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Forever grateful 🧡🤞🏾 @247SportsPortal @Mansell247 @PitViperSports pic.twitter.com/Ojqr4LyNZY— JB (@Justinbeadles99) May 21, 2021
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Next thing you know Sports Illustrated will be in town
/ssssss
Wonder where he stood on the depth chart after spring
As a bit of constructive criticism with this coaching staff, they should at least open up more in press conferences or something and give us little bits of "So and So is playing really well" and "right now after spring practice my 4 deep at this position would be XXX but it's day to day and the young man with the best performance will earn their way into the lineup". I think that would help a lot with our transfer portal worries. I know many teams have ppl leaving (both higher and lower rated) but I think if they aren't going to have live practices and stuff this would help with the PR aspect
Completely disagree - I've made the following point several times in the past:
We're talking about 18-22-year-olds kids here. They spend everyday in the spotlight, especially with almost all of them on social media. Fuente has created a bubble where they can learn, make mistakes and grow as football players / human beings without the peanut gallery commenting on every little critique. Honestly, in this age of no privacy, I find that incredibly endearing and ultimately better for the players' mental health.
Fuente had individual meetings with every single player after spring practice and clearly told them where they're at. The only people who need to know what's going on from a depth chart perspective in spring ball are the people in the locker room, not entitled fans looking for their pound of flesh for a mediocre season.
That's a good point. I guess I was just thinking back to the Beamer/Foster days when they used to give us info like that at press conferences but their practices were also a lot more open to the public. Making those comments would defeat the whole purpose of what he's trying to do I suppose
It is the nature of the beast these days, as I would suspect he was just outside the DE two deep, but with his frame still not fully maxed out he was always a developmental project with very high upside. That is what makes this one sting. Time will tell if we will be kicking ourselves over losing him.
Exactly. If we want to be the best developmental program in the nation, we can't keep losing the players we need to spend a couple years developing
I'm not commenting on Beadle per se, however some (many) players never develop - and I suspect coaches have generally a pretty good idea which ones 1) likely will, 2) might, and 3) likely won't once they've had a chance to see a players abilities (physical and mental), work habits, etc. up close and personal for a year.
The portal isn't a one way street. It's not as though there can't be an upside for a program when a player transfers. In fact, I would guess for a program like VT the portal is a solid net positive.
This is an interesting point. Beamer made his name on revolutionizing Special Teams. He saw an opportunity there that nobody else was doing and he leveraged that into one of the best careers in CFB.
Perhaps this is Fuente's moment. If he can achieve mastery of the Portal before anybody else and find success by revolutionizing how coaches build and develop their teams that could be his ticket to success. I think it's a big risk, TBH, but it's kind of his last chance to really find success in Blacksburg, IMO. If he doesn't win big soon I can't see him being in Blacksburg much longer.
This would be worth a nice deep-dive of a thread, but it's just almost impossible to quantify into any sort of meaningful conclusions, because a player's performance somewhere else isn't an apples-to-apples comparison to their performance here. Probably need a few years worth of hindsight, but I don't think the early returns on the players we've snagged from the portal have been "obviously great" additions outside of Khalil Herbert. and the volume of players out has been significantly higher than volume of players in. We've pulled in a few solid contributors to the program from the portal, but it seems like the staff is really cycling through developmental projects really quickly.
Edit: My gut feeling at this point in time is that the portal might be net neutral for Tech, and a lot of that will depend on the OL and QB play in 2021.
I'm actually working on that right now, and here's a preview: We've lost waaaaayyyy more than we've gained - but the players we lose don't make as much of an impact elsewhere.
This is using 247's Transfer Portal data, which isn't very useful after 2018 when the actual portal started (kinda hoped they would tack on old transfer data there but it doesn't look like they did).
Overall this leads me to believe three things: 1) we aren't the developmental school we say we are, 2) we have had a lot of misses in evaluation at receiver and on the defensive line, 3) the recruiting services missed on just as many of these guys as we did. Depending on how much work this ends up being, I might look into some other teams portal track records to see how different we actually are.
Do you have any data regarding transfers in?
