Yahoo's Pete Thamel on the Fuente situation:
https://sports.yahoo.com/heres-the-15-million-question-lingering-over-vi...
I think the most interesting note is that opposing coaches think the talent level has dropped significantly.
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Thanks for nothing Pete Thamel
The bottom line is Whit needs to do cost/benefit analysis on how much money it costs VT to keep Fuente vs. firing him for $15M. Likewise, he needs to be talking to his top donors on how they can help (either way). In addition, he needs to be looking at the coaching market for an affordable yet worthy replacement now and potentially ramp up discussions depending on how the analysis progresses through the year.
Doesn't Whit, technically, have the right to fire Cornelsen? I understand there could be relationship consequences with Fuente based on that, but I would assume there are already issues there.
Probably. But what is more likely to happen is the same thing that Braine did with Beamer after 1992. Braine basically told Beamer he needed to overhaul the staff or Beamer was going to get fired. Beamer made significant changes and 1993 was a turn around year and started the streak.
Virginia Tech football in 1992 was a regionally irrelevant institution that had nothing of substance to lose by allowing the program to wallow while waiting for a coach to get his act together.
That's a world of a difference away from Virginia Tech football in 2019 where it's literally financially bolstering up the entire athletic department and has a multi-million dollar industry in the Blackburg region built on expecting the population to double for 7 or 8 weekends in the fall.
We don't have the financial luxury of letting this play out like we did 27 years ago.
You can say its different because the money is different, the exposure is different, or whatever. But the fact is, its not different when it comes to running an organization.
If Whit fires Corny (or any other assistant coach) for performance reasons (not for cause), he will not get a good HC to come work for him (probably in any sport.) You can't run an organization like that. That is why its handled the way it was handled with Beamer in 1992.
Braine understood that with Beamer and I beleive Whit understands that as well.
WUT? One does not go inot coaching for the money. Or because it's easy. Or to fail. There are understood metrics...win or you are out. This is football. There are wins and losses on the line. This is NOT UVA where you just come to coach to become tenured.
I don't think you understand what the person to whom you responded is saying. He is trying to say that if Whit has a heavy hand with Fuente's staff (phrasing?), then once Fuente ultimately leaves Whit would have a hard time attracting a quality replacement. What HC wants to work for an AD that takes hiring/firing of assistant coaches out of the hands of the head coach?
At least that is what I took from it, and I agree. I don't think Whit can fire Corny. He either does the 1992 Braine approach, or he just fires Fuente outright. Those are the options, at least considering this current scenario under discussion.
If Whit tells JF to fire Corny, and he doesn't, then JF should be fired. I get that. But if JF doesn't fire Corny, and we don't have the funds to fire JF, then Corny needs to go regardless. Just because we are on this side of the football doesn't mean that people in the biz don't understand the reasons. Meaning, if Whit fires Corny, other coaches aren't going to freak out over it and shy away. They will know the workings of it, no matter what someone on this side things it looks like.
Possibly. But I still think that if all that happens, there would be some behind the scenes angling by Whit to get the funds ponied up to pay the buyout. Not disagreeing with you that it would be easy for the next coaching candidate to see through that, especially when Whit explains his actions, but I still don't see it going down that way.
Who would want to work for Fuente at this point anyway? Even if he fires Corny, Foster is still gone, the recruiting is still awful and Fuente is still going to be on the hottest of hot seats going into 2020-21.
What good coordinator would want to step into that situation?
I don't disagree. I am not defending Corny. I was trying to help clarify the post above that was seemingly misunderstood. I didn't see how comparing us to UVA, where coaches go to get tenure (apparently?), made sense given the gist of the previous post.
To your point, I don't know what decent DC or OC would come here unless they are super confident that they have what it takes to fix...all this. High risk, high reward. Come in and fix it all and have us winning again, you are on the fast track to a fairly successful career. Come in and the shit is the same, I would imagine your career outlook isn't as rosy.
Those coordinators would have maybe 8-12 months to make significant improvements or else they're probably back on the market after next year.
It's a very high risk potential career suicide to join a staff where the head coach is a dead man walking. The reward might be high as well, but I don't know if it's worth it.
