No silly title for this one, thundering turd is too cliche. I think Marshall and white water rafting might be the only good things to come out of West VA, so I'm leaving them alone.
Pry starts by thanking the fans, as usual. Said there was a great showing for Hokie Nation at Rutgers. I'm embedding the Fuga quote below that Pry mentioned in reference to the team's culture and response to adversity thus far. I tried typing it up originally, but I didn't think it would translate as well in written form.
- Mentions coaching together with Huff at PSU and states that Marshall is well coached and coming off of a bye.😳
- I mentioned this already in another thread, but it seems like everyone is frustrated with the depth charts being inaccurate each week. Pry apologizes for getting them out late today, but then mentions that Tuesday depth charts do not mean much to him because the staff needs the week to evaluate player's performances and injuries.
- For a small portion of the game against Rutgers we were sustaining drives and getting 3 and outs. We were complimentary and it allowed us to get back in the game. We have to do that more often, more consistently. We also have to protect the ball better and be better about getting to the ball on defense. The top 6-8 teams in turnover margin are all undefeated right now.
- We take a lot of pride in being staunch against the run. It's evident we're not good enough right now. He goes into a good amount of detail on execution and personnel issues. Probably talks on it for 3min starting around the 8min mark.
- Felton capable of being an impact guy for us. Came in raw, but is putting in work.
- Marshall has a big Oline, good tailback, and a mobile QB. 😳😳
- We need all 11 doing their job to break big runs on offense. Need to be better on the perimeter.
- Completely sidestepped answering if Wells would start this week if he was healthy.
- Wants Drones to get better with the deep ball to give the wideouts a chance down the field.
- Pretty pleased with special teams overall. Need to get the punt returners going. Kicks need to be more consistent.
Injury updates
- Wells questionable. QB1 listed as Wells or Drones.
- Peoples out, hopeful that he can be progressed to doubtful/questionable Sunday.
- Tisdale back to compliment Keller
- Heath out at least this week, maybe longer
- Jenkins probably
- Stroman questionable
- No update on Jennings other than being back in the weight room and around the team.
- Lane much closer this week.
- Pry again brings up that these are hard calls to make Tuesday before they have even gotten back to contact practice. Sounds like Wednesdays and Fridays are when the evaluations are made outside of game time decisions like Lane has been.
I'm adding Drones' media availability too and will break it down later.
- Feels good overall about his first collegiate start at Rutgers. Definitely things to build on.
- Felton and Drones throw a lot outside of workouts. Felton ready to step up with Jennings out.
- Phone went off lol
- Feels like he knows the offense pretty well after 6 months working in it.
- Moving away from Texas and getting used to VA weather was hard. Glad Jennings helped introduce him to VA
- Felt like biggest growth here at Tech was becoming a more vocal leader.
- Wanted to play defense prior to high school ball. Likes hitting people, but says that he has to be mindful of down and distance and protecting his body as a QB. Doesn't want to be known as a running only QB.
- Grandfather and father both high school coaches in Texas with multiple state titles.
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Comments
Thank you for continuing to do this for us!
Here's to hoping the post game is easier to digest this week.
A word that comes up a lot in his pressers is "consistent" which is 100% on the staff you're inconsistent if you're not ready and getting players ready is on the staff. Its fixable we need to figure out how to fix it.
This season has been so frustrating so far because I feel like it's 2 steps forward one step back with everything.
I just don't know how to feel about this team.
We lose- especially the Rutgers game- because we are not good enough to overcome 2 turnovers, shanked punts, penalties, missed FGs etc. We are not good enough to win that way. So on some level we have to coach better for sure.
Yeah this is why the debate of personnel vs coaching being the issue is tired. Its both, we don't have room for error because we're inexperienced in both facets and both contribute to the errors we're making.
We've seen 3 different teams in 3 weeks. We need to see the same team on the field every week win or lose and that has to be, in Pry's words, "the team we can be," or we're not going to have a shot at winning.
Add in, our good punter returns to form so far after a bad 2022, but shanks a punt at a bad time that leads to a score before halftime.
There were definitely some major lapses in the game with very unfortunate timing:
It was just a series of misfortune, blunders, and the defense running out of steam. VT will win some games this year, but they need to start winning the T.O. battle, limit penalties, and stop those backbreaking TD runs. If they do those 3 things, Drones and the offense will score enough to win.
You described a bad football team.
