I'm glad for the win. I only got to watch's the condensed game, so I'd love some further thoughts on a few things I noticed.
Was that fantastic route design on Tre's first TD? That's how it looked in isolation.
The plays from our drive before half time seemed really sharp. Was the whole drive as good as the condensed drive seemed?
Ny'Quee Hawkins played a lot, but we also had our other DBs. How did he do out there?
I love watching Malachi Thomas run. He just looks like a guy who's always going in the right direction. Was he consistent throughout the game?
Go Hokies!! I appreciate anyone's insight who saw the whole game.
Forums:
DISCLAIMER: Forum topics may not have been written or edited by The Key Play staff.
Comments
I loved the game. I love the talent and potential they have and this incoming recruiting class. I love the defensive staff and some of the offensive staff and I think Fuente (especially with Jerry Kill) has a lot of potential. If the OC is the problem then get rid of him but do not burn it all down. The losses this year have been close, with James Mitchell they could have been all wins or with a better QB (Which I am curious of what Bullock is capable of). It is a shame we just found out how talented Malachi Thomas is, he opens the playbook up for the QB, WR's, and TE's. How much other talent do we have that we are not aware of that could have won us the close games. With Thomas we beat WVU, ND, and last week the defense had their only bad game of the season as far as I am concerned. Changes do need to be made but to get all new coaches, lose a lot of players in the transfer portal, and let this recruiting class fall apart puts us back further in the ACC. Make a few corrections but maintain what is good and keep getting up. I know my opinion is not the most popular but if a new OC all of a sudden fixes things then just make that change. No AAC coach is coming to Blacksburg and making us a powerhouse and we aren't about to hire Saban or Dabo. Every small school coach is going to be equivalent to the Fuente hire until the coach gets in, builds connections at the high schools in the area, and gets his coaching staff and system established and that will take at least 3-4 seasons. At this point we can still go 8-4 but I would play a lot of freshman and backups to get experience and see who else can help the team and just get other guys experience. Let the close games be a learning experience and get a new OC.
When I say it is a shame we have found out how talented Malachi Thomas is I mean we should have known entering the season and had him as our top RB since game 1, not find out midway into the season when things go downhill that "Oh yeah, we have this guy who is a beast..." Why wasn't he on the field in game 1? Is he terrible in practice and only good in games?
This is all hypothetical nonsense. The reality is our coaching sucks, recruiting (including next year) sucks, and the higher admin sucks for the most part. We do not have the players or coaches to do well in any capacity of power five football. Hell, we hardly even have the fans anymore. Big changes are needed.
Lol this comment in any of the threads the last 3 weeks gets 20 up votes. We beat GT and 10 down votes.
Little bipolar
I don't think the players suck, the admin sucks, and I keep hearing that our recruiting is supposedly top 20 for next year. Some of our coaches definitely need replacement.
Most especially if our offensive renaissance is because Fuente has stepped up and just started doing Corny's job.
Go away..... We do not talk about VT players in that way. They leave it all out there every Sat. Have you not watched a single game this season? You are not welcome here sir!
Thomas is good, but a beast is that guy at Mich St. Everyone should watch his highlights from yesterday's Mich vs Mich St game.
I was glad I picked MSU to win that game.
Except in week 1 he may not have known the offense well enough. He may not have had any mastery of blitz pickup (he still missed a bad one in the 3rd quarter yesterday). He may not have understood the blocking schemes well enough to find the holes.
I know we believe that this coaching staff does zero to develop players, but the reality of the situation is that a freshman in week 8 probably understands (a lot) more of the playbook than a freshman in week 1.
All of us had bad professors in college, but that didn't stop us from learning at least some of the material.
Because he is a true freshman and likely needed to pick up some of the protection things before he could see the field...
I think this has been one of the deficiencies of our coaching staff for several years now - not being able to identify and coach up the talent we have here. Even in Hooker's case, he was probably our most talented QB, yet he rode the bench behind Willis. Not saying Malachi Thomas is the end-all, be-all running back, but he looks very solid, especially for a freshman. It makes you wonder how many other Malachi Thomas' we have on this team.
I agree in some ways that maybe it is not for the best to burn the entire house down, but it is a shame that we cannot play to our full potential every week, and only seem to respond when our backs are up against the wall.