It wouldn't be to me, but then again I'm not a fast rising, type A, up and coming football coach, either. I don't know the solution, I just hope we see some sort of change. More of the same isn't going to cut it.
You didn't understand the loluva tenure comment, where you can coach forever without winning (you know, getting tenure) and not being fired because of the product on the field. There are incompetent bosses, sub-bosses, and workers all over. Just because one of them gets fired because they aren't performing at their job doesn't mean the "company" is bad to work for. That's just a broad brush statement that isn't true. Not everyone fits every situation. And I'm sure there are convos between JF and Whitt about performance.
I'm sure Corny will be around into November. No way they make a move now. But if they did, it's not going to paint Whit in a bad light. Look at the program. It's not like we're 5-1 and fire an OC because we didn't win by 27. It's because we can't get a first down.
Fair enough. But honestly, I didn't have those takeaways from your first comment, fwiw.
I agree with your points in this post, that it wouldn't necessarily be indicative of a 'bad company', but I didn't get the feeling from your UVA post that this is what your trying to say. Perhaps I just haven't had enough coffee yet...
A good coordinator that wants a good head coaching job in a year....
A coordinator who has the potential to be a HC.
EDIT: Missed that. I'll drink.
I am not sure I even understand your response.
You don't understand how organizations work. If I have a team of people and my boss chooses to interfere and fire someone on my team because they aren't pulling their weight, that means that I don't have any control over who is on my team.
Head coaches want as much control as possible. if Whit takes that away from Fuente it will signal that the HC at VT will not have control of his coaching staff. Established head coaches will not want to come coach at VT (in any sport) because of that.
So you are arguing a hypothetical situation where Whit deviates from the norm...something he hasn't done yet.
I've posted a couple of responses. And you are fitting this, if it plays out this way, into a one-outcome scenario. Which, in my responses, if Whit does this, it reflects more on JF than on Whit. And won't have any affect whatsoever on volleyball or baseball or track.
We'll just have to agree to disagree on this. I really hope Whit doesn't fire Corny outright, becuase that will just be Whit doing something to do something. And it probably doesn't solve the problem anyways and risks more long term damage down the road.
No way. Impact and risk are massively different with an enterprise this size. You don't run lemonade stand the same way you run a bank.
Wait....You can't run an organization where you fire someone for not performing at their job? In what industry is that ever the case?
It was still D1 football back 1992 (which is closer to a bank than a lemonade stand.)
Let me spell it out for you:
Whit has to let (force) CJF to fire Corny. Whit can fire CJF.
That is how good organizations are run.
I never said nobody could be fired. But it is all about the way you go about it.
BUT....
If Whit ends up firing Corny, because JF wouldn't do it, it won't reflect on Whit or VT. It will be known that JF wasn't stand-up enough to do it and that something had to be done. It won't make us a bad organization. It will make us a good organization with bad people...which is in the process of being remedied. And the insiders in football will know this. People know the deal. It's not like Whit is just going to walk in Corny's office and escort him out.
Then he can fire JF for any number of reasons.
Those optic would not be as good on VT or Whit as you think.
If Whit wants Corny out, then Whit tells CJF to fire him. If CJF doesn't, Whit fires CJF and the rest of the staff (or just Corny,or whoever.)
Call it whatever you want...there is a massive gap between the football program now and the program then and the financial and societal implications. To boil it down to 'it's how an organization is run' is totally false. They're not run the same and shouldn't be run the same.
If you have a staff member that isn't performing and dragging down overall performance, and have a direct manager who has the power, but is unwilling to fire him or her, sometimes someone more senior must step in and make the call. That IS how organizations run - especially when that direct manager isn't performing either.
No one makes judgments on the enterprise as a whole if that must happen. In-fact, I'd be more worried about leadership if they continued to let under-performers drag them down without making a change. I'd love to hear some precedent that states a coordinator can only be fired by his HC, and if he isn't, there are lingering effects on the AD as a whole.
If the senior manager knows the details of the work, then it *might* work. Its always better to convince the direct reports manager to make the decision to replace them.
