Thank you Virginia Tech. For everything. These seven years have meant the world to me. On to my next challenge: Building @TheSeql. https://t.co/6HaeOW8Ang pic.twitter.com/vpPyrbXEJ5— john iezzi (@jni123) February 8, 2021
A really nice goodbye note:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CLChy3inLIo/?igshid=j0uh8te3ok4r
Looks like he's going to create a recruiting profile type site?
More info here:
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Comments
The "seql" for a database site, damn that is nerdy as hell .... mad props
There's a SUV in my neighborhood with SEQL stuff all over it. Previously had logos/advertising for a different thing that was the same so I guess it went through a rebranding/naming.
Things that are going well in VT Football these days:
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List complete.
Two first round draft picks first time since 2004 and 2018.
Isn't the draft in April?
It's great for those Hokies and much deserved but I'm not sure it does anything for the program. The fact that it happened in 2018 is evidence of this considering the direction recruiting has gone since then.
Counterpoint: losing two All-Americans early
If your a first round pick you don't stuck around, Tech's history is full of players leaving early. It's not new.
The state of the program is so bad right now nothing is going to help but winning. If you continually loose games, recruits, coaches, and burn relationships no one cares about your draft picks.
Everyone is just looking to pile on the program problems so bad they ignore OP statement. I didn't claim Fuente is winning, didn't claim he is recruiting or hiring well. But for people to claim having 4 1st round draft picks in 4 years isn't something to celebrate I'm not sure why people like that even follow the team if not to find some joy in even the little things.
I question it because it hasn't happened yet. If there was anything I learned in the past year, it's that life can turn on a dime. We expect and hope that Darrisaw and Farley get drafted first round, but there is no guarantee it happens. If it does, it will be a good thing for Fuente to hang his hat on.
Why aren't we winning? If everything is fine, and Fu has secret voodoo and cranks out first round picks, why isn't the team beating Wake Forest? Why can't we compete physically with Pitt? Why can't we beat Liberty? Why can't we beat Miami? If everything is going to plan, when do we start to actually win football games?
As I've said before with the two 1st round picks "best developmental program" refrain, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Just because there are a few bright spots and a few underrated prospects who outperformed tremendously doesn't mean that the whole program is running at a caliber where it is a consistent winner. UVA had several 1st round draft picks during the Al Groh years, doesn't mean they were tremendously successful either. Is the staff's job primarily to put people in the NFL or to field a winning football team? We're not recruiting at a high enough clip where we are a consistent winner and put talent into the league regularly, and we aren't developing enough players at a high enough clip to be a consistent winner either.
2021
yeah, we'll see
Well recruiticorning has been pretty shitty the last few years so maybe this will be addition by subtraction?
I'm sure you didn't intend it this way (and that DV isn't from me), but it feels quite disrespectful to call Iezzi leaving 'addition by subtraction.'
Iezzi basically built this recruiting department from the ground up as a GA. In an industry full of mercenaries, John was a missionary. He's a lifelong Hokie fan, and basically completely self taught. If not for him, VT recruiting would be even further behind than it is now. This is the kid who taught himself photoshop and did all the new recruit photoshops because no one in the administration knew what photoshop was, much less realized that they needed to hire someone who could do these things.
I hope we can replace him with someone who is experienced; someone who actually had the opportunity to be mentored before they were thrown to the wolves, someone who is an upgrade, but I know it's not possible to find someone as passionate as he was.
Best of luck John, thank you for your hard work!
You nailed it. I said something similar as soon as I listened to his interview with Sons of Saturday. You cannot fault his effort, his passion, or his love for VT. And, for what he had to work with, it sounds like he did as well as could've been expected. You can fault our program, however, for falling so far behind in recruiting and not having an experienced director for John to learn under. I hope he does well in his new endeavors and that we get this hire right.
Just hope he is leaving because he is excited about this new opportunity. Not because he feels like he has reached some kind of ceiling with this staff and administration.
Ehh. While his SoS episode was eye-opening, it was difficult to square his knowledge with the open disdain for Virginia players. It lacked a lot of self-awareness, in my opinion, to say that only a handful of commonwealth players rated offers from Tech while in the same breath blaming fan negativity as a reason why players choose not to come here.
That, alongside with being involved in "all aspects" of the two lowest ranked back-to-back classes of the modern era, and I'm not sure that this is a huge loss.