True. But I'm not yet ready to write them off for the season. But they also showed signs of a good team:
Overall bad, but not all bad.
I will go to my grave thinking he watched beamers press conferences and is emulating him- the hand movements the "wish he could have had that one back" etc. Very reminiscent of Beamer
Thanks for the recap!
Ali is the best RB the Hokies have faced so far.
Good thing we've got a sound run defense
Curious what others think of the "Fast Fridays" bit at the very end. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but we always did a walk through the day before the game. Shoulder pads and shorts. Light contact. Hurry up on the field. With the injuries VT has at the moment, I have to wonder if these guys are going too hard or using too much fast twitch the day before the game. Thoughts?
He's gone into more detail about practice structure before and from what I remember Tuesdays and Wednesdays are full pads and full speed, Thursdays are pads but 75% speed, and Fridays are no pads full speed. Pry has mentioned this structure is based on recommendations from the sports science team.
I don't think Friday's are the problem, I think we've just had bad luck, but whenever you rack up injuries like we have the S&C and sports science depts deserve a little scrutiny.
When you have zero depth, even a normal or even less than normal amount of injuries will seem catastrophic. Especially when the injuries are to high impact starters.
Depth was a big concern before the season and more than one TKPer said that a few key injuries were the difference between a bowl and another 3 win season. Welp, here we are. We were super lucky with injuries last year and are unfortunately reverting to the mean right now.
I think it's a lot of luck - last year we went the whole season without an qb injury, an OL injury, or a notable WR injury (caveat: we had one notable wide receiver).
Unless we have stats on how many other teams sustain injuries and compare it to our team (over a period of time), we have zero reason to scrutinize S&C imo.
Fair. Scrutiny should have had a little more context there.
I meant that the staff should review their procedures to make sure we're not missing something, not that the fans should start calling for S&C and sports science firings. I personally think we are in a much much better place with these things than we were a couple seasons ago.
The only time I think you can reasonably scrutinize S&C is if people are constantly blowing out their hamstrings. S&C has nothing to do with Lane rolling up on Jennings ankle. That's just bad luck
Yeah soft tissue injuries vs broken bones. If guys are pulling, tearing, spraining things that's a sports science/S&C thing. If we have broken wrists and concussions that's mostly out of their control.
And ironically that one WR had to hang it up for injury reasons after last year
Thanks for posting this, and summarizing it.
These pressers are interesting to watch, and Pry seems pretty comfortable giving them. Bonus that he isn't constantly opening and closing a water bottle.
I could not find this posted to YouTube and to be honest I didn't go hunting for it too hard yesterday, but anyway here's the post game from Marshall. For the life of me, I could not get a direct link to work from Hokiesports, so if you want to watch you'll have to scroll down a little. The video is only about 5min long.
https://hokiesports.com/sports/football
We need a tracker on the word consistent on these had to be at least 20 times in 5 minutes. Sounds like my golf game out there "I'm not a bad golfer I'm just inconsistent" when in reality that's what makes a good golfer.
He's not wrong, but at this point outside of the freshman just figuring it out over the course of the season I do not see signs that we're going to get much more consistency from this group.
When its your freshmen being inconsistent, there's hope that its just growing pains and there is likely better times ahead. When its your juniors and seniors being inconsistent, its the sign of poor talent that is incapable of being coached.
There's a reason why our recruiting was rated as poorly as it was under Fuente, and that's before considering that those classes might have been artificially boosted up by taking on 15 RBs with better star ratings than our overall average. We just have a bad roster. Sometimes it really is asking too much for players to be consistent. And the mistakes I was seeing over the Marshall game were the kinds of things that put the team in a hopeless situation. When you have your tackles getting out of the way of the pass rush so that Drones doesn't even have time to fake a handoff or get to the end of his dropback before a guy has his hand on him, it doesn't matter what Bowen calls, the play is dead. When you have your Linebackers consistently overrunning plays and choosing the wrong gaps to defend, it doesn't matter what the rest of the scheme is, you're going to get gashed.
We're just bad. Our players are bad. The is the least talented Virginia Tech football team we've had since the 80s. That's just our reality right now, and it isn't getting better until we have a complete roster overhaul. And even then, we're behind the 8-ball because the previous coaching staff salted the earth in our recruiting relationships across our home state. We're legitimately in a pretty hopeless situation right now, and the more it goes on I'm not sure I believe we're ever going to see a meaningful game in Lane again. Especially if we get left behind in conference realignment.
