2021 blue-chip quarterback Dematrius Davis has opened up his recruitment.
no love lostβ€οΈ pic.twitter.com/KSGUaRkERlβ Dee (@Dematrius09) May 6, 2020
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2021 blue-chip quarterback Dematrius Davis has opened up his recruitment.
no love lostβ€οΈ pic.twitter.com/KSGUaRkERlβ Dee (@Dematrius09) May 6, 2020
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he gone, again
Well that sucks! I try not to be negative but WTF
I'm trying to remember. Wasn't he, like, the jewel of our class or something? Our big get in the Texas heist?
Correct, and plays the most important position on the field. The good news is that our head coach CAN go out and get transfer QBs rather easily it seems, if we need one.
*when
Well, hopefully the staff can pull him back in
2022 IS THE YEAR!!!
#Manila2VT is going to be lit with the recruiting connections Fuente's developed in the Philippines.
IF nobody gets hurt or a 4th year senior doesn't go pro "early"- that throws the whole thing off.
Sounds like we got big dogged.
Just sounds like my man wants to take visits. I think it all depends on where he sets up visits and when VT gets their official.
Ohh Kay.
He will never take a visit here he's gone
you know this because of his tweet that says he will never take a visit here, right?
or does his tweet above say the exact opposite of that?
He is likely concerned because the staff has failed to really get a lot of other big time recruits onboard with him. Probably disappointed that his commitment didn't have impact he thought. Good players want to play with other good players.
Why would you believe that he will visit Blacksburg. I mean, "fool me once..."..."
I'm afraid to see the crazies in the replies to his announcement.
Gut check time for the staff.
Don't need to recruit Virginia with Texas on lock...
Yes, of course. Plenty of Virginia offers out there. The staff is still trying to recover for some things Shane Beamer said to richmond kids in 2013 though. Things like this take time.
I mean, yeah. We have 31 offers out to Virginia kids this cycle. The staff recruits Virginia.
I don't think that's the issue. The issue is how well the staff recruits Virginia. VMI has a bunch of Virginia offers out there too.
What did Shane Beamer say to Richmond kids?
I'm pretty sure he was being facetious. As in making fun of the excuses some fans will make that the current staff is making up for mistakes of the old.
I don't think so. It's a commonly held opinion
No, it's not. It's true that at the time many fans didn't think Shane was recruiting up to expectations (I wouldn't be surprised if the most vocal fans saying this were the same ones upset about the current state of recurring). However, not a single person is arguing that the current staff is still trying to recover for some things Shane Beamer said to richmond kids in 2013. The only person who can't let it go is dc.
I think one of us misunderstands. I thought the question was whether some people believe Shane upset people in Richmond or not and if that would be an issue if he were to become our HC
So you're suggesting that Shane Beamer become our head coach with no HC experience?
And, hypothetically, this would solve our problems in recruiting?
Insert -Bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for em.gif-
That's also not what I'm saying.
Isn't he the guy that said speculation around DD decommiting was FAKE NEWS! Hmmm...
Using the word "fault" when talking about a recruit's decision gives off a negative vibe and isn't a good look IMO. Also, yes Beau we do have to live with blue-chip recruits decommitting.
to clarify, this tweet is weeks old and was in response to people sniping at our staff when Tony Grimes left us out of his top-10. It's not about DD
Didn't notice that, thanks for clarifying. Totally okay with his tweet in that context.
The ones from VT have been respectful so far
I'm sure everyone on twitter and the various messages boards will handle this with calmness and maturity.
UVA fans are already sending screenshots of our boards to recruits.
I don't see how Fuente survives another top 50-70 recruiting class...assuming this one proceeds to fall apart now. Even if 2020 goes extremely well with the current talent on the roster...the two deep 2-3 years from now is going to be Rutgers-tier. We dropped to 51st with Davis gone on 247sports.com
The program is assuming room temperature right before our eyes.
There are only 5 other guys committed. The rankings are going to change a LOT before the class is finalized. If we picked up a boatload of 3 stars right now, we'd probably shoot up the rankings, but I'd rather the coaches get whatever 4 stars they can first. It seems like a lot of 4* kids are wanting to take their OVs before they commit. I think this is going to be tough. I want to say that a lot of our recruits in the past have loved the family feel they got on their visits. Hopefully some of the recruits can visit if they open things up soon.
