska has only the 4th best winning percentage in the conference.

Compare that to the Osborne years (1973-1997), when Nebraska finished in the Top 15 of the final Associated Press poll in 24 out of 25 seasons. During that time, the team was ranked in the Top 25 in 304 out of 307 games, including every game from mid-1981 until Osborne retired following the 1997 season. That year, the Huskers split the national title with Michigan. They have only won 60% of their games since then.

In 2022, the conference likely would have come down to the Air Force vs. Kansas St. game. How cool would it be to see a service academy in the playoff?

Of course, 1-11 Colorado hired Deion Sanders in the offseason, and Coach Prime has wasted little time upgrading the talent level in Boulder. College football is more fun when Colorado is good, so hopefully he gets the Buffalos going.

Texas

Yup, that’s it. No fancy title needed. Rice gets the final nod due to its proximity to the University of Houston. Historically, this conference is rooted in the old Southwest Conference, and while I considered restoring that name, there was a lot of negativity around how that league broke up back in the 1990s. It was less of a merger on this side than a crack up, with the four strongest teams joining the Big 8 teams to form the Big 12. The rest of the teams basically scattered in the wind.

UT San Antonio has emerged in recent years as a viable program and one meriting inclusion in this conference.

TCU still feels like a newcomer to the national stage, but as their record demonstrates, they have won at a consistently high level for the last 25 years. A level higher, in fact, than mighty Texas. (This table must be irksome in Austin.)

There is a lot of parity in Texas these days, and one need not work hard to imagine a scenario in which any of the top seven teams wins the conference. National runners-up, TCU, would have been the clear favorites to win the conference in 2022. UT-San Antonio’s 11 wins in 2022 made for two teams in the conference with at least 10 wins.

Southwest

The name here might be controversial, but the grouping of schools seems pretty clear cut. On the name - bringing back a Texas-based Southwest conference felt like a step backward, but I like geography-based names. Stressing the hyperlocal nature of this proposed realignment is all part of the branding. One hundred years ago Texas might have felt like the southwest corner of the country, but in actuality it’s right in the middle of the two coasts. The real southwest is Southern California and Arizona. So, think of this conference in the same terms that you would the current Big East basketball conference.

USC is by far the strongest program in the conference, but most of the other schools have had their moments at some point over the last 25 years. So, while it is probably safe to say that USC could be expected to secure a plurality of conference championships in any ten-year period, an outright majority would be a surprise.

That said, the Trojans, though a bit too defense-optional to crack the ranks of the true elite in 2022, likely would have won the conference last year. One gets the sense that this conference would go as Fresno St. and UCLA do - when they are good, the conference will be good. Arizona St. has a ton of untapped potential - maybe in the NIL era they will finally figure things out.

Northwest

For shear competition, the Northwest is difficult to beat. The conference includes the northern-most schools in the current Pac-12 as well as many schools that at one time or another enjoyed great success in the Mountain West Conference. A lot of these states are sparsely populated, but the people who do live up in this corner of the country care about their football.

And they should get good matchups week after week. In the last 25 years, Boise St. has won 80% of its games. And it still has virtually no chance of making the playoff under the current setup, and only a limited opportunity once the playoff field expands to 12 teams. That’s a crime! The Northwest conference would remedy that situation, but in exchange the Broncos would have to beat a lot of good teams to secure the automatic bid.

Oregon has won at a nearly 73% clip since 1998, while Utah’s winning percentage during that same time period is north of 67%. In terms of winning percentage over the last 25 years, Utah is basically Penn St. And they are only the third best team in this conference. Let that sink in.

This conference would have been SEC West-level good in 2022, with four 10-win teams and Boise St. sitting in the middle of the pack with 9 wins.

Before this exercise, I could not imagine a conference in which a seven-win P5 team would be picked to finish in a tie for 7th place. And there is something else worthy of mention - this conference, with so many good teams capable of winning the title, also features some really interesting home field advantages. Imagine a team like Florida flying into Boise or Pullman for a playoff game in early December. That would be wild!