In this case, Whit is not an X's and O's football guy, so it should not be him that takes that action. It looks like meddling to the outside. And as you pointed out, the HC is under scrutiny for performance so the leverage would already be there for Fuente to fire Corny or Whit fires them both.
To the fanbase Whit will look "decisive." To potential HC candidates, it will look like he meddles.
The biggest difference between then and now is that Beamer was building his culture, and Fuente is... not really doing that.
I said this somewhere earlier - No fucking way the 1992 team would have lost to this Duke team 45-10.
^ This. Time is such a factor now. Patience levels are thin because their is so much to lose.
I listened to Will Stewart talk about this on the TSL podcast yesterday and he said it's highly unlikely for that to work again. He mentioned that what changed the culture was Phil Elmassian(sp).
Starts at 23:00.
Didn't listen to the podcast but I agree, just firing Corny is not going to solve all the problems.
Hear. Hear. Coach Phil was Coach Foster's sensei.
I assume that would really hurt our opportunity hiring another coach.
Were they? I've been doing the Hokies in the NFL for 4/5 years now and I'm not seeing all these "stocked NFL players" coming out of Tech most years.
I've been rewatching the 2010 ACC Championship. We had Hosley, Kyle Fuller, Carmichael, Exum, and Bruce Taylor. And we rotated RW, DW, and Darren Evans on offense. Now I'm depressed.
Hosley fucked up his NFL shot, Taylor was hurt and didn't have an NFL impact.
Yup. Bruce is a big "what if" guy to me. Both were NFL talent and elite college football players though.
They were still talented enough to get their foot in the door. We still have chuck Clark, the Edmunds, stroman, settle, Adonis, exum and maybe some other I'm forgetting actually getting some solid play time.
Previously unbeknownst to me, Brandon Facyson is playing good minutes for the Chargers.
Well you definitely picked the right era, if you wanted the job to be relatively easy. The 2004 team had 20(!) future NFL draft picks, not even counting any undrafted players who might have made NFL rosters at some point.
Despite my sarcasm, I really do appreciate your Hokies in the NFL efforts.
2013 Defense was stacked: Antone Exum, Ken Ekanem, Kendall Fuller, Kyle Fuller, Chuck Clark, Brandon Facyson, Kyshoen Jarrett, Dadi Nicolas, Luther Maddy, Derrick Hopkins and James Gayle. All of those guys played in the NFL in some capacity (Ranging from Kyle Fuller making bank to James Gayle being a UDFA).
The non-NFL players weren't exactly slouches: Chase Williams (Gregg Williams' son), Alston Smith (Bruce's son, initially on defense that year), Tariq Edwards, the Vandyke brothers, Jack Tyler, Corey Marshall, Deon Clarke, J.R. Collins, Seth Dooley (he fucks) and Andrew Motu'apuaka.
We should have been a BCS-contending team that year if we weren't devoid of skill position guys on the offensive side of the ball.
Alston Smith never played any kind of meaningful minutes for us. He switched to OL.
I know. Still notable. I guess I could have included Wyatt Teller on that list since he played defense for about a week that year haha.
Sorry, but Alston wasn't notable in any way except he was Bruce Smith's son.
Nor was Seth Dooley.
You must be new here.
VT had 2 defensive guys go in the 1st round Draft last year, they have been balling out as well.
The class with Edmunds and Settle is an outlier. Look at the roster of NFL players: 1 DL, 3 safeties, 3 DB's and one LB on active rosters.
The one before had Terrell Edmund's, Stroman, and CJ Reavis, who were all rated lower than Ricky Walker. That was a good class of no name 3* recruits.
Edmunds got drafted same year. Stroman and Reavis are not on active NFL rosters.
Stroman is on IR for the Redskins, but point taken.
They waived him before IR, the Skins might not keep him.
Sorry recruiting class not draft class. I wasn't clear.
Pretty sure we had Settle, Edmundi, Chuck Clark, Brandon Facyson, and possibly Kendall Fuller all on the same defense who are in the NFL.
For a single season. The quote made it seem like that was normal.