You lost me at "don't burn it all down"
One MAJOR function of the head coach is to ensure that the coaches working for him are doing their jobs adequately. It was abundantly clear after 2018 that Cornelsen was not. Fuente failed to fire him then or any time since. He needs to go.
Another MAJOR function of the head coach is to close on big time recruits. Fuente has failed in a big way several times in this regard, including presiding over two of the worst classes in the last 30 years. He needs to go.
And yet another MAJOR function of the head coach is to ensure the roster management makes sense and provides our team with a balance of talent and depth. He has failed to maintain a sensible roster for almost his entire tenure. He needs to go.
A final MAJOR function of the head coach is to make sure that the team is prepared and ready to play every week. VT has wandered out onto the field looking completely flat and lost countless times under Fuente. The team shows up a couple times a season but otherwise it mostly looks like a jumbled mess. He needs to go.
The OC is very clearly a serious problem that has held this team back for years. But it is far from the only problem. Firing Cornelsen and keeping Fuente isn't going to magically turn us into an ACC Coastal contender. 3 years ago I could get behind the idea of retaining Fuente and making a change to the offensive staff. It's too late for that now. Fuente must go.
He also presided over three pretty decent classes, including potentially this year's. He hasn't been great, but he also hasn't been the worst.
And I do think you need to consider that the defensive coaches, which we encouraged him to keep, weren't 100% checked in during some of those years, and weren't really pulling their weight in recruiting.
The program was moving in a downward spiral when Fuente arrived. We got a false boost of confidence when he got good results in his first year.
Most of your criticisms are valid. But I think if you want to make an argument to fire Fuente, it needs from a place of best fit moving forward, not from casting the harshest light on his failures, and maybe even exaggerating them.
The question is "Are we better going forward with Fuente, or with someone else." Don't get me wrong, it's clear where you stand on that.
We're not where we want to be. That's clear. My criterion for this year was to show some progress in the right direction. Are we seeing that? The Syracuse game seemed to indicate "No". Oddly, had he gone with Hooker instead of Burmeister, I don't think we're having this conversation right now.
But the season isn't over yet, right? He can still get to 8-4... /s
Sorry but you can't ever use a recruiting class from the past two years as part of an argument, they could have the highest ratings but if most of them bust or transfer then it doesn't matter, it's just way too soon to tell yet.
Can we use his first two years?
I'm just saying that "two of the worst classes of the past 30 years" isn't the most accurate way to characterize Fuente's recruiting, as his recruiting classes overall aren't so completely out of line with what we're used to.
For me, the better yardstick would be "what do we expect going forward?"
By the way, I think your comment with regard to how classes ultimately affect the team is valid, and I'm not sure how 247 actually reconciles these classes over time.
Love these last two posts of yours, Key.
I'm 100% on board with the 'what do we expect going forward' approach. To be clear, I expect better than what we've had the last few years and what I've seen so far this season. I think Fuente needs to make staff changes, unsurprisingly, and if he doesn't and we don't get better, then I expect Fuente's boss to make staff changes.
The question I keep coming back to is, 'will the next guy be more successful than this guy,' and the answer is a clear 'I don't know'. If the right guy is out there then yes, make the move. And I don't expect to make any move until the right guy available.
When we make a move, I want to move towards a solution instead of just being motivated to move away from a problem.
My #1 beef of the Fuente era, and the reason I think we need change at the HC position.
Fuente's young, and still a smart football mind. I do think he'll be a successful P5 HC one day. Just not now, and not a VT, unfortunately.
This is how I feel about things as well. Thanks for writing it . I'm conflicted after a loss, wanting everyone fired and then after a win seeing potential for growth and success. I'm not football savy. I like to see us play hard with free abandon on O and D, punch above our weight, be bruising even in defeat. I love it went players really love being a Hokie. I'm also and old man for my age and don't take change well.
We needed a new OC 3 years ago. It's far too late for that now and it problems are so much deeper than offensive play calling and development.
I think Fuente is a pretty good football coach, but he's a below average CEO and his support staff for the most part sucks (apologies to Lechtenburg, J Ham and Coach Smitty)
FGs instead of TDs hurt us in the 4 losses this season. We have struggled mightily this year with punching it in. I'll take the 3 in a game like this where the defense is playing well. Would much rather have the +4.