The Takeaway

Hopefully the series thus far has demonstrated both the viability and the advantages of moving college sports to a hyperlocal model. I am a firm believer that such a realignment is inevitable. No business model can support bi-coastal conferences. Eventually, people are going to stop paying. In fact, I think that Rubicon has already been crossed by players like the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois (where I earned an MBA completely online for a total cost of $22k while continuing to work full-time) or University of the People, which offers tuition free bachelor’s and master’s programs that charge a miniscule flat rate fee ($120 per undergrad course) for credit seeking students. It’s time to get back to basics, to make college football matter close to home, and to rein in the crazy spending by athletic departments. Only when the cost of being an actively participating fan decreases, and the importance in the community of each game increases, will college sports truly achieve sustainability in the modern marketplace.

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"Realignment is here," Dutcher said. "So everybody is just waiting for the next shoe to drop. Whether that's the Big Ten or the Pac-12 or the Big 12 or ACC. There's going to be more realignment."

"Even though [our flight] was a charter, I thought, my goodness, those guys have to do this every other week to play a basketball game? It would be exhausting," he said. "It's going to be a real challenge to be at their best with that kind of travel. I'm wishing them all the best, but that's more travel than I would ever wish on anybody."

As Dutcher added, "I just feel like you should play regionally. It's better on the kids. It's easier to be a student-athlete instead of just an athlete."

Now, assuming you have read Part 1 and Part 2, it’s on with the show!

Big 10

Once upon a time, the Big 10 really only had ten teams. Then Penn St. (previously an independent) joined the league, making it 11 teams strong. The league stayed like that for a while, but then went out of its footprint to add Nebraska, than Maryland and Rutgers. Soon it will comprise 16 schools, including the two L.A. schools. That’s just madness! Here is what the conference should look like:

Four Ohio schools, two from Indiana, and three from the southern part of Michigan. Away games would be doable by car for everyone. No one would have a weather advantage. Michigan and Ohio St. are the major names in this conference, but if the top seems a little thin, the ceiling is still fairly high.

Five schools have a winning percentage of at least 60% since 1998, and only two have a winning percentage lower than 50%. Essentially, since the beginning of time, Ohio St. has had its pick of in-state recruits. None of the other schools were a high end, viable option for blue chip players. Cincinnati, NIL, and the transfer portal are changing that. Parity, in some senses, has already arrived, but I think we still have a long way to go. Wait until collectives have established a reputation. Wait until certain schools establish themselves as a destination for guys in the portal. That information will permeate down to the high school level, which could be a game changer.

Michigan would have been expected to win the conference in 2022, but Ohio and Cincinnati were good enough to steal a win from the Wolverines or Buckeyes in one of their combined four matchups. My, how that would have shaken up the college football world, not to mention the conference standings!

Heartland

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m likely to receive mail from George Strait fans this week complaining about the choice of name for this conference. Heartland in Illinois? Blasphemous! But what could be more Heartland than Iowa? Besides, I had to call it something.

One of the things I like about this conference is that every team should be plenty comfortable playing in cold weather. Weather advantages should only come in the playoffs, where they would be a reward for having a better season than the opponent. Maybe Alabama would go up to Madison and romp in a first round playoff game. But they might just freeze.

Wisconsin and Iowa are well positioned to be the two best teams in the conference, year in, year out. The softness at the bottom of the 25-year standings seems to have been addressed via Matt Campbell at Iowa St. and Bret Bielema at Illinois. I never would have guessed that Northwestern would be almost a .500 team over the last 25 years, as they certainly run hot and cold, and seemingly more often cold than hot.

Minnesota likely would have won the conference last year and been one of the weaker win-and-you’re-in teams to make the playoff. Maybe that would be the case most years, but with Wisconsin nabbing Luke Fickell in the offseason, I highly doubt it.

Appalachian

I will admit, I chewed on this one for a while. Memphis is the furthest west, and it is barely in the state of Tennessee. Perhaps it would be a better fit in a conference with the Mississippi and Louisiana schools? Ultimately I kept the Tigers in this conference because I placed high value on keeping schools within a given state all in the same conference. I like the idea of state bragging rights. Besides, it’s not like they are outside the conference footprint.

The Appalachian is a solid conference that should produce a champion that is competitive in the playoff each year. Nick Saban is 71 years old, and my gut tells me he’ll hang up the whistle within the next five years. Will Alabama be as dominant with a different coach? Probably not. They spent almost a decade in the wilderness after Bear Bryant retired. There are enough strong teams in this conference to challenge the Crimson Tide when they return to earth.