Some of those guys are on practice squads and still getting paid by NFL teams. Its REALLY hard to make a 53 man roster with a lot of guys on the team already under contact. Not disagreeing with you, just really tough to make the final roster year after year.
Only 1 defensive player is on a practice squad Adonis.Well never mind that.
Evened out your downvotes, apparently someone is holding a grudge
It's pretty normal now.
Hokie Fireman, you're being extremely pedantry and are increasingly making these threads unreadable.
The reality is we have had a significant talent decay in year 4 of Fuente. We can debate whether it's recruiting, or development, or both.
As another ACC assistant noted --whose assessment I trust more than the moderator of TheKeyPlay.com -- we benefited from having multiple NFL caliber guys on our roster for the last several years. You can annoyingly debate and fact-check when they got waived, or placed on injured reserved, or how they derailed their own career (i.e. Hosley), but you are missing the mountain from the mole hill.
I know it just sucks when facts get in the way of a good story. The reality is Bud Foster has had maybe two seasons in his time where he relied on NFL talented players on his defense. The rest of the time he did what he was great at, taking the talent he had and making them great college defenses.
I would argue he turned a lot of medium to good players into NFL talent.
In total over the years yes. But per year his defenses weren't stacked with NFL in all but 2 or so seasons. He rarely had an NFL defensive lineman, Settle is the only one in last decade I can name that has played more than one season on an active roster as a DL. LB Edmunds is only modern one I can name.
Jason Worilds!
Worilds was a 3/4 linebacker in Pittsburgh.
Thank you... Ray Charles can see that talent is down since Fuente took over. Semantics and word parsing aside. Watch the games.
And that's why y'all aren't following. This isn't about Fuente or recruited college talent. It's about NFL talent on Bud Fosters defensive units.
Here name the three best defensive units since 1999. That's 20 years and the. We can look over NFL 2 year active roster guys on those teams.
How many draftee's on this years team, either side of the ball? Oh, that's right Beamer's RS Seniors should be those guys and he didn't leave 15 of them. He really ran the program into the ground.
You really are just a troll. We aren't talking about Fuente, recruiting rankings or anything else. Try and stay on the topic at hand.
LOL. are you serious here? this WHOLE discussion started with you disagreeing with an ACC assitant that said the defense had more NFL players on it before Fu took over than it does now. Talk about troll.
Please show me the rosters
On the defense.
Semantics, word parsing.
That's the quote yes I'm Reading the words actually written and using them at their meaning. Unlike some groups of people I don't want to have to hunt for meaning when someone says or types something. You say something that's what you mean.
I'm going to stop y'all here. You guys have been great. But we're moving in a different direction.
Judie will handle the particulars, we wish you the best of luck.
I'll bite a little. I think some of your argument comes from a difference between you and the anon coaches definition of "NFL guys." Up above you seemed to argue that since Hosley and Taylor flared out and didn't have long NFL careers that they weren't "NFL guys." To make it to the league is extremely rare, to make a team is hard, to do it consistently year after year while you get older and younger players come in is even more challenging. I'd say Peter Warrick is an "NFL guy" by this coaches definition even though he didn't have a long and extremely successful NFL career.
I'd also say Roc Carmichael, Macho Harris, Eddie Whitley, Jason Worilds, Davon Morgan, Kam Chancellor, and Cody Grimm were NFL guys. 2008 roster. On the defense.
I'd say Darryl Tapp, Chris Ellis, Eric Green, Jimmy Williams, Brandon Flowers, DJ Parker, Vinny Fuller, Vince Hall, Xavier Adibi, and Aaron Rouse were NFL guys. 2004 roster. On the defense.
Then you have 2011 roster with Kyle fuller, Jayron Hosley, Kyshoen Jarrett, Bruce Taylor, Hopkins, Maddy, Marshall, Dadi, Antone Exum, among others.
To me to be an NFL capable player you need to at least get two season on an active roster. Doesn't have to be starts but you need to play.