Yup, CJ McCray and Brock Hoffman are the only G5 transfers in (Jared Cole too, but he's a PWO). And the only FCS transfers we took were in during the weird 2020 season. We've done a great job adding P5 guys with upside. If we are serious about using the portal as a net positive though, we need to get not just stellar grad transfers like Herbert and Williams. We also high ceiling development guys like McCray, even if it means looking at G5.
The good news is there will be ample opportunity with everyone undergoing a scholarship crunch soon. Again, without looking at other schools it's hard to say we've had it worst (we're definitely toward the top in terms of losses) but outside of a handful of guys it really has just been depth we've lost. (And that depth is usually mid-to-high three-star guys we haven't developed or we're evaluation misses).
When you have ~25 recruits per class sign a scholarship LOI and there are only 22 starting positions, you're gonna have a lot of guys not measure up. At any school. It's just simple math.
I'd rather move on from the 10 or so "not likely to contribute" guys sooner rather than later and roll the dice with their scholarship on HS players and a handful of "likely to contribute" incoming transfers. Even at the possible expense of losing a 2-3 unhappy contributors every year.
IMO, managing a college roster in 2021 is probably closer to managing a professional roster than it is to managing a college roster just 5 years ago. If you try to understand things thru a one-way prism of 2015 (or 1999...), you're only going to continually perplexed and frustrated.
The self-righteous media and many fans thought they wanted the rules changes. Now they've got it.
Was Barno a portal transfer? Bermeister?
Barno was JUCO, doesn't count as a portal transfer
Burmeister was.
And Hazleton, Crawford, Blackshear
Hazleton was not JUCO, he was from Ball State (MAC) before the portal. Blackshear was not JUCO or G5 since he was from Rutgers (Big 10). Crawford was JUCO.
My bad. I thought we were discussing all portal arrivals...
In fairness, there has not been much difference between Rutgers' program and JUCOs in recent memory. Although last year they did start to show some signs of life.
That's a very interesting comment GGC. I don't want to comment on tis particular transfer since I have exactly zero details on why he is leaving, but I have to imagine it will be increasingly difficult to ask players to "be patient, your turn is coming" when the portal seems to be so darn easy.
If a coach has a plan for Player A that takes 2-3 years, but Player A feels they will be ready in 1-2 years (or they hear it from another school that they should/could be on the field sooner), I worry the impatience of youth will triumph.
I guess like most things, winning a ton games would help that as well. Players would likely be more inclined to hang around and be patient if their team is competing for conference championships, etc. A bit of chicken and egg scenario though - need the players to hang around to improve the team, but you need an improved team to keep some of the players around.
Great, I just gave myself a headache.
That is essentially what the article linked below describes as happening every day
I took the gist of the article to be more around the tampering issue in general regardless of the status of a player. I was trying to focus on developmental players and whether they would feel it was worthwhile to stay the course (internal influence), but the tampering could absolutely be a major external influence to portalize.
Another factor in this could have been Tapp leaving. Tapp mentioned him a few times when asked about younger players. Wouldn't be surprised if they were pretty tight and the combination of post spring evaluations and potentially his favorite coach leaving were deciding factors. I don't see how the numbers are going to work moving forward with everyone getting the free Covid year, while also trying to bring in recruits, without having a ton of kids hit the portal.
I think it's a safe assumption that Tapp leaving had a material impact on this decision. I also think it's a very safe assumption that there will be a lot of casualties from the portal/scholarship number imbalance we are currently seeing, and it will suck for a lot of young athletes who fail to find a new home.
A Great article came out today discussing this.
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/31477534/tampering-arrived-college-football-looks-nba-free-agency
Great article on tampering and how, or if it's possible, to monitor and enforce. Closing remark in the article from the coach at Arkansas.
>>It's tempting to get mad or frustrated when a player leaves. But then again, as Pittman said, "If you turn it around, you're going to go get someone from the portal, too.">>
The portal giveth and the portal taketh away. We already knew that here at TKP!!
Kevin Dresser has a beef with the current assistants at UVA, that left Iowa State before he took over, because of tampering.
Doesn't everyone have beef with UVa? That can't be unique to us.
I mean it's kinda like having beef with your little underdeveloped nephew that looks scared when you say got your nose.
Really not happy with this. I thought he was the guy from that DE class that could have been special.