In fact, last year Tennessee probably would have been the conference champion. That said, Troy was good again in 2022, and they have quietly been good for some time now. That is a team that would stand to benefit from conference realignment and getting their fair shot at the blue bloods each year.

One unknown variable in all this is what happens to stepping stone programs? For example, Justin Fuente was on a nice little run at Memphis prior to coming to Virginia Tech. In the Appalachian conference, he would have a realistic chance to make the playoff every year. Now, maybe he still takes the Tech job because Alabama is not in the Capital Region and the Hokies have a higher recruiting ceiling, but maybe donors at Memphis step up to cut that gap enough to keep him. It’s an interesting thought experiment.

Bayou

Now, if this isn’t the greatest big brother, little brother conference…For every big brother, there are, on average, two little brothers. Imagine that! On an equal playing field, every other year in their home stadiums, Louisiana, Louisiana Tech, and Tulane would get a shot at LSU. How many years do the Tigers get through those games unblemished. My money is on less than you think. Sure, a conference title and playoff birth will be on the line, but it’s hard to get “up” for every game.

The potential for upsets is crucial because clearly, on paper, LSU is the best team in this conference. I do think the rising tide would lift all the other boats, but LSU would still win this conference more than they would lose it. But that is probably about how things should go. LSU is a powerhouse program that has won three National Championships since 1998, and they played for a fourth.

Plaudits aside for resurgent-under-Brian-Kelly LSU, Tulane was the best team in the conference in 2022, and would have earned the playoff bid. It is hard to predict what Mississippi State will look like without Mike Leach, but that has become a pretty solid program over the last decade. If Lane stays in Oxford a while (yeah, I know, big - no, make that enormous - if) Ole Miss could challenge for the title each year.

In general, though, this conference would likely be decided by which contender slipped up against the teams that will perpetually hang around .500. You know, the little brothers. They may not win the conference often, but they would probably play a pivotal role in deciding the champion each year.

On Deck

Next, we’ll move out west, first to the plains states, then to the coast to sort out how realignment should look in the country’s wide open spaces.

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The 12 conferences I propose are too many to cover in one article, so I’ll go four conferences at a time, starting with the East Coast.

Northeast

The Northeast Conference is by far the weakest of the 12 conferences. Such is the state of football in that part of the country. In a ten year span, one would have to believe that Penn. St. would win the conference six or seven times, Pitt once or twice, and the remaining teams might combine for two conference titles.

Over the last 25 years, aside from Penn St., Pitt and Boston College are the only schools in the conference to win more than half of their games. It’s not so much that these teams never win as it is that they can rarely string together winning seasons.

I know what you’re thinking - there is no way these teams could ever comprise a win-and-you’re-in conference. But look closer. This conference would cover four major media markets:

• New York City (#1): 7,348,620 households, average income: $75,023

• Philadelphia (#4): 2,942,800 households, average income: $65,573

• Boston (#9): 2,424,240 households, average income: $70,455

• Pittsburgh (#23): 1,160,220 households, average income: $47,582

With those four markets, this conference would almost assuredly net a lucrative television contract. TV money buys better facilities and better coaches. And down the line, that translates into better performance on the field.

No surprise, Penn St. likely would have won the conference in 2022. Penn St. would probably win a bunch of conference titles at first, but the competition would likely stiffen over time.

Capital Region

One of the major flaws of the current college football setup is that too many games do not matter. There are too many buy games in which the only goals for the favorite are to avoid losing and avoid injuries. Too many historical rivalries have been shelved. Too many teams are out of playoff contention after the first two weeks of the season. Winning a conference championship doesn’t even really matter that much in the grand scheme of things (2021 Georgia is only the latest example).

Virginia Tech currently plays ODU, Marshall, and Liberty much more than most fans would like. Those games would mean a lot more if they were conference games. Then, the Hokies would have something to gain.

Playing in the same conference with West Virginia would ensure that that rivalry game gets played annually, as it should. Given their military traditions and geographic proximity, Navy and Virginia Tech would be a unique matchup that would bring a lot of positive attention to the men and women in uniform. Maryland and Virginia round out the league and are good fits on multiple fronts. Put a playoff berth on the line, and I think this would be a very competitive conference year in, year out.

