http://footballscoop.com/news/everett-withers-to-be-head-coach-at-texas-...
Honestly this is a shock. But it also opens up an instate job to some guys with VT on their resume.
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Shane? Stiney?
I have no doubt both of them will try and get an interview.
Fwiw Shane has already been named the special teams/tight ends coach at Georgia.
He won't pass up a HC job though.
He gone.
That doesn't mean anything. Shane wants to be a HC if JMU an FCS power school in the best FCS conference offers him the HC job he is there.
Yeah, don't think for a second that the idea of being a special teams and TE coach at an SEC school carries more promise than a HC position at a good FCS school. If offered, Shane would take it. It would mean he stays in VA, close to Cheryl and Frank (assuming they don't up and move to their lake house), and he'd be familiar with the recruiting territory. Last year, UGA's TE coach made $235k. Shane was just bumped up to $252k last January. I imagine that's about where he will be for UGA considering both TE and ST responsibilities. From what I can tell, Whithers was making ~$325k with several performance bonuses in place. Shane would go if he got the chance.
This is really weird to look at. Maybe its because Shane's kids/ Frank's grandkids have been in tons of Snapchats and Twitter posts the past few years, but it feels like we just lost a big part of the VT family.
Yea it actually feels wrong. Those kids were huge Hokies and now the SEC is going to corrupt them.
Even more awkward, his wife went to
Ole Missa Mississippi school that's in the SEC . Talking about confusing rooting interests.Miss State, I believe
The father-of-young-kids in me immediately sees the girl on the right and wants the scream, "hold on to him! Don't drop your brother!"
The father of much older kids in me wants to pat you on the back and say, It's alright dude. Kids that age are made out of rubber bands and slinkys. Hard to break 'em.
Cute as buttons, those Beamer kids.
I agree. I think Shane would be a great fit at JMU. If he does well, he could easily make the jump to P5 head coach.
That REALLY seems like a downgrade from top tier FCS team, with all the added brand recognition from the Game Day visit, to a below average Sun Belt team.
Whatever the reason, he seemed real anxious to leave.
This may have something to do with JMU's plan to jump to Division I across all sports.Their administration back in September indicated that they were hoping to move up sometime in the next 24 months to DI Football, so at Texas State, Withers has an already established DI program, although only four years so, so he doesnt have to go through the transition pains, and instead can focus on building up at Texas State. He also has plenty of connections to that area, having coached at Tulane, Texas, New Orleans Saints, and Southern Miss. At JMU, he was facing having to become a doormat program to start out with more than likely, fighting for games on his schedule and enduring the transition structurally, mentally, and administratively. That and probably facing several years of losing seasons doesnt do much for your resume, especially when you already have 27 years of coaching under your belt. I cant speak to the dollars of the two positions either so there might be something there as well.
I hear Chip Kelly is looking for a job...
Sorry I couldn't help myself
I want that to happen like you wouldn't believe.
This would be perfect for Stiney.
Not going to happen imo. Their fans have soooo much contempt for this notion that I don't think it's feasible, especially the way this went down.
Also they have a high powered offense and I suspect they will look for someone to keep it that way. Just my .02
If Stiney gets an HC opportunity, I think he'll do a great job of delegating - aka find an OC to run the offense and be hands off.
[Enters Curt Newsome]
The new HC at JMU just needs to keep the current offensive staff in place. Those guys are lighting it up.
I read a post somewhere (so it must be true...) that JMU students/fans absolutely detest everything VT. I've not ever heard, seen anything like that - but I haven't lived in VA since forever and a day so I don't know. Is there any truth to that comment?
I have a friend that went to JMU after Tech and he said JMU absolutely hates VT. He got way more hate at JMU in a couple months than I've heard in 2 years of graduate school at UVA.
From my high school experience JMU was always the place everyone went when they didn't get accepted to VT/UVA.
Whoa whoa whoa, now that's starting to sound like a wahoo.
JMU has a lot of programs that are really good (and some better than VT).
Really great arts, music, and music education programs.
Their engineering program is on the rise as well.
Also good in the biology arena.
