Virginia Tech alum Pierson Prioleau will remain on the #Hokies staff under new head coach Brent Pry, per source.Prioleau served as the Director of Player Development - Defense this past season under Justin Fuente.— Mike McDaniel (@MikeMcDanielSOS) December 1, 2021
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Huge fan of this.
Looks like Prioleau and Pry overlapped here during their '97 season
I like it, keeping some continuity on the D where we did see improvements this year are good. Now we need to see the flashy OC hire...
If we can go back to fielding elite defenses again then we don't need a OC that's a barn burner.
Getting a top 50 or top 40 offense with a top 10 defense would go such a long way in getting the program back to relevancy.
but why not both?
Because that's not realistic.
Lol... somebody's fun at parties.
Fielding elite units (top 10) on both side of the ball is unheard of even in the perennially top 10 programs.
Be really good on one side of the field, don't suck on the other side gets you in the top 15 or so every year.
We haven't been there in 10 years. We are so far behind the curve, thus we should be realistic about Pry's hires and performance.
Fixing what's wrong on the defense will go a long way.
I don't think this is true at all. By SP+ the Alabamas, Georgias, and Ohio States of the sport typically have top-10 offenses and defenses regularly.
Anyway... I agree with your general sentiment that the program has been behind the curve and being realistic about near term expectations is a fair point. Fixing the defense will go a long way for sure. It's also good to keep in mind that modern offenses score a shit ton of points so banking on keeping your opponent under 20 points (or even 30 points) to win games is probably not realistic. Better to be great in all three phases of the game if you expect to win championships in Blacksburg (as Whit stated).
What a weird line of thought. You kind of play this whole game expecting the exceptional or the miraculous. If you want to forever go 6-6, you got the wrong Virginia school. Make some moves.
It's the "But we're just Hokies" complex. The DSM folks should study it and isolate the causes.
Not sure I agree.
I remember those days, start off with 5, 6, 7 wins, top 10 ranking... start getting it our hopes up...then the D has a couple less than perfect games, shattering our hopes and dreams
Yeah, I hated how the win was always put on the defenses shoulders. One small flaw, game over. I think that's where a top 50 offense (vice top 100) could help. Obviously you'd love to pair a top 10 defense with top 25 offense, but that's just not reasonable.
Flip side is, offenses are so powerful now you just can't bank on shutouts or even sub 20 pt games, you NEED an offense that can score on a good defense too. Offense has been such a priority (and money driver) for the last decade, basically any offence can drop 25 pts on any given day. Shootouts are common place now.
I've been looking at stats from the last decade.
Not a single school has had both an elite offense and defense in the same season.
It's not we are just the Hokies negative thinking, it's reality. Not even Bama can field elite units on both sides at the same time.
Go back to elite defenses, which is attainable, and get an OC who is competent and fields units that are average or better, and we have a combination that gets us back.
This year Georgia is in the top 10 in both scoring offense (6th) and scoring defense (1st). I didn't have to look at prior years to find another example, but my intuition says there's always at least 1-2 teams you could put in that category every year.
http://www.cfbstats.com/2021/leader/national/team/offense/split01/catego...
http://www.cfbstats.com/2021/leader/national/team/defense/split01/catego...
Yea....Stats. They'll get after ya.. Per your links, there are currently 9 teams that are both the top 25 scoring O and D, 2 of which have both in the top 10 (Cincy 8th/3rd; and Georgia 6th/1st). Currently all 4 playoff teams and ND all have both in top 25 scoring O/D. OK St is 42nd on O, but 5th on D. Probably why they're all contending for playoff spots...
Hell, App. St (19th/14th); CCU (7th/21st); and Houston (9th/19th) are even in there. No reason at all why we couldn't field a team that can have both...
Currently, we sit at 90th and 42nd. Which sounds about right for a 6-6 team.
Whenever someone says something like "look at the statistics" in a condescending tone without providing said statistics, to me it's always a red flag that they're bullshitting you. The good news is in this case "the stats" were a very quick google search away, not always the case!
I'm agreeing with you........ I extrapolated your links to disprove what VTHS said...
I understand/understood that!
I gotcha. We're on the same page now.
I don't come across that word often, but when I do, it deserves it's own gif
I thought our 1999 team had both elite offense and defense. I went to http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/football_records/DI/2000/1999Stats.pdf
Here were our rankings
1999 Division I-A Team Leaders
Total Offense #9 451.82 yds/gm. Rushing Offense #8 253.9 yds/gm Scoring Offense #1 41.4
Total Defense #3 247.3 yds/gm. Rushing Defense #3 75.9 yds/gm. Scoring Defense #1. 10.5
Can't have elite offense and defense - suck it
Think you might want to check those stats again:
Offensive FEI
Defensive FEI
F+ Combined
As the comments to this are likely going to point out it varies wildly on what you're comparing. Total O/D, Scoring O/D, FEI, EPA, F+
There have certainly been teams that have been good at both. I think realistically Tech should be able to field a minimum top 30 each year with years where a unit is elite (top 10).