Loaded QB room, what did you expect? the 2020 class was hurt because we had a low number of scholarships available, which scared away 4 and 5 star talent, and we had to be really selective with so many 4 and 5 stars interested. HEAVY/S
There's a 2 star VT is interested in that's just as good but not getting as much hype because of anti-VT bias in the recruiting sites.
the worst part about all of this, IMO, is that there's going to be a bunch of crazy sickos tweeting negative shit at him. That makes me ill.
Being a Tech fan is really getting exhausting. Remember when this used to be fun?
....no
Well I do. Virginia Tech Football used to be arguably my favorite thing in the world. There was nothing better than spending a weekend in Blacksburg for a football game. But those days are long gone. It's basically just disappointment and frustration now.
I misinterpreted what you meant. I thought you were referring to recruiting. Following recruiting has never been fun. So, for the most part, I stay away from it. I do remember when VT used to be fun to watch though! I think 2016 was the most recent fun season. Otherwise, you have to go all the way back to 2011. Everything between 2011 and 2020, save for 2016, has been butts.
2013 was fun. Every game was close, most shouldn't have been, but I'd call it fun. 2017 was mostly fun too.
Yeah we're on the same page. I think you and I probably find recruiting to be as much fun as Coach Fuente does. All 3 of us fucking hate it.
I'd say that 2019 between the Miami and Pitt games was fun. Unfortunately, a not fun beginning and end.
I don't see how anyone can say this especially going through a period with no love sports right now. It must suck for everything to be based upon whether the team wins or loses. What did you do all those years when we lost to teams like FCS JMU, or Boise, or Pitt, or Maryland etc etc. almost every team loses games and very few win NC. Learn to enjoy the experience be happy you can go to games he'll be happy we have games. Demand better from the school and staff when we lose but don't let it ruin your enjoyment of the program.
All those years when we had those head-scratching losses, I was incredibly disappointed, but then we bounced back. We always bounced back. Those days are over now. The losses are starting to feel more common than the victories.
During this unprecedented time of no sports, obviously I'd rather watch us lose to JMU than have no sports due to a pandemic, but this program hadn't been fun to follow for a long time before coronavirus.
It's hard to understand how you could say I shouldn't let losing ruin my enjoyment of the program. If you don't think winning is significantly more enjoyable than losing, then I don't know what to tell you.
Boise was a top 10 team and squarely a top 15 program at the time. Right this moment they are probably a better program than VT as well. Why are they lumped in with JMU? That was a toss up game from the start and came down to the last seconds. No comparison to JMU or ODU.
losses suck, no matter what. Seasons with losses can still be fun. But the really fun seasons are the ones where the fans have legitimate hope that their team can and will win most, if not all, of the games on their schedule. Seasons are much less fun when the fans don't feel confident that the team can hang with powerhouse programs like ODU. 2010, when we lost games to Boise and FCS JMU, was still fun because we had a legitimate shot at winning every game on our schedule. And, for the most part, we did. And it was fun. Despite those loses you cited. But lately, it's hard to go into any game with confidence that we'll come out ahead. I would wager that the number of VT fans who think VT will beat ND in 2020 is much, much lower than the number of fans who believed VT had a legitimate shot at beating Alabama in 2009 or 2011. 2009 and 2011 were fun seasons because VT had a legitimate shot at winning every game, even if they didn't. 2019 was not fun because, despite having one of the easiest schedules in the country, most fans went into every game with some level of trepidation because there was little hope that VT could win every game.
Look, I'm not suggesting that VT should win every game in order to make the season fun. I'm just saying that going into each and every game expecting to win is much more fun than going into every single game hoping and praying that it just doesn't go sideways. That seems like a subtle difference but it has a huge impact on the psyche. I miss the days when I was excited for the games to start because I knew VT would put up a great effort and likely win, even against the best teams. In recent years the feelings leading up to the games can't be descried as excitement. It's much closer to angst. I wanted to watch the games because I hoped VT could win, but I wasn't excited about it because I didn't have any confidence they actually would. Worse yet, even if they did win, I was worried they would look lazy, unmotivated or unfocused. Expecting wins and being excited to watch them is fun. Anxiously watching and hoping your team doesn't find some new way to fail, week-in and week-out is not fun. Not at all.