I was accepted to VT in 2002 and put on a wait list for JMU and they ultimately denied me. Funny since JMU was my fall back school
My high school guidance counselor tried to convince me that JMU was superior to VT for science programs. JMU had at that point just built a nice new building for chemistry and biology and that caught her attention. But until JMU offers more graduate degrees in basic sciences, they will never come close to VT in terms of research infrastructure. The only grad degree they offer is an M.S. in Biology. Until they start offering Ph.D. programs in biology, chemistry, and biochemistry, there is an upper limit to their research infrastructure and sustainability that will be well below VT for a long time. JMU does have some nice buildings and facilities, to be sure, but I don't get the sense that there is any more value in a JMU biology degree than one from VT.
It's possible my high school had a better physics program than Tech...
Note how I didn't mention physics :)
Though, IIRC, the VT physics program is on the upswing. The big holdup was the lack of a nuclear research program for many years (rumor has it there was some kind of radiation accident back in the 1970s but I don't know if it's true). Without being able to attract faculty to do really cutting edge research, it's been hard to develop the program. I think it's turning around, though, and there is more nuclear research going on. Not my field though, so I only follow it peripherally.
This says 1985.
I'll have to ask my landlord for the dirty details. He ran the reactor group back in the day (Andrew Robeson). I'll be sure to hold off on any jokes about the physics department and accreditation...
Yeah, I know a guy that graduated with a physics degree, got a full ride to study at Oxford for a summer, and was then sought out by a bunch of companies until the navy recruited him to be a nuclear engineer. I think a physics degree from VT is a-ok....
Yeah I'd pump the breaks there. They have some very good professors and great research going on in the physics department. We're also starting to get some people astro people in too. And we have the entire kimbelton facility. Our physics departrent is no joke
Well I can tell you that a biology degree from anywhere doesn't mean shit unless you go to graduate school. That was the one thing that every single person I encountered during an internship told me. (I was a biochem/biology major at VT so I'm well versed in all the jobs that I can't have)
Ah, the persistent morass of life science graduates in limbo. Despite some growth in biotech fields, this is becoming very common. You can still get an entry-level job with a BS, but basically one should expect terrible pay and no upward mobility. Then once you get an advanced degree, expect terrible pay and limited upward mobility...
Not like I'm bitter or anything. Just looking at my peers who went into different fields and got a BS, who are making 2-3 times what I am with a Ph.D. and 4 years post-grad experience...
All of my friends at Tech were engineers so they immediately went out into the work force and started making $60k+ while I signed my life away to graduate school making $24k. My best friend texts me the breakfast that he gets for free at work each morning. Another colleague posted a picture of the brand new corvette he bought after signing on with an engineering firm.
Life's not fair (is what I keep trying to convince myself when I can't have nice things).
This is why I went straight to law school after getting my PhD. I saw too many Post-Docs, with 6 years of work with good papers barely getting interviews. Well, that reason and the constant circular rat race to get funding and publish. As much as I would rather be solving life's mystery's, I'm now filing paperwork for other scientists to get and protect their patents.
Maybe one day I'll be calling you up when I have a big discovery.
But you're 100% dead-on. If I didn't love what I do so much, I don't think I'd keep doing it. I'm applying for a K99 award right now (got an F32 for my current position) and it's really the only way I'll get any interviews for faculty positions. For example, I was just talking with a faculty member in biochem at a reasonably sized university, and they had an opening. Just a general all-call for someone in biochem. 300 applicants, and it wasn't even a prestigious program/university. The hiring committee only looked at the 50 or so that had a track record of funding (e.g. F32 and/or K99/R00). It's really intimidating.
Anyway, back to writing that...my deadline is in a month.
You have a pretty good track record thus far. Good luck on that K99, that's definitely the best way and will almost assuredly get you a faculty position. I did get an F31, but only after my mentor published in Nature (not any of my work) and I proposed some follow-up experiments. I'm pretty sure, if it was a lower-tier paper, I wouldn't have been funded. Funny, all those follow-up experiments went so poorly so I had to change my project completely to get something publishable.
As for that "big discovery," I will definitely be able to help with that (when I finish law school, and get firmly established at the firm I'm working at (2-3 years)). One thing about patents and academic bio science, it's actually pretty to easy to get patents, but biologists are always concerned with understanding the intrinsic nature of biology instead of manipulating biology for a treatment/assay, etc. Many things a biologists do would be patentable (and valuable) if they tweaked some of the experiments to get results that Patent Law requires. If I knew now what I knew during my grad school days, I probably could have applied and obtained 3 or more patents with the right experiments. I always said to myself, you know these experiments could lead to a treatment or an assay to discover this. But instead of looking for that answer, I was more concerned with discerning the intrinsic mechanism, which is not patentable.