Pry is doing a lot of good work the rebuild the relationships so when we fire him in 2 years we will have talent and relationships for the next staff
Quite frankly, if Pry is doing that good of rebuilding and maintaining those relationships, it wouldn't be in our best interests to replace him. At this point, a head coach should be more of the CEO role, overseeing everything, maintaining relationships, doing all the good PR stuff, and his assistants and position coordinators should be doing the ground work to get the team truly prepared on a game by game basis.
If, and I'm still not convinced that things really are bad at the assistant positions, it doesn't work out with the current staff, he needs to be allowed to replace key positions, this time with explicit instructions that they need to be from people with significant positive experience in the P5 level. And we would need to open the bank to be willing to pay top dollar for the best assistants that money can buy.
Unfortunately, I don't think we have the right administration, nor do we have the desire from boosters to set up a situation like that, so we'll probably just churn through head coaching buyouts for a while until things maybe bounce back up.
This is the way.
Pry seems to be pretty solid on the face of the program side of being a head coach so far. Position coaches and coordinators I feel like unfortunately the jury is still out. We're gonna need some solid improvements by the end of the year or at the very least mid next season. The coordinators are on a short leash and I flip flop on this a lot but every time I fall back on there's really not anyone that going to significantly move the needle with what we have right now.
I thin the biggest issues we have right now is that things are so bad that we cannot even have a reliable read on how our scheme truly is. Plays are blowing up on both sides of the field before they even get a chance to get going. Our OL and LB positions in particular are killing us on a game by game basis. The few times that those units do their job, we are able to have some positive plays happen, but they are so inconsistent that its impossible to gain any lasting momentum from them.
We have to fix the talent, first, before we can evaluate the coaches themselves. #1 priority is fixing recruiting. Only after we have the players from which we can succeed can we evaluate our coaching ability to make us succeed. It sucks, and its going to take 3 years from now to get to that point, but that's just the sorry shape the previous staff left us in. There will be no instant gratification with this rebuild. Unfortunately, judging by the overwhelming narrative being pushed on social media as well as all the fan sites right now, we're not a fan base prepared for such a reality.
No staff is going to get 5-6 years anymore with the transfer portal. If Pry can't make a bowl in 2024, he should be gone. Recruiting strides that have been made are going to evaporate by then if he can't put a competent looking team on the field, and this year I fear is going to hurt recruiting as well. I don't see us winning more than 1 or 2 more games this year which is incredibly concerning.
And that is how you turn into NC State basketball since the Valvano years
I think he gets through 2025. Maybe that is why he keeps bringing up that 2025 is the year, because he knows if he does not put together a good season that year he will no longer be here.
While Pry might last until 2025, if the offense and defense don't improve markedly either the rest of this year or next, his coordinators don't make it.
This was a tongue in cheek comment, I am not convinced it is Pry at this point. Working with the military you often see guys come in and have 2 years to build a resume before they go somewhere else. So a lot of them do something fast and superficial to get noticed and promoted. When the program is more than a decade old this doesn't move the needle. But others see the big picture. They make long term decisions, and once they are in the right organization with the right leadership they go far. And if they are in the wrong organization then the contractors hire them up real quick.
Some times the quick flash is just amazing people. But often it is just getting them to their next position.
Or bad coaching. We genuinely don't know yet.
The tough part now is that for juniors and seniors the current coaches have to basically deal with the crappy fundamentals that the previous staff instilled in them while also trying to teach them how to execute the scheme they want to run. That alone is hard enough with top end recruits, but with the lower end guys who you really need 3 or 4 years of development before they 'get it', starting over in the middle essentially ensures you'll never see them bloom.
I mean, I don't remember our OL being poorly coached under Vice. But I do think that having 3 OL coaches in 3 years is doing a disservice to these kids (not saying that was avoidable; just saying it's a rough situation).
Great callout as well. You hear all the time about how its rough for QBs to deal with changing coordinators, but yeah for these OL, they've had 3 coaches in 3 years, all likely teaching different styles in a position that historically takes a while to grasp?
And we wonder why we routinely have plays where the OL looks completely deer in headlights out there
And on top of being coached 3 different styles of blocking in 3 years Rudolph left late in the cycle, so it didn't give Crook a lot of time to install his schemes and vocabulary. Maybe they can make progress late in the season, but they were dealt a pretty crap hand.