The fun stopped when I started following recruiting.
NO. SHIT.
You know the famous Francis Bacon quote:
"Knowledge is awful"
Probably because our recruiting tanked right around when recruiting services got big and people started following it
I have been watching this for awhile and I think it's a combination of big-dogging but also the Twitter cesspool and some absolutely JACKASS fans tweeting some ridiculous things at this kid. I saw many screenshots of stupid Tech fans' comments that trolls from UVA would send to DD. I swear we have some absolute idiot fans and tweeting at these kids and their parents has become toxic. We look like an awful fanbase and the reputation is being exacerbated by trolls who hate us. This is a sad day for me because I loved DD's attitude and pro-VT recruiting. It will be awhile before we shake off the negativity that is in the Twitterverse regarding us IMO. Go Hokies nonetheless.
Agree fans should not tweet stupid things to recruits on twitter- agree 100%. I do not agree that it has a huge influence though. The tech fans that gave Davis "Love" on social media far outweighs the idiots and trolls. I honestly think the head coach interviewing for other jobs hurts the programs "perception" with recruits much more than a few twitter trolls.
Fixed it
Someone skilled in graphic arts needs to come up with a Wheel of Recruiting Excuses GIF- fans on Twitter, Jim Weaver, UNC cheating, Chuck Cantor, etc.
"small class"
"Recruit ratings don't matter anyways" Add anecdotal examples as evidence.
Remote location
Money
"Character"
Didn't have his major
Closer to family
Relative in other program
Better dorms
Prettier girls
More history
Grew up a fan of...
Bagmen
Weather
Academics
Not OKG
Not a fit for the scheme
Didn't say hi to his mom
Jesus there are more excuses than commits.
Literally ever fanbase has twitter lunatics. There are actually probably superfans out there that have created fake accounts where they imitate rival fans and harass players. I highly doubt players put much stock into this unless it's someone in a position to represent the university.
Our fans may post some jackass stuff, but I'd be willing to be it's nothing like the stuff he'd get if he decommitted from an SEC school. He'd probably get death threats. Outright crazy belongs to the SEC, like that Alabama fan that poisoned the trees at Auburn.
Every school has idiot fans in twitter land
Boy do we suck at the ABCs of recruiting
We suck for sure
More like NBC , never be closing, amirite?
Amen. Call it what it is. Sucks. Self awareness is the best way to improve. Whit understands this and is going to ratchet the expectations up accordingly in the near future, IMO.
Does he tho?
After the Baylor stunt and now this, Whit has to be prepared to do something. We can't accept a product like this. Two back to back bad recruiting classes will effectively tank this program for a while.
Lackluster recruiting led directly to the .500 period from 2012-2015, and Fuente is on record talking about a portion (25%, I think) of VT players not being P5 caliber when he got here. Hauling in back to back 70th ranked classes will do the same. And as it becomes a pattern, there's no reason to expect 2022 recruiting to suddenly improve on that drastically.
I've said this before here, but one of the main reasons 2020 recruiting was so poor was because staff invested time and energy into 2021, knowing that the commonwealth wasn't saturated with talent and the class was going to be small. And now, if they shank this class too, it's going to be a real issue.
Fuente has not yet shown that he can be Wisconsin-East, winning 10 games a year with the 40th best class. That isn't going to suddenly happen in years 5-6.
Fuente never said anything close to that. It's mendenhall that you are thinking of.
Baylor "stunt?" Do we have to revisit how pretty much all coaches nowadays move on every so often? Baylor flew to Blacksburg, Fuente listened to their pitch, and turned them down the next day. Let's please not turn that into a thing again. And "this?" Whit should what, can Fuente because he listened to Baylor and a single recruit decommitted (who said he still plans on taking his OV to Tech in the same tweet).
