🚨 BREAKING 🚨Virginia Tech center Ryan Jones has entered the transfer portal, from @ChrisArvin_247 #Hokieshttps://t.co/mUKGPYBo1X— VTScoop247 (@VTScoop247) March 24, 2025
At this rate, the list of players returning next year is going to be shorter than the list of those leaving
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Major contributor to a sweet 16 team next year while we sit home again. Thanks Whit
Really hurts to see Rodney Rice on the Crab 5 and Chef Sean balling out at Ole Miss. We'd actually be in decent shape if we could just retain the players already on the team...
We had all of the major contributors back from a 6-6 football team, so naturally you pay them instead of the basketball team. Since we can't do both.
Honey you would have pitched the world's largest hissy fit if we didn't pay up to keep that 7-6 team
Probably. I am a VT fan. I'd like to see us win again in my lifetime. I give to the Hokie Scholarship fund, etc. So yeah we have to pay the football team in today's world. We also shouldn't have to ration it like a bread line with the hoops program- if we want to win of course.
Wait, I thought CMY was getting some NIL money next year. So the question between now and next few weeks is are they leaving due to tough conversations or due to better offers?
The roster is leaving every season now. IIWII. We are going to have a new team every year. Fan engagement won't suffer and the bubble won't burst though. no.
This has got to be playing time related not NIL
Hard to know for sure without being in the room.
The yearly mass exodus under CMY is feeling Fuente-esque so I do wonder if there are some "lockerroom issues."
But the money in the SEC is clearly a big driver..yearly bottom-feeders in SEC MBB and WBB are suddenly top-25 teams.
The formula seems to be pretty clear now:
1. Buy yourself a Coach
2.Pilfer best players/recruits from Coach's prior team
3.Let NIL and Transfer Portal take care of the rest for you.
Go get Porter Moser, Join the SEC, go 6-12 in the league, generally suck, get in the dance anyway. That's what VT should do. Or get Kevin Williard and take all of Maryland's best players. Its a cut throat world out there.
It used to be UK was always good. And another team was decent or so but I never remember the SEC being good at basketball.
After NIL have the damn league is in the tourney.
Try 14 out of 16 teams made the tourney with six of those having losing conference records
Well yeah, it just means more.
6 SEC teams won 6 games between Dec 20th and March 15th... 6 games in 3 months- and got in the dance. Total crock of shit. Oklahoma would have likely gotten in with 4 SEC wins.
Turns out highly rated freshmen want playing time! Somebody tell CMY please. I've been calling this one since like the fourth game of the year lol.
I'd say that I hope incoming freshman center Gurdak is ready to play some serious minutes since he's the only center currently on the roster next year, but he's a top 150 recruit so CMY will have him stuck on the bench.
Weird because he never played but looked fine in limited action. Obviously some issue the coaching staff had with him
My understanding was he had lingering issues from an injury late in his High School career and by the time he was past those he would have burned redshirt/medical redshirt to play.
Curious to see where he ends up.
Caleb Love, Jeremy Roach, RJ Davis and Ethan Morton played in this tournament. They also played when Valvano beat houston in 83. Play him and let him appeal for a 6th year down the line and it's granted easily.
And the odds anyone stays more then 2 years is slim to none, if the player can help you now, you play him. The time for wishing we had a 5th year of Tyrod in 2011 is a lifetime ago.
Leave it up to the player's 3rd school in 5 years to get that year back.
This is what I heard also, though I have no real sauces.
I believe this gives Coach Young NINE open scholarships. The new court rulings now allow a roster of 15 scholarship guys compared to 13 last season.
Edited to update scholarship number
Any Curry kids we can offer a scholarship now... sorry had to.
Sorry best we can do is a walk-on offer.
yep, as a high major hoops program steeped in NCAA tournament tradition, the 12 precious scholarships always go to 4-5 star high level prospects here at VT.
Last I commented on the harsh reality of VT's Bball outlook I was ridiculously downvoted.
Well, here we are. This is pathetic. We put forth the recruiting resources to land Jones and he doesn't stay long enough to even get on the floor for anything meaningful.
At a high level, if CMY is of the old school logic of not playing freshmen', he needs to get with the times.