And that is where you differ with this coach, and I would say the majority of people in this thread. Whether or not a player has at least 2 season of success in the NFL after his college career, has no impact on whether they were a good college football player in the past. You're going from 130 FBS teams to 32 NFL teams - 90 men rosters to 53 men rosters. The number of players that meet your definition of "NFL capable" is so incredibly small. If we had a team of 15 7th round NFL draft picks, we'd be competing for championships.
Plus, how many great college players didn't pan out in the NFL? Spoiler alert - it's a shit ton. Doesn't mean they aren't NFL caliber players. Charlie Ward and Tommie Frazier never played a down in the NFL, but I'd say they have NFL level talent and would take them on my team in a heartbeat.
If you don't play a down in an NFL game how are you an NFL caliber player?
Am I crazy to say that I think Kyler Murray is a MLB caliber player?
Exactly this. "NFL Caliber" = Borderline NFL Player. A good to great, but not elite, college football player. Put another way, a mid to late round draft pick, or someone a team may sign as an UFA. Basically, a guy who if the chips fall the right way, he catches a few breaks, could make an NFL impact. I would submit to you that the only guys on our defense right now who fit this description are Floyd and DeAblo. A far cry from the lists above.
While you are debating word choice, you are missing the point. I would consider a "NFL guy" as anyone who makes a roster, practice squad, gets an UDFA deal, and anything in between. The reality is, if a player gets a sniff at any of the above, they are more talented than most other football players. Shit, I would even consider combine invitations a measure of above-average talent:
2019 combine invitations: 1
2018: 7
2017: 6
2016: 4
2015: 3
And how many combine invitations would you surmise we would have in 2020?
Again, while you are examing NFL rosters and pulling out your thesaurus on word choice, you are missing the point. Our team is less talented now than in the years prior, and who is responsible for that? The CEO in year 4 of his tenure is who.
So just being in a single training camp is the baseline?
If it is the baseline, then this year's roster is full of players that are significantly below baseline.
2 years ago the school got 15mil donated in a lump sum for the Merryman renovations.
Sufficiently motivated and coordinated the boosters and school can find the money to pay it out over 5 years.
They did? I thought it was several smaller donations over 2 years.
So it wasnt for all the work on the building but funded 15 out of the 16mil pricetag for the nutrition center). But yeah the larger office renovations and all were a series of donations as I recall.
But based on the wording of the Roanoke Article.
" The donation, made by an anonymous alumni couple who are native Virginians and longtime benefactors to the university, is the single largest outright gift ever to Virginia Tech. " https://www.roanoke.com/sports/college/va_tech/virginia-tech-announces-m...
Sounds lump sum, but even if paid out over time, thats still one gift by couple committed at one time. And of course just so happens to be that magic 15mil number. The money is out there with the right coordination.
The money came from a couple out of Warrenton,VA.
That's where I got confused, your talking about The Jamerson work not Merryman weight room and other work. Forgot about that one.
Yeah my bad, had them confused myself! Only realized my mixup when I pulled the article back up to double check.
Isn't the money Texas A&M paid us for Buzz's buyout still out there? And the money we saved from not having to pay him this year. That should cover the 2.5 mil for this year
Buzz's buyout was like $4.00 if he left and 60 million if Whit fired him. Buzz writes his own (very beneficial to Buzz only) contracts.
Every little bit helps
I'd put in tree-fiddy, then we'd have sev'n-fiddy. Just 14.99999250 million to go.
Yup, when you know, you know. And when you know, you also know.
So what you are saying is that there are known knowns, and known unknowns?
So far this season, Virginia Tech has gotten thumped on the road by Boston College, trailed Furman 14-3 at halftime and gotten the atomic wedgie at home against Duke.
Atomic wedgie......i must say that pretty accurately describes how i felt watching that game and how i feel about the current state of the program in general. I cant remember ever turning off a game and going to bed before.
Here here. First time I've turned off a game - ever. Didn't watch the 4th quarter. Wasn't sure what else to do....so I just went to bed. Not sure if I'll watch the next one. Hurts too much.
Oh I'll be back for the next one......Just like Charlie Brown with Lucy holding the ball.
Hmmm... the talent is down. Wonder where I've heard that before.