The conference is chalk full of rivalries and big brother-little brother games. WVU would have to play in Huntington every other year. That would be an awesome scene. Hokie fans saw how amped up ODU and Liberty fans were to host Virginia Tech this year. Imagine getting the Hokies at home on even footing every two years. No, the stadiums are not huge (yet), but pound for pound, these schools have pretty solid fans. And with the importance of every game, both for playoff and historical reasons, I would wager that attendance would be high.

Any one of four teams could have won the conference this year. None of them are Virginia Tech. A James Madison-Liberty game in the final week of the season with a playoff berth on the line would be bonkers. ESPN College Gameday would, no doubt, be there. It would be November Madness at its finest. Just imagine being the JMU kicker, with your team down a point, three seconds remaining, and you are lining up to attempt a game winning 47-yard field goal. That would make for incredible television, an amazing in-game atmosphere, and would be the talk of the region for decades to come.

Carolinas

As conference go, this one is like the love child of a James Taylor song and a classic by the Eagles:

• “In my mind I’m going to Carolina…”

• “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”

Eight teams packed into two states - can you say “bus trip”? In conference play, you almost guarantee Duke will average at least 25,000 fans per home game, and maybe even generate a sell out or two due in large part to the traveling fanbases of their opponents.

East Carolina, especially, has a rabid-in-a-good-way fanbase, that would gladly set up shop in Wallace Wade to cheer for the road team. I also love the idea of Coastal Carolina getting a shot at Clemson and South Carolina every year.

So long as Dabo is at Clemson, the Tigers would be favored to win the conference most years, but there are plenty of teams capable of capturing the title. And Hokie fans need not strain hard to imagine the facility enhancements that the added revenue would support at Appalachian St., Coastal Carolina, and, to a lesser extent, East Carolina.

Southeast

Looking at the conference map, I can almost taste the heat and humidity on my tongue. Imagine The U never having to travel north of Athens, GA in order to play a conference game. It almost makes too much sense. If you are holding out hope that the boosters will clamor for a return to the good old days with jaunts up to Chestnut Hill, MA and Syracuse, NY, well, good luck with that.

If it seems a bit much having Georgia, Florida, Florida St., and Miami all in the same nine-team league, I would note that seldom have any two of those schools had elite teams at the same time, and never have there been three at once. The Southeast would be roughly on par with the current SEC West - certainly tougher than the Northeast, but out of conference scheduling would compensate. Penn. St. would likely arrange to play two high level teams per year in an effort to boost their seeding, while Georgia would likely only play one (and UGA would still probably be favored).

Think about how basketball scheduling works. In years when a coach thinks he has a National Championship contender, he will go out and schedule out of conference games against other great teams in order to boost the team’s resume and the players’ toughness.

But there is no guarantee that this would always be a great league. See Exhibit A: 2022. Outside of Georgia and Florida St., this was an awfully pedestrian conference.

On Deck

I’m brushing up against the email length limit, so I’ll wrap things up for this week. Next up - tornado alley!

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College football attendance has been declining for the better part of a decade now:

While many pundits blame the price of travel and tickets, as well as the ease of watching at home on a giant flat-screen tv, I think one primary factor driving the decline is apathy. There are too many games on the schedule that fans do not care about, and access to the playoff is way too restrictive and open to the subjective opinions of the committee members.

I think there is a better way, and I think it is inevitable that we will get there eventually. Conferences today are so big that they are almost ready to split in two. One day they might. But if they really want to get this thing right, the presidents need to simultaneously look forward and backward. If they do, they will come up with a solution that looks very much like the one I am going to propose in this article. First, though, I will detail the main problem this solution is intended to solve.

What ails the current alignment

College football has been special in this country for more than 100 years because of the closeness between the players, fans, and broader university community. I have never seen a professional player in any sport just out and about, but when I was at Virginia Tech, I saw football players all the time. I had classes with them, played pickup basketball with them, and I even shared a townhouse with one during my junior year. Back then, most of the players were from Virginia or one of the neighboring states, so if backgrounds were sometimes different, at least everyone knew the lay of the land. There was a locality to it all.