The Baylor move was obviously done in an attempt to take a shot across the bow of Vt athletics and get more commitment for resources. Otherwise you wouldn't be looking around. If this recruiting class turns into a disaster following last years bad class, that move doesn't give you very much leverage. I don't think it's fully understood what two years of below 50 ranked recruiting classes will do to this program. Fuente claimed 2018 was a result of how bad 2016 was and nothing being left in the cupboard. Now imagine our team in 2022 and 2023 with again nothing in the cupboard. That's what we are staring at.
This isn't directed at you personally, but I'm completely burnt out on the excessive Fuente defense I see from some.
I'll just add this - the evening it looked like Fu to Baylor was a done deal back in January, it was telling to me that Kirk Herbstreit is on Twitter actively lobbying for Shane Beamer to get the job, then several other VT football alums follow suit, then Mike Vick also tweets a huge endorsement. Combine that with some reports that Vick hasn't been very responsive to the staff's requests lately. Combine that with a lot of former players distancing themselves from the program. And the fact that we have a lot of former players coaching in the VA ranks and basically no one is helping to send their players to VT right now. It's all very telling.
Not much you can do when people are convinced Fuente only "listened to Baylor's pitch" because it was "courteous." The gaslighting here was nuts.
So both of you know, for an absolute fact, all the motives behind him meeting with Baylor? "Obviously?" You have absolutely zero in the way of concrete evidence why he met with them. Maybe he did it because it was close to home for him and it just seemed like one of very few good opportunities for him. Maybe it was to pitch for more resources. Who knows? And gaslighting would be more along the lines of if he'd taken a couple days to think over the offer, maybe flown to Texas for a second interview, then turned them down. And THEN people defended him. Even so, Whit went on record saying Fuente told him about it before hand. He turned it down the next day.
Beyond that - coaches move around nowadays. If our standard becomes our coaches can't ever talk to other schools (Beamer and UNC cough, cough), our fans are in for a lot of disappointment over the next 10-15 years and beyond. At most other schools, that's probably at least 2 different head coaches.
I love that in the first part of your post you attack me for not having concrete evidence. Then the next part of your post you take the rumors you want to believe as 100% fact. I also don't think you know what gaslighting means.
I am not going down this road again. It's a waste of my time. You believe what you want.
I don't for a second believe them as 100% fact. I offered two very different but plausible reasons. So nobody should be able to say that his motives were obvious. Not even me.
With zero evidence as to his motives, I'd think believing any one of them as fact is ridiculous. People choose to believe whatever motive they want.
Gaslighting is intentionally trying to manipulate people into questioning their sanity. Without evidence, people weren't trying to manipulate anybody, they were just stating what they actually believed, so not gaslighting. I tried writing out an explanation of what I meant, but it was convoluted - I just meant those would be circumstances under which gaslighting was more likely to have occurred.
It doesn't matter. Everyone knows that it looks bad. There is not a positive way to spin it.
the basic fact is that Fuente didn't like Baylor's offer enough to leave. beyond that it's not worth rumormilling back and forth about. Fuente picked VT over Baylor.
again, the basic fact is that Fuente liked the situation at VT better than accepting whatever Baylor was offering.
it is also a fact that VT's staffing/recruiting resources are being enhanced this off-season, as are VT's student-athlete facilities & housing.
Fuente interviewed with a program that was 1-11 2 years ago coming off a major rape scandal and disgraced Art Briles and his staff. Why? Easier to recruit Texas? More money for assistants? a bigger player lounge? If he is going to channel his inner Buzz Williams, it would be cool if he took us to a football equivalent of a sweet 16 before bolting. If he thinks the VT job is "tough" and our fans are "tough" he is not a big time coach. Bottom line. If being the dominant program in his state and having to get past a murderers row of Duke, GT, UNC, Pitt etc in his division is too tough a job? He's not big time. Good OC? perhaps Big time P5 head coach? nope.
What IS the football equivalent of the Sweet 16? NY6 bowl? Conference championship game appearance?
Conference divisional title. Conference championship would be like the Elite 8, which then goes to Final Four (playoffs). Right?
Edit (see, not long after posting, ugh): If the conference division title is the equivalent, that's not shooting very high.
Winning the coastal. Winning a NY6 bowl game.
I know this was a talking point at the time, and something people said often about being fed up with how unfair the fans were being to him.
