Virginia Tech's Elite Status During the Peak Beamer Years
Virginia Tech's Elite Status During the Peak Beamer Years
From the first Sugar Bowl season in 1995 through the most recent Sugar Bowl season in 2011, the Hokies were among the best of the best. Before and since, not so much.
Note: Data are sourced from CFDB and accessed via CFBFastR.
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:
what an incredible job Frank Beamer did
that Virginia Tech can be a national power over a period of decades and not just an occasional flash in the pan
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.