Our lack of NIL gave us last season - awful.
The adjusted NIL appears to not be enough to retain key folks - awful.
It's too late. We sat on our hands too long and the NIL train has left.
We don't have the mindset, the money, or the right conference to do much of anything about it.
This continual shit show is the new world for VT Football and Bball.
"At a high level, if CMY is of the old school logic of not playing freshmen', he needs to get with the times."- Well maybe and no. CMY needs to coach the team. He is not going to change what has worked for him for 40 years. Neither would you. Young demands defense and running within the offense from 5th year seniors and freshman alike. As do 99% of coaches. If Cooper Flagg didn't defend or move without the ball, Scheyer wouldn't play him. Calipari had 5 NBA draft pick freshman on the court and won 1 national title. He lost to many lower seeded teams in his career at Kentucky- with literally the best freshman in the country. If VT wants a guy that's not going to coach his system, then fire young and find a guy that plays an out of shape Jones who won't play within the offense. It won't turn out like you think. Everyone wanted Rech to play as a freshman too.. well you see why he didn't. Either you trust young or you don't. If you want to play freshman for the sake of playing them, find another guy.
Truer words have rarely been spoken about Virginia Tech in general in recent years
To be fair- triumph was on or even ahead of the game several years ago. We simply don't have the mega boosters to throw money at the hoops team in hopes of beating Wake. That's what it boils down to.. Arkansas found money to hire Calipari and fund his war chest. I guess they have mega boosters? we don't.
Arkansas has Jerry Jones, John Tyson (Tyson Foods), and the Walton family (Wal-Mart) as just a few of their mega boosters. We don't many in that stratosphere, if at all.
Serious question... Does Jerry Jones give big NIL money to arkansas hoops? I would be surprised if so.
I would ask him, but then he might start talking about glory holes again. /s
Or he'd ask you to come see his monkeys
With the amount of billionaires from Arkansas it doesn't really matter, he can fund the football program himself and leave the rest of the sports to everyone else.
Not only that we had a Basketball NIL group, Commonwealth. But everybody was happy when Triumph absorbed Commonwealth. Not so much when it was revealed that Triumph was only planning on supporting football going forward.
The conference piece is the biggest one, but unfortunately it's also the one most out of our control. If we were in the SEC, then we'd have an extra $30m/year, and this would all be a non-issue.
Unfortunately, VT (specifically Weaver/Steger) took way too long to understand that college football was changing, and we got locked into our current situation (SEC expanded in 2011, ACC GoR was originally signed in 2013 - both happened before Whit/Sands were hired).
Sure, Whit could've made better football hires and/or asked for better assistants. Perhaps Sands could've fought against the 2016 addendum to the GoR (though I believe the only change to GoR in 2016 was to make the Notre Dame deal happen).
But realistically, even if the current administration did everything right, I think we're basically a better version of K-state. While the difference between recent VT teams and recent K-state teams is pretty stark, I don't think there's much difference from a program perspective.
The acc signed a million year grant of rights deal with a TV company actively trying to kill their league. Brilliant move by all 15 guys really.
Don't worry, that $2b per year NFL deal they are about to sign will only help the ACC, right?
Jones not playing was NOT a not playing freshmen thing. It was a not playing someone that was recovering from injury and wasn't capable of contributing meaningful minutes.
Young by season end was starting two freshmen. Tyler Johnson and Ben Hammond both were on the floor for majority of games as starters.
Those leaving are not seen as meaningful folks in three out of five cases. Rechsteiner, Wessler and Brown have shown they are not ACC caliber players. Jaydon Young is a mixed bag. Defensively capable but offensively a roller coaster but had been improving and is most likely the biggest loss of the five at this point. Jones will be a wait and see result but if he couldn't force Wessler off the court this season than is that a huge loss?
The fact that we are facing two years in a row of almost zero roster continuity is the problem. Regardless of the talent level of each player on this squad who is now in the portal is more a reflection of this is the level of talent we can attract (and isn't very good), and they can't be retained. There is no chance for any meaningful season/season organizational improvement.
ACC caliber??? Not sure what that means anymore.