But damn, if there is any truth to this, he's not the right coach here. No coach should be scared of pressure. If you can't take the heat, you shouldn't be in the profession. Being accountable for your own performance should be something that makes you better. I swear, if one of my employees told me that they were looking elsewhere because they thought our customers were being too unfair by demanding a good product, I'd be looking to replace that person as soon as possible. I really hope this isn't true.
You would fire an employee that thought he might be able to move closer to his family, get a raise, and have more fertile talent pool to build a team around? Because that is really all it is about. The expectations are relatively the same everywhere in college football, the resources are not.
Literally not what I said.
My comment had nothing to do with any of this:
THE Right Coach may not be available at the time. THE Right coach, in order to accept the VT position, would essentially have to do what Fuente did with Baylor, but just accept the VT job. THE Right Coach is out there somewhere, but not on the VT sidelines at the current time........so we have Fuente.
I'd separate these two things. I agree that complaining that our fans are tough is just part of the profession. But VT has unique challenges. Doesn't mean they can't be overcome, but I have a feeling he didn't understand how underfunded our athletic department is, nor how challenging recruiting to VT could be.
The underfunded talking point is highly over hyped in my honest opinion. If Fu wants more money for recruiting, Whit will give it to him. VT football is our signature program. Buzz Williams wanted the largest staff in the ACC, Whit gave it to him.
In 2019, Fuente was the 31st highest paid coach in college football. Justin Hamilton is now highest paid assistant on staff making $600k - that would have made him 95th highest paid assistant in 2019.
Fuente wanted to bring Odom in as DC, but we couldn't afford it. It's rumored that he wanted to replace Cornelson as well, but we couldn't afford it.
You really think Whit is holding back any cash?
I don't belive a word of that regarding Odom or Corn. If that were the case, Fuente would be coaching at Baylor. All due respect.
That's fair; both were at most rumors - although 904 did say that he believed for a moment that Odom would be our new DC. Also, you're comment about Baylor assumes that Fuente was just using the interest for leverage - he may have wanted the job but didn't get an offer.
Anyways, ignoring the rumors and conjecture, It doesn't appear that our staff is being paid like a top 25 staff. I'm hoping to do a longer post about this in the upcoming week, but when it comes to staff salary, our peers are WVU, KSU, and UVA. Some schools who pay more than 5% better include Kentucky, Arizona State, UMD, Louisville, and Utah. Two school's we've outspent include GT and Arizona.
Now, there's 3 possible reasons why our football team doesn't have better funding:
My guess is #3. And if Fuente has a winning year, he'll get more funding, assuming a winning year brings in more revenue.
I honestly don't have any qualms with this - the problem I have is that everyone is convinced Fuente only listened to Baylor's offer because it was the nice thing to do when that is not the case. He was very interested in that job. We know this because of all of the smoke surrounding it, and also because other programs have been calling him for a few seasons now and he turned down all contact. Baylor was different. If Fuente "listened to their pitch" because it was the right thing to do, he wouldn't have turned down all other offers. He was seriously interested in another job (which I am 100% fine with!), but people on here don't want to believe that. They want to think it was him being a nice guy.
All of what smoke? The only smoke I saw came from us. There was talk of this being leaked. But if you went and looked beyond Fuente, it said other people Baylor had interviewed, and even that they were interested in Aranda before they interviewed him. It seemed like Baylor was doing zero to keep their search quiet. I'm not saying that he listened to the pitch because it was the nice thing to do. All I'm saying is we have nothing other than speculation about his real motives. It could have been for more money for the program or it could be that it's really close to his relatives and would have been a substantial pay increase for him, which just wasn't enough to pull him away. My ONLY point is that we do not know what his motives were. People act like they know, or it's obvious, but it's not. The only two things we do know are that he listened to the pitch and he turned them down. I had previously offered up that it was him being nice and listening to a pitch (like if he had a friend at Baylor). I only offered that up because people took the instant negative view, like Fuente had somehow planned to have Baylor come interview him at a really bad time, or he was gone and just going to leave all the new coaches he'd just hired. The only thing anybody can do is believe what they want to believe and that's all it probably ever will be, people's own beliefs as to why he did it.