Our defense playing to their potential was helpful. But they gave up some huge plays negated by penalties. We had several big gift calls that went our way. One was a hold on a touchdown.
Agreed on the officiating. There were a number of really questionable calls both ways - the phantom holding call against Clements comes to mind as well as the DPI that they flagged and then picked up - but I was watching it again last night and frankly was mystified by several calls by that crew.
To the OPs point, I thought there were several well designed plays against that defense and the O-line definitely seemed more aggressive. Whether that is a function of our improvement or the level of the GT defense remains to be seen, but it was good to see.
It's the ACC, the officials just suck.
I'll give the ACC refs this - they're better than PAC12's.
Yes it was great, and I believe we've seen it before.
Malachi also did run consistently hard throughout the game. It seems Malachi's emergence has benefitted both he and Heem. Each guy playing well seems to be inspiring and complementing the other, which is what you want in a RB tandem.
I'll need to rewatch to see how Hawkins did, but he largely went unnoticed by me, which can be a good sign.
It was great play design, as was Tayvion's TD, but damn does Burmeister stare down his one read and then underthrow the shit out of them. Tre's score, Gallo's catch, and another one of Tre's catches could have gone for way more or been much easier if Burmeister actually hit them in stride, it just so happened they were wide open.
Unfortunately, it was clear to see for everyone but our offensive coaching staff that Burmeister was exactly what he has been this season. A hard working gamer who absolutely gives it his all out there, but a better athlete than he is a QB and it shows up in areas where you need consistency, like accuracy to all three levels of the field, including short throws, hitting guys in stride to increase YAC, not staring down your first read/only read on schemed open stuff, etc. He didn't show us anything to expect differently than what we have gotten this year.
This just sparked a question in my mind: Where is Holston? Did he get hurt and I didn't notice or did Thomas usurp Holston?
Probably sitting in the dog house after a series of tweets after the Pitt game. He's in year 6? so this might be it for Agent 0.
I have been wondering where he has been for the last 2 games.
I think with this performance, we can definitely compete with BC and probably beat Duke. UVA and Miami will be tough games.
In the last few games, I've seen the Tajh Bullock calls but let me say this. BB 3 is not the problem, the problem is decision making by this coaching staff.
The playing calling while it improved in the GT game, there were a few instances where I had a major headache. For example with 5:00 left in the 3rd quarter we are up and have been doing fairly well running but we elect to throw 3 times with no success. There seems to be a lack of game knowledge/understanding when it comes to their decision making. This isn't just on the OC but also on Fuente. We also seem to be very conservative at the end of the 1st half.
From a football program perspective, the overall recruitment is not very good, the development of players is not very good from a physical and skill development. Keshawn King for example hasn't been Hilgatized in 3 years. Jafar Williams hasn't done much with the wide receivers at all. We have 10 running backs and 2 more coming for a position where we only put out 1 player at any given time. So even the roster management is not very good.
Here is what I would do, reduce Fuente Salary by 500K, use that money to get an OC in the 1 million range. Replace Jafar Williams with WR coach from a spread offense. Get a young graduate assistant who has recently played qb at the college level and have them work with the qb s and get them to develop.
On defense, our tackling at times particularly against the running game is below par. I would have this defensive staff work with a high octane defense like Georgia for some information gathering and learning. I would also get an experienced defensive analyst to work with DC (assuming Tenuta is defensive)
Having said that, we still have a shot at a decent bowl game. Let's get to 7 games
Just throwing out some information I've seen while surfing the interwebs today...
uva's QB got hurt last night, possibly broken ribs, and he could be out for a while. I don't know if that would mean a season ending injury, but if he's out at all, it will change the trajectory of their season.
Meanwhile, I was looking for a chuckle so I peaked in on LeScissors, and saw at least one thread that seemed very similar to threads we have here. Basically, when we're talking about Fuente needing to get more hands on with the offense and fire the OC....well, replace Fuente and offense with Bronco and defense, and you've got a uva message board.
Putting those together, it sounds like uva's defense sucks and their QB that usually bails them out might not be playing for a while.
I'm sorry, but my mind immediately assumes that we'll make their pedestrian defense look like world-beaters and our defense will allow their second-string QB to set 3 single-game records of his choosing.
It's how we've been conditioned to feel
Awesome video.
I caught the second half of the game by radio; video is better. Seemed to me they upped their game a bit.