Some stats are informative and some are just noise without context.
I never really trusted statistics.
Goes all the way back to high school math class when the teacher tried to tell me that if you flipped a coin and it came up heads, the statistical probability of it coming up heads on the next flip was less than 50/50.
That seemed absolutely wrong to me. Every flip should be 50/50 I sez.
No, she said, statistically the more times a coin came up heads in a row, the less likely it would the next flip.
I said "I need to see this," stood up, and started flipping a quarter.
After 15 flips that came up heads every time and her doing math to tell me how improbable the next heads would be, she made me sit down and shut up.
So, yeah, someone starts making trying to make sense of statistics to me, and my normal reaction is to make some sign to ward off evil.
Ha... and your teacher didn't pick up on the word play? Silly teacher.
If it makes anyone feel better I had the same short circuit until my brain grokked the significance of instance vs. series.
A) thats probability not statistics
B) your teacher was an idiot.
EDIT i hate autocorrect
Wut?
Hah. Shows what you know. Even she knew the proper spelling is "Yer"!
Probability =/= statistics.
The likelihood a coin flip will be heads or tails is probability.
Flipping the coin and recording the result then saying that flipping the coin 100 times resulted in 50 heads is a statistic. But its says nothing about the next flip.
Yeah that teacher told you the wrong thing or something. Obviously every coin flip is an independent event. The more coins you flip the more likely your experimental proportion of heads/tails is to converge on .5 but its not as though the outcome of any individual coin flip impacts the others. There's a whole field statistics used in a professional setting that is basically some variation of the question "how many coin flips do I have to make to confidently say what is the real probability of heads vs tails".
"The Gambler's Fallacy"
"There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics." ― Benjamin Disraeli
"Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable." ― Mark Twain
"One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten." ― Thomas Sowell
"If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment." ― Ernest Rutherford
"99 percent of all statistics only tell 49 percent of the story." ― Ron DeLegge II
AND PERHAPS THE BEST......
"Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination" ― Andrew Lang
Statistics are like a bikini: they reveal a lot, but what they don't show is usually more interesting.
I hate statistics mostly because Freshman/Sophomore year I was taking Qualitative Methods and pointed out in class that my teacher was wrong about something.
So he punished me by turning me into the Honor Court for "cheating" on a group homework assignment by saying my work too closely resembled that of my partners.
What are the odds...
I see what you did there. Qual Methods was a great intro to gambling class for me. If anything, the first time I went to a dog track I knew what I was doing because of that class.
How'd that Honor Court turn out for you?
100 hours of community service that I got permission to work off at my student job as unpaid hours at Hokie Grill.
Damn. That fuckin sucks.
I see Nottingham at basketball games and shake my first at him from a far.
Shoot. You have some major self restraint. What he did was petty and a major abuse of power.
As a proud, loving, and happy greyhound owner, I can say this with great confidence
Don't bet on my dogs. You will lose.
One of my favorite dogs was the retired Greyhound my mom adopted. Gentle giant and never got in a hurry. I loved that attitude about her. Her running days were long behind her.
Our first dog was a beagle. We would take her to the dog park were a greyhound frequented. That greyhound would run around the park for a while, every dog would join in. Kaley was the only dog to catch the greyhound. Not pure speed, thats where the other dogs failed, she would cut across the park and cut off the greyhound on the otherside.
There's a greyhound that occasionally comes to the dog park we frequent. Only dog that is clearly faster than our Border Collie
Oddly enough, the kennel name of one of mine was King James
My Aunt has always had rescue greyhounds. Her son made a short track in the backyard for them with shale rock in an oval shape. My dog cut across when racing them and the greyhounds just stopped and looked like, you can't do that!
F+ rankings for 2021:
UGA: Offense #2, Defense #1
UA: Offense #3, Defense #9
Michigan: Offense #8, Defense #10
Of course those aren't final rankings, with 2+ games to go for each of them.
I understand setting reasonable expectations ("we're very unlikely to field top-10 units simultaneously"), but why not aim high with the hire? We have the money, we should absolutely be pursuing a top-10 OC.
It took me longer than I care to admit to figure out who the hell UA was. I'm so used to everyone referring to Bama that I forget it is a university
You have forgotten something very important.
Fan = Fanatic