I also never really understood how that one guy (can't remember his name) could walk out of the recruiting department in 2017-2018, when Iezzi was a contributor, with the sole copy of everything that they had, and that this could somehow set back all recruiting ops by 18 months.
(Chuck cantor)
I saw this multiple times at different clients when I was consulting, both by people who intentionally horde knowledge, and people who do it unintentionally. It's pretty common when a team is stretched thin, and people take the 'divide and conquer' strategy too far, such that individuals are siloed.
I could have easily done this to a company. And I wasn't happy with the company when I left. I was incharge of requirements,testing, performance engineering, and what is now called devSecOps (lots of hkme grown scripts for autoconfigurations and hardening). When I gave my two weeks my boss told me I had tons of work documenting the decade of knowledge that I was the only one that had. I dropped all my documents in a folder the first day and said start asking me any questions. It took them 6 months to get through all the documentation. Months later I saw a bunch of coworkers at lunch and they were impressed at everything I documented, which is odd because very few people had the memory to not write this stuff down. I wrote it all down because I wouldn't remember in a month why I did something some way.
But had I just outright quit, it would have been a struggle to find where my documentation was. Small company didn't have tools to handle that stuff. When I started there wasn't a network drive. So if you don't have the infrastructure it makes it tough when some one leaves.
Yes... We always called it 'tribal knowledge' - processes and norms are passed down over 'generations' of workers. It quickly gets to a point where people do things because they were told to do so a year ago, and no one knows why it's done or how decisions are made.
Oh all my documentation contains the why I did it the way i did it. I write documentation for me, because i wont remember. Doing things because they have always been done that way is not a good thing if no one knows why.
Why was the head boss so out of touch and not involved with recruiting to allow one guy to walk away with all the recruiting data/information? I am sorry, but all of this trickles from the top down. All of that information should have been on VT systems and contracts, etc. signed that said it was VT property. Who is ultimately responsible for this program and all the shit that continuously occurs? This isn't consulting where contracts and teams are extremely siloed. Someone hoarding project information from others on a project is not equivalent to a head football coach having zero insight into his recruiting staff and its processes.
This is a college football program and recruiting is the life blood of it. Would the CEO of Booz or Deloitte just say, hey I don't give a shit about hiring, let a junior to mid-level employee figure it out and own the whole thing.
1000% agree. This was a major oversight by Fuente. Not trying to absolve Fuente of blame; just saying that this happens a lot in many organizations, due to poor leadership (more on that below)
But going back to JPCVT's comment, I'm not sure how you can say Iezzi was responsible this. It's mostly Fuente fault IMO, and slightly Whit's fault for not considering this/pushing for Fuente to hire someone with more relevant P5 experience. I still think Whit's a great AD, but I think it hurt us that between Whit, Fuente's staff, and Foster's staff, no one had any experience with a modern recruiting strategy.
I'm not positive, but I don't think VT was using a CRM to track recruiting at the time. If I recall correctly, VT recently started using salesforce to track recruiting (after Canter left), but I can't remember where I heard that (one of multiple podcasts I believe) so take it with the appropriate grain of salt.
For what it's worth, in my original story, it was my clients who were completely disorganized, not the company I worked for. And you'd be surprised how disorganized huge companies are. Hanes, for example (fuck them, terrible client in so many respects, I will never buy Hanes clothes again) had so many problems. There's a middle manager at their Martinsville DC who would literally horde technical information, not tell anyone, and use it to negotiate pay raises. The VP came onsite one day and was taking directions from a manager 4 ranks below him. It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.
Anyways, that's an abnormal situation. What's more common is you that you see people not document things, and just pick up responsibility because no one else is doing it. They get results, and their superiors who don't actually know what their doing all day just say 'keep doing what you're doing!' Then they leave, and the superiors realize they have no idea what this individual was actually doing all day. This was exactly what happened at VT.
In both of these situations, it's a leadership failure. Unfortunately, leadership is hard, so things like this happen frequently.
While it sounds like we have a similar line of work, and I know what you mean, it's crazy to me that the administration didn't think to organize themselves better in the event someone left. I guess under the Beamer years we were so used to people staying on forever that we didn't even consider the possibility of what would happen if they didn't.
I think this is part of it. I also think lack of technology was part of it too. Often times, you don't know what you don't know - those are things that get you in trouble.