The players CMY can dangle from the portal are going to be anything different than what we have already seen? Doubtful. Maybe see one exception, but not holding my breath.
My point about playing freshman is doing so to have a snowball's chance to retain a player for more than one season. If Jones wasn't it, well, we won't find out here.
At the end of the day, Bar elaborated on it and it is the lone factor that nothing else can remedy and that is the $30M team revenue delta. It's too great a gap to counter. All makes all other points rather mute.
"ACC caliber??? Not sure what that means anymore."- It means guys that can win in the league.. go above .500, etc. in other words, not our roster.
Speaking figuratively here bro. Don't take it so literal that you feel the need to explain it.
The ACC at large is ".500 caliber" and will remain as such. I don't see an upward tend of more teams win %, by rather flatten.
ACC basketball will become the former ACC football - A dominant FSU (Being Duke) and everybody else. And, let's see how long that lasts.
1700- not a misprint- players in the portal. This is so healthy, scalable and great for college basketball!!
Yep over 700 on Monday which was double the amount last year.
1700 represents roughly 1/3rd of all players with remaining eligibility.
Supposedly we are looking at 7'3" Center from Youngstown.
Committed to Liberty. Another one we will have to watch in our own backyard
Babcock repeatedly gets his ass kicked by an online christian school 50 miles away that was a nothing school 15 years ago. Great fucking job Whit bringing VT athletics to liberty's level - if that- in record time. Fucking great job.
Do we have any insight into the decision process here? Going to Liberty to me either says he didn't get real D1 interest (and thus transferring out should not be a huge negative) or it means that liberty had enough money to throw at him that we can't compete with their NIL....
The latter.
.... or since Liberty has made a fucking commitment to sports and not EBITDA they are synonymous with VT now- same/same. Michael Vick aint walking through that tunnel. Liberty is our equal in sports now- like it or not. The fact that it only took them 5 minutes to get there shows what a real commitment to sports is.
Liberty is using sports investments innthe same way saudi arabia is... sadly it is working
Liberty University is also a major bankroller of the current MAGA party and heavily influencing a lot of the decisions that are currently being made to dismantle the DoE and funnel more of that money to private institutions. So yeah, the Saudi comparison is spot on.
I thought we kept politics out of this board.
Liberty University is a political entity.
Then there is more than 1 political entity mentioned in that post. The "information" included had at best as glancing reference to VT sports. The post was a troll designed to inflame emotion. It has no part here.
Kids this is why TSL gets 3 views a week. Kids don't be TSL... the post was fine, nobody was triggered by it. No need to police it.
Troll post.
Eh, I'd have to disagree, if we break it down:
Liberty University is also a major bankroller of the current MAGA party (This is not political opinion, this is documented fact) and heavily influencing a lot of the decisions (it is well known and documented that LU actively seeks to influence politics and public policy) that are currently being made to dismantle the DoE and funnel more of that money to private institutions (Indisputable fact that the current administration brags about, dismantling DoE in favor of private institutions). So yeah, the Saudi comparison is spot on (Saudi Arabia's Privitization Program is focused on providing the private sector access to gov't assets)
Just a few facts about Liberty University, and one about SA - nothing arguing politics, just "it is what it is" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yep- and 15 minutes ago they decided to put their mind to it and have surpassed VT in athletics. It's really awesome. Great job Whit
However it turns out, I don't think there was any hand-wringing in Blacksburg about any of the players that hit the portal. Early word on Jones was that he was slow on D and lost on O. His old 247 bio says He's worked hard to sculpt his frame, but has somewhat limited mobility. He may be best suited defending fives and isn't going to provide a ton of positional versatility or switch-ability on that end of the floor. MY says "you are who you can guard" and I think the mobility/versatility thing turned out to be accurate. Maybe he finds it at Liberty or maybe they play a lot of zone.
IIRC Liberty plays the same pack-line defense that UVA plays because McKay used to be one of Tony's assistants. So yeah that might work out better for Jones.
UVA will use more of a chaos defense next year with Ryan Odom as head coach. He will employ full court and three quarter court press. Will alternate from man-to-man to zone quite often. Honestly it's something I wish Young would entertain. Makes it much harder to gameplan offensively against.