Point of clarification - they do not have an accredited engineering program or offer any form of engineering degree. JMU has some sort of applied sciences degree that's "just like engineering."
They created an ABET accredited engineering program in '08. They call it a new kind of Engineering, but it is Engineering. They can sit for FE and get PE the same as other accredited engineering degrees. We can mock their engineers, but saying they aren't engineers is untrue.
Tell that to my daughter's friend, who can't find a job making coffee in an engineering firm. In the eyes of recruiters, the generalized engineering degree is like a freshman year and three sophomore years: you have lots of engineering credits, but you don't have enough background in any specific field of engineering to be useful.
I probably saw the hate more than a lot of other people because the JMU game was my first year in college. All of my high school friends that ended up at JMU (most wanted to be at VT but weren't accepted) have never let that go. That was really when the hate started since they finally had an argument to say they were better than us in something.
All I'm saying is, let's not become what we despise of others.
So great prep for aspiring baristas you say?
Or teachers.
Because they deserve all the snark and derision we can give them. /s
2015 grad here...and yeah, its true. I have plenty of friends who went/go to JMU you, and its not all bad, but they literally take swipes at Tech and openly root for tech sports to lose more than UVa kids do. I'm just taking a guess, but its probably a mix of school attachment (kids at JMU love JMU almost as much as people at Tech love Tech) and the fact JMU gets overshadowed in the state by tech, UVa, and vcu now because of basketball.
JMU fans are great, the ones they have. The problem is that the Harrisonburg area is predominately Hokie country (perhaps due to the large agriculture industry in the Valley). So those with ties to JMU are die hard JMU but most residents are Hokie, UVA, or even WVU. JMU is very underrated as a school though.
Very large contingent of cousins fans in the Hburg area. Quite disconcerting
Translation: so they're just jealous. Ok. Makes sense.
I know the JMU co-eds really like us Hokie boys back in the late '90s and early 00's...
Agreed, only place I have ever felt like a piece of meat.
This reminded me of a video, The Economics of Dating: How Game Theory and Demographics Explain Dating in D.C. It explains a bit of why that is the case since JMU is 63% female (JMU is actually specifically mentioned at 24:47). One of the things they mention is that at colleges (CalTech was the example used in the video) where there is a higher percentage of men than women, it's very common for relationships to start in Freshman year and last their entire time in college. The video included an anecdotal story from a male student at Sarah Lawrence College (85% female) who had been sexually involved with all of his female friends.
The parts talking specifically about colleges are at 11:15-13:25 and 22:00-27:00
Confession time: I went to JMU for undergrad
*waits for gasps to die down*
As you can see, however, I don't really bother with being a fan of their sports teams. So mostly whenever I'd hear people slam Tech, I'd either stay quiet and get shifty-eyed or offer up a "hey now, Tech ain't so bad" or something along those lines. There were definitely some people who took it a little further than others.
A lot of my good friends ended up at JMU. Most of them were pretty nice about everything and I still keep in touch with them. A select few were absolutely awful and I just had to stop talking to them.
Regardless of how they feel about us, I know that I'll root for them just about any time they're not playing us. There's only one school in VA that I'll root against...I'll give you a hint, it starts with LOL
LOLRADFORD?
Maybe Stiney & Newsome could reunite (anybody)? In all seriousness I though JMfU was trying to make the jump from FCS to div 1A (kinda like Liberty)???
My only point of reference to JMU is there great Halloween scene.
saw texas and was like woahhh.. then the state came and I laughed at myself. #blondemoment
Texas State's biggest donor will no longer be giving money to Texas State due to the hiring of Withers. Thinks hiring a FCS coach was a dumb move. The donor completely rips the program as well.
I saw some tweets about it last night but can't find them at work.
Who else was coming to Texas State?!?
that's my thought but there seems to be a theory that they were making progress and this hire is just gonna take back to FCS. Wish I could find the quotes, they are way out there.
Found it.
http://totalfratmove.com/texas-state-biggest-donor-absolutely-destroys-u...
not sure how dependable totalfratmove is but it's something to talk about.
They just linked the tweets to the newspaper beat reporter for Texas State.
ah ok, well then I say carry on and I kind of feel like Withers is going to be fighting an uphill battle. May have been easier to transition JMU to FBS over dealing with this stuff
Wait, Texas State isn't FCS?