Whit said there had been other offers that Fuente didn't even listen to. That means that Fuente told them about them previously (which seems like it flies in the face of all the people who think Fuente didn't tell Whit about Baylor ahead of time). We don't know who the other schools were that were interested in Fuente. That seems to imply that Fuente didn't spill then either. So why would he leak something now? Whit already knew other schools had been interested in Fuente, that's quite possibly enough to leverage for additional resources. This whole thing screams that Baylor "leaked" it, then rumors flew and we spun ourselves into a frenzy, all within a 24 hour period.
"the basic fact is that Fuente liked the situation at VT better than accepting whatever Baylor was offering."
The basic fact is that Fuente accepted an interview with Baylor. There is no concrete evidence that Baylor made him an actual offer after said interview. If Fuente was using the Baylor job to try to leverage donations from boosters and/or more money from the Athletic Department as some have suggested, then it is mighty suspicious than no potential terms of an offer, or even any real mention of dollar amounts, ever came to light. When people want leverage in this business, stuff like that often gets "leaked". It is just as likely that Baylor interviewed Fuente and decided to pass. Whether that is from expressed non-interest from Fuente or Baylor deciding to move on to someone else, we may never know.
Come on man. Seriously. Justin Fuente interviewed with and seriously considered taking the Baylor job. He wouldn't have interviewed in person if both parties weren't close to a deal. His agent could have handled everything else. You think he would have wanted to deal with what he KNEW would be a major fan reaction for an equivalent of a phone screen? nope. He thought Baylor was a better job- better league, closer to his home roots, better recruits within 300 miles, etc. On top of that, more money. It is what it is. Like I said, if he honestly thinks that VT football is a "tough" job, he is simply not a big time college head coach. And that's OK.
"Come on man. Seriously. Justin Fuente interviewed with and seriously considered taking the Baylor job."/em>
No shit. None of that proves that Baylor actually extended an offer. We only know that they interviewed Fuente.
"He wouldn't have interviewed in person if both parties weren't close to a deal."
Being "close to a deal" is a completely subjective phrase that means nothing. I have a hard time believing the two parties were "close to a deal" without having met.
It may have been Fuente's dream job, but that means nothing without Baylor concluding after said interview that Fuente was their guy and continuing their pursuit. The more likely scenario is that after the interview one or both parties decided they wanted to go in different directions.
Agents love leaking terms of deals to make themselves look good and since no terms or even ball-park dollar ranges ever got leaked, my gut says that Baylor decided that Fuente wasn't their guy.
And if this interview was taken by Fuente just to leverage more resources, surely his agent would have leaked some dollar amounts in order to gain that leverage.
To me, all signs post to Fuente wanting the Baylor job but not getting it. That is just me opinion. It is why he actually took the time to interview when other interview requests never got that far. I don't hold it against him. Everyone should have the opportunity to find what they perceive to be a better job.
I just think it is important to go on what we know for a fact. Fuente interviewed with Baylor. Everything after that is just speculation and should be treated as such.
You may be right. The only thing that doesn't add up for me is that Fuente appeared to be the first interview and they came to him to do it. I think he was their guy. But maybe his terms were too much for them to actually extend an offer. Or perhaps their terms weren't enough to get Fuente out of town. I honestly don't care though.
I posted this a lot when it happened. Fuente wasn't the only name that came out. They interviewed Billy Napier first. And that was made public. Link
This article states that multiple people called Baylor when they found out the job would be open to express interest. They bypassed those people and interviewed Napier, then decided Fuente was their leading candidate.
Link
So a school that had just gone 11-3 under Rhule with the resources they have decides they're interested in Fuente. The 2020 class had been signed. They'd seen his wins/losses for the past several years. But they were still interested. They interviewed Fuente BEFORE they interviewed Aranda, who had just come off winning a national championship. Yes, he didn't have head coaching experience, but seems like he is at least a good candidate for a HC job. So why in the world would Baylor be interested in Fuente, even to interview him in the first place, if he's as bad as everybody on here seems to think?
How about we see what happens this season? I thought the actual games are what mattered? If we win 9-10 games all will be fine including this class. If we go 500 or close I might agree with you.
One season is not a good indication of program health.
Not saying I agree with VTJ12 that 'something must be done,' but just answering your question in vacuum.
