Virginia Tech Football's Uphill Battle in the Washington, D.C. Media Market
Not the local team and not quite a national power, the Hokies have long struggled to gain traction with the capital press.
It’s not as common these days, but family brand loyalty was still a thing with cars when I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. In that regard, we were a mixed unit. All our family cars were Chevys, but for a long time all of my dad’s business trucks were Fords. Dad owned a small landscaping company and then, just like now, Ford trucks seemed a step ahead of Chevys. And that isn’t easy to say, since one of my grandfathers had been an engineer at Chevrolet (albeit, working on cars, not trucks).
Likewise, loyalty to local news networks was also a thing back then. Growing up in Montgomery County, Maryland, we always watched NBC 4. At 6:00 pm, that meant Jim Vance and Doreen Gentzler, who anchored that time slot together for 28 years. Bob Ryan was the meteorologist from 1980-2010, and the legendary George Michael covered sports from 1980-2007.
Evenings were crazy when I was growing up, with all three kids playing multiple sports. We seldom turned on the news at 6 and watched the whole hour. But before widespread adoption of the internet, if we needed an accurate forecast for the next day, we knew to flip on the tube at 6:48 in order to catch Bob Ryan. And then, my favorite, George Michael was on with sports by 6:52.
I’ve been thinking a lot about recruiting in Maryland and Northern Virginia lately, and perhaps that’s what sparked memories of George Michael. I’m sure he covered Tech’s run to the 2000 Sugar Bowl (National Championship game), but I don’t recall seeing much of the Hokies on a regular basis in Michael’s news segments.
Transcripts are not publicly available, and there is a dearth of recordings on YouTube. So, as a proxy measure, I went searching in newspapers. The Washington Post, to be precise.
The question top of mind is, what kind of coverage did the Hokies receive in the D.C. market in the program’s heyday, and what impact did it have on the program’s development? In addition, to what extent did the preeminent print publication in the DMV cover the major local team (Maryland) and the other semi-local teams (Virginia and Penn St.), and how does that compare to other major programs around the nation?
For this analysis, I pulled data from the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database and looked at 2001-2005. I searched each coach’s full name in order to filter out coverage of non-football teams. The unit of measure is a mention - any time the paper included a given coach’s name in an article.
To get a real sense of which teams The Post was covering, I have included seven teams in the analysis:
The Home Team (Maryland)
Secondary Local Teams (Penn St., Virginia, and Virginia Tech)
National Programs (Florida St., Ohio St., USC)
The intent is for the national programs to serve as controls. FSU is an East Coast ACC team, Ohio St. was a Midwest Big 10 team, and USC was a West Coast PAC 10 team.
Growing up, Columbus might as well have been on the moon. However, in terms driving miles from the White House (the very heart of the DMV), it is less than 150 miles farther than Blacksburg. For FSU and USC, those with change to spare are flying. Those without are probably staying home.
Exciting Years
The turn of the millennium was a great time to be a college football fan in the DMV, as all the major local teams were good (and the Hokies were great).
Wins per season for the group ranged from a low of 6.4 (Penn St.) to a high of 10.8 (USC). During those five years, USC shared a national championship and one another outright. The Trojans played for a third, in 2005 against Texas, but lost a classic in the Rose Bowl to Vince Young and Texas.
The other team on the list that won a national championship during this time was Ohio St. (2002). While the Buckeyes won a lot of games during this stretch, Jim Tressel’s sweater-vest and proclivity for punting were the not the sorts of things one would expect to move copy far from home.
Expectations vs. Reality
Looking at the charts of wins and distance from the White House, my expectation would be that Maryland got by far the most coverage, then the other three local(ish) teams would all have roughly the same the number of mentions and likewise the national powers would be closely grouped behind the others.
Boy, was I wrong.
I added an logarithmic trend line for reference. Look at USC, in the top righthand corner. The Trojans got more mentions per season, nearly 3,000 miles away, than did Maryland, which is less than 10 miles down the road.
And it’s not like Maryland was bad. The resurgent Terps, led by Ralph Friedgen, played in an Orange Bowl and two Gator Bowls in that five-year stretch.
Out of the secondary local teams, Virginia Tech averaged the most mentions per season (87), but that was good enough only for fourth place out of the seven teams examined. Florida St., which won three less games than the Hokies, averaged 95 mentions per season.
So, what gives?
Peculiarities of the Washington, D.C. Media Market
One the one hand, the Washington Post mentions metric is indicative of the sports media scene in the capital region, but on the other hand, there is a catch regarding the outlier (USC). To explain, let’s return to George Michael over at NBC 4.
In addition to his local news hits, Michael hosted a show called The Sports Machine, which showed highlights across sports, nationwide. Some of that programing mentality bled into the 6 o’clock news, as well.
Washington D.C., as the nation’s capital, has long seen the nation’s news as its own. That fact was reflected in the coverage we saw on the 6 o’clock local news.
If there was even a hint of a local angle, and with senators and congressmen from all 50 states holed up in the capital there was always a local angle, the story was fair game.
Case in point was Bobby Bowden’s Florida St. Seminoles. They had dropped a notch following three straight national championship game appearances (1998-2000), but were still a force to be reckoned with in college football.
They were also an ACC member for the full five years of analysis, whereas Virginia Tech joined only in 2004. That mattered because the local team, Maryland, was an ACC member. In those days the road to the conference title still went through Tallahassee (ACC champions in 2002, 2003, and 2005).
At this point, you might be thinking, “OK, that’s great. But what local angle could possibly explain so much USC coverage?”
At first blush, I thought it was an error, but the number is indeed correct. The explanation - the Times-Post News Service.
In operation from 1962 to 2009, the news service was a 50-50 venture that enhanced national and international news coverage not only at the two papers, but also for many other regional papers.
So, while Pete Carroll’s Trojans were over-represented in the Washington Post, the reverse was true of Frank Beamer’s Hokies in the Los Angeles Times.
Beamer’s average of 39 mentions per year in the Los Angeles Times from 2001 to 2005 was second only to the Washington Post among major newspapers. Weird, huh?
The Takeaway
Media coverage does not necessarily drive recruiting. USC plucked one high school player total from the DMV in the 2002-2006 recruiting classes (those that followed the seasons examined). That player, five-star wide receiver Vidal Hazelton, had a strong start in L.A. before getting derailed by injuries. He later transferred to Cincinnati.
The same was true for Florida St., which also signed only two commits from the DMV, as well as Ohio St., which only signed one.
Still, one could certainly make a strong argument that local media coverage of major national programs during this period helped set the stage for the exodus that would follow.
The internet, with sites like Hudl, made it possible for every school to evaluate players from all over the country. And for players who grew up in the D.C. media market, there was a unique familiarity with those distant programs that would soon come calling.
All the while, Virginia Tech was caught in between. The Hokies were local, but not as local at Maryland, and they won a lot of games, but were still a notch below the USCs of the world. As a result, their coverage in the newspaper of record, The Washington Post, lagged.
In addition, although the lack of precise local television sports data precludes me from drawing a blanket conclusion on that medium’s coverage, in my own memory from having grown up in the area, I remember Hokie football coverage being intermittent, at best.
All of this should color Virginia Tech’s latest recruiting success in the DMV, and especially Maryland, in even more favorable hues.