Local news outlets, especially print newspapers, have been struggling for some time, but the local beat writers have long played an important part in fostering a sense of community around college football programs. Throw in the fans - passionate students, locals, and alums - and you have everything it takes for a great college football atmosphere. Well, almost everything.

The one other important ingredient is that the games have to matter. Everyone involved has to care deeply about the results of each and every game. Otherwise, why bother?

And that is the crux of the current situation. There are far too many games about which fans feel indifferent. Buy games are boring, too many conference games are played between teams with limited history, and huge conferences act like a funnel for the playoff. Each year, there are only a handful of teams with any legit shot of making it, and by November, there really is not much drama. Enlarging the playoff will help some, but the effect will be limited by the consolidation of elite teams.

So, the ultimate goal is to make as many games meaningful for as many people as possible.

How to get conferences right

The presidents of the institutions could solve three-quarters of the problem by just splitting the five ginormous power conferences into ten. I think they need to go further, though. Here is my proposal:

• 12 regional conferences with 9 teams in each

• Every team plays 8 conference games (4 at home and 4 on the road)

• The season reverts back to 11 games, so each team will play 3 non-conference games per year

• There are no conference championship games

• The weekend before Thanksgiving is the last week of the regular season

• The playoff comprises 16 teams: 12 conference champions + 4 at-large teams

• Playoff selection and seeding is done by the current CFP committee

• The first two rounds are played on-campus, with the lower seeded team travelling to play at the higher seeded team’s stadium

• First round playoff games are played on Thanksgiving Friday and Saturday (4 games each day)

• Second round playoff games are played the following Saturday (on what is currently Championship Saturday)

• The semifinals and finals are then played as they currently are in the CFP

• Every team with at least six wins that is not playing in the semi-finals is bowl eligible

Here is a map of schools by realigned conference:

In the proposed realignment map above, notice that in only one instance is there a state with schools in different conferences (Michigan - Central Michigan is in the Heartland Conference while all the others are in the Big 10). In every other instance, all the (at least semi-major) FBS schools from each state are in the same conference. Only the worst of the worst (and Notre Dame) retain independent status.

The advantages of realigning in this manner include:

• The schedule would not interfere with finals, the vast majority of players could go home for Thanksgiving, and most teams would play 12 games, with 15 being the max for any particular season

• All primary conference rivalries from the current setup are retained as well as most secondary rivalries

• Three non-conference games each year allows room for any remaining secondary rivalries (perhaps VT would ink annual games with UNC and Miami, or maybe Tech would eschew that in favor of rotating home-and-home series with schools like South Carolina, Penn St., and Pitt)

• Travel times and costs would decrease significantly, saving universities money (especially on Olympic sports) and enabling more fans to travel to road games (further helping attendance and thus the athletic department bottom line and gameday economic impact)

• Bragging rights in the office would return (there are not many workplaces that are highly concentrated with Rutgers and UCLA alums)

• In basketball, the annual home-and-home setup would return, with each team playing eight home and eight away games against conference foes

• One has to imagine such a setup would incentivize recruits to stay in-state, as the hyper-local focus would ensure that each player’s family could attend all conference games without undue burden in time or cost

• Scheduling strategy would likely be similar to how it is for basketball - if the conference is easier to win, then you likely schedule elite non-conference opponents in order to burnish your resume and earn a higher seed (a la Gonzaga in basketball), while mid-major programs would likely focus solely on winning the conference and limiting the risk of injuries during the non-conference portion of the schedule (i.e., avoid playing powerhouses like Alabama and Georgia)

• The playoff would be a truly national phenomena, like the NCAA basketball tournaments, in that teams from all regions of the country would be participating, not just the Southeast and Midwest, as is the case in most years since the advent of the CFP

Would all these new regional conferences be of relatively equal strength? Most would be in the same ballpark, but there would be a few outliers. In terms of FBS win/loss records and win percentage, here is how it looks over the last 25 years (note, some conferences have lower game totals, as they include teams that joined FBS sometime during that 25-year period):

Coming up next week

In part two of this series, I will break down the realigned conferences to reveal the teams in each, project playoff teams had this setup been in effect in 2022, and analyze the impact such an alignment would have on the Virginia Tech football program.

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