Staying within the confines of this vacuum, here:
Where would you rate a high school kids decision from May 6, 2020? Higher than, say the 2020 football season?
It's a shitty day to be a Hokie fan, sure.
If I hope for success on the football field next season, I could be disappointed; I could be happily surprised. It's a sport; we're drawn in because it's exciting and unpredictable.
And I'm not pissed that everybody's upset about DD walking away. Fuck it, so am I. There's not much other news in the world and this feels important and big.
If I hope to see a relatively stable 20 year trend (the average talent score of a program's football recruit) suddenly jump up, That has an extremely high chance of ending in disappointment.
Losing DD stings, but it's not a program changing event. The kid burnt himself out trying to push the needle on our recruiting history by himself. I'd like to hope we were doing our best to rein him in, but he was probably going to try anyways. He's gotta be frustrated. I can certainly see why he got fed up and walked away.
He really wanted to bring a ton of blue chips here with him, but he'll either have to settle for coming here with a typical VT recruiting class, or going to a place blue chips collect en masse instead. He's in a rough spot right now.
That needle is stronger than any recruit. It's stronger than any coach.
We'll pull in a class of *** recruits and likely a couple of ****, because that's exactly what we've done for about 20 years now.
I can't tell you how we'll perform on the field next year. That's what I'm excited to see. That's what Fuente has to manage to keep his job; what's in front of him and within his control.
TL;DR (this is not directed at you bar, but the gyst of my sentiment);
If we're upset today because we lost DD (and likely another commit or two), that's rational.
If we're upset today because we don't recruit like a blue-blood, we did a poor job of selecting a favorite team.
This x 1000. Well said Brockman.
So, I might be going too far off topic here, and I'm struggling to put my thoughts into words, but here I go anyways....
At the end of the day, I honestly believe Fuente is a great coach - he doesn't do stupid clock management things like James Franklin, he's football savvy, and he's shown that he's willing to try new things and make changes. But the on the field results aren't adding up.
This is what frustrates me - we're stuck in this purgatory where we don't have enough data points on Fuente. Each of the last 3 seasons have failed to meet expectations for a variety of reasons, and each of those reasons has been somewhat legitimate. What happens if we go 8-4 again this season, with the defense being mediocre? It's not Fuente's fault that a defense installing a new system missed out on spring practice due to COVID, and that resulted in a poor season - this would be another 'legitimate excuse' for under performing.
If you're a VT fan, you're likely in one of two camps: Either you believe we're at the bottom of a trough, and we're on the other side of a rebuild, or you believe that 6-8 regular season wins is what Virginia Tech is capable of for the foreseeable future.
I really want to believe that we're in the first camp. But I need something to prove to myself that we are in fact finishing up a rebuild, but I just don't see it. It feels like every since we missed on Devyn Ford, there hasn't been much on or off the field to be excited about. I was hoping that this recruiting class would at least be a sign, but I'm not optimistic.
He's not Mike London bad, but for Fuente's game management skills leave a lot to be desired.
I can't think of any times where he really blew it? Definitely times at the end of a half where I wish he would've gone for it instead packing it in, but I don't consider that poor game management. Cornelson trying to establish the run late in a game when we were down 2 TDs was infuriating too, but I'm not sure that's a clock management. Anything else I'm missing?
I thought he blew it in our two most recent games against UVA and UK.
Georgia Tech 2017 was also pretty bad.
I didn't hate the 3rd and 4th down play calls. I thought his reasoning was sound. Not like we had been running the ball particularly well that day.
That game was poorly managed from start to finish. 3rd and 4th and 1 was just the final straw. If other poor decisions had not been made throughout we could have been kicking a game winning field goal from there.
What did he do wrong against UK?
Fuente's time management when we get the ball 2-3 minutes left in the half is some FCS levels stuff that's for sure
Lol that dumb ass play call going long to Cam against GT to end the game.
The end of the Kentucky game was a total time management shit show.
AND the end of the 1st half too, IIRC. And let's not forget going conservative in the first half against Miami while DOMINATING them, then giving them the ball back, and letting them score and get back into the game because they did with their end-of-half-drill what we should have done.