It seems like his site is aiming to take the middle man out of recruiting services. It would be interesting if schools had to validate offers in an open forum.
So, being a Tech guy and all, we get the family discount on the Seql right? Not a good look when one of the program's biggest advocates departs, but at least it's a new career direction rather than a new team. Best of luck John, thanks for moving the ball further down the field.
Sad day.
Anyone else getting the vibe that some of the football staff are jumping ship in case Fuente is removed at the end of the season?
It could be that. It could also be that Fuente is overhauling recruiting, pushing people out, and shuffling responsibility. It could also be that budget cuts are coming due to COVID. Could be a combination of the three. Can't really know for sure without behind the scenes information.
One one hand, recruiting can't be worse right now, on the other hand there is ZERO continuity on this staff the past couple years. No wonder we aren't winning. Bottom line.
Recruiting could be worse right now. Much worse. But carry on carrying on.
For a school with our historical profile? not really. Our highest rated recruit is a 3 star TE.
If we are in the 40s and there are 130 FBS schools, it could be much worse.
Carry on.
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Not sure about the face palms, this is a good opportunity and lots of students are currently very interested, and have openly posted on Twitter to even volunteer on staff. They now have a chance to get paid. So props to the football staff for offering those opportunities.
What's wrong with this? I had two roommates who interned with Football/athletics as students.
I have nothing against student interns helping the football team. But the optics of this is essentially that Iezzi is being replaced by interns. It looks cheap and unprofessional to try to fill the hole he's leaving with students.
especially after he was so vocal last year on the Sons of Saturday pod about how the way to level the playing field was to teach several student volunteers how to evaluate recruits' high school film. maybe they can get paid now? but it certainly does seem like they're effectively looking to replace iezzi with interns
We're not replacing a director level position with interns. The optics are fine. This is such an overreaction.
you sound awfully certain of that. But for a program that is notoriously tight-lipped and doesn't give the media (or the fans) much of anything to work off of we kind of have to rely on the optics of things, unfortunately. And the optics are quite clear. John Iezzi, a former student who basically invented his role with the program, announces he's leaving. Then the next thing the VT football twitter puts out is an add looking for students to help the football team. Looks an awful lot like they're trying to fill a gap which just opened up. I don't really see how you don't see it that way
who needs a recruiting director when you've got recruiting coordinators
director level position leaves, program slaps some Recruiting Coordinator titles on JC Price and Andy Lechtenberg, hires some interns to fill in the gaps. everyone does more with less because budgets don't allow it. very easy to predict that recruiting treads water instead of progressing or rebounding, and that we perpetually recruit in the 40s under this staff with this setup
https://hokieclub.com/
if this continues for another couple of years recruiting in the 40s may be less realistic
PR bumble again, whether there is correlation or not. I would assume Lezzi gave notice a little while back? No? They didn't have the time to hire a replacement or have a tweet ready saying we are in the process of hiring one in the future (good PR), so when he tweeted out they could say (good optics) that we have this person replacing him or its in the process.
via GIPHY
There are plenty of valid complaints and concerns that we as fans should have about this staff/program. The hiring of student interns is simply not one of them. FFS
again, there is nothing wrong with hiring student interns. I think its great, actually. But the timing is terrible. Right after Iezzi announces he's leaving VT turns around and says, Hey, students, we need help!!!
We've had student interns for as long as I can remember so I don't get the issue? They've posted this tweet plenty of times before i thought
I would have jumped on a chance like this in a minute. Timing might seem off but this is likely completely separate. Hell, if it wasn't for the fam, I would go register full-time if I had a spot like this as part of the deal.
Excellent idea. The students are more Tech savvy (see what I did there?) than Fuente is. I've been suggesting we bring students on to help run the Hokie Club for well over a year. So long as they aren't drunken frat bros too busy chasing Delta Gammas to get anything else done, which is an admirable quest in and of itself, I think this is great. Especially with budget cuts due to Covid. Give the students some real-world experience.
Good luck to John.
He had an opportunity he couldn't refuse and is passionate about. He loves this staff, so this isn't a knock on Fuente and co. Maybe Pete, cause fuck that guy.
Losing recruiting staff hurts, so it's important to hire back better. Let's see how our football staff rehires these positions.
With student interns...apparently
You need to take the "Recovering" out of your Avatar Handle.
clever