I'd say 2017 "met" expectations, but I'd agree that the past two seasons have not.
The reality of our situation is there are certainly worse coaches out there than Fuente, and most of the time not many other good ones are readily available (we would likely have to buy out another successful coach should we decide to prematurely switch lanes. Expensive decision x2).
he is the coach we have. I don't think 2018-19 were "damaging" to the program, but it was certainly a whole lot of sputtering on the field (with long-awaited breath of fresh air towards the end of last season).
Whit made his buyout substantial, so we're kinda stuck with him whether we like it or not. Apart from a major breach of contract or misconduct, or something overwhelmingly damaging to the program, we're likely going to see at least the next couple of years of the Fuente era, results be damned.
Getting a new coach seems like an exciting and positive step in some people's minds.
Really, it's taking a step back as a program. The recruiting "bump" people believe is there is really insignificant to non-existent when you look at it on graphs. Basically, some of the former coaches recruits will stick around, and if the new coach is lucky he'll have a couple of scholarship positions to play with. There's no drop-off in talent, either, but some of the commits (as well as kids already on the roster) become square pegs in the new round hole team. It's the same talent level- the transition is just a less efficient period for the same kids.
Bob Stoops took an insanely talented roster and simply figured out how to organize the random-ass blue chips Jeff Blake bought all lying around everywhere. They won a Natty in that first season! Never again.
If the new system is easy to learn; the team can overcome the transition successfully. when we hired Loeffler we lost a season or two of anything resembling a competent offense (it's an effective but complex system).
Bottom line- Whit made a command decision with the buyout - fuck it, we're gonna ride this Fuente train out for a handful of seasons. Personally, I want to see this play out.
I don't know if he'll succeed. I feel like I'll get bombarded with "apologist" chants if I say I'm optimistic. Really, Memphis' turnaround was already in progress when Fuente was hired. The pivotal moment for Memphis was the day Tommy West was fired (2 coaches before Fuente). This speech boosted resources and interest in the program dramatically.
~5 minute video of Tommy West firing press conference
So some of that Memphis success was due to Fuente; some of it was fantastic timing on his part. Can't really say how much of each, but the turnaround was an still an impressive feat of coaching.
I know I shouldn't let all of the negative Nancies on here get to me, but a call to arms to fire Fuente every time a kitten swats a toilet paper roll now is unbearably obnoxious.
It's typically insane logic to start with. Firing Fuente at any particular "right now" would be a disaster (financially and schematically). And I'm not sure how making your program look like a dumpster fire with an sudden firing would "impress the recruits". (We don't have a Tennessee's worth of program clout to bank with).
My feelings on this are if somebody shows up and throws Fuente hissyfits, I'd be okay with it if you're a billionaire and you're ready to do something about it.
In the meantime, if you don't want Fuente as the coach, you ready need to be bitching at Whit anyway. His decision made it prohibitive to fire Fuente for a long while.
Fuck, some of us just want to see this out, too. Nobody's pulling any wool over my eyes. It's not ideal. But it's my team and I want to see them kick ass on the football field; whoever the hell is playing and whoever the hell we have coaching.
Again, not directed at you bar, just my counter-rant.
This is so spot on.
The number of people that don't understand that firing Fuente right now is another 3-year set back is alarming. Of course things haven't been ideal. Our "rebuild" hasn't followed the expected model, but we are finally primed for a good season this upcoming year, and I honestly think that success has potential to be sustained for the following 2-3 years. Patience is rewarded a lot more often in the sporting world than being reactive.
2020's on-field success has little impact when you factor in a really bad 2020 class and potentially also bad 2021 class. Why don't people realize that one good season on the field with two poor recruiting classes in the pipeline is not going to make much difference? We are going to be in the same situation as 2018 in 2022/2023. Yeah we may have a great team and record this upcoming year, but it won't stop the damage that's going to hurt us in future years. Recruiting is the core of the program.
Also don't understand what you mean by firing Fuente sets us back 3 years? So how does keeping him 3 more years with an eventually depleted roster and inevitably having to change coaches then help us in the long run? Then you're talking a potentially 6-7 year setback from where we are now.
Losing DD sucks, but it's May 7th and you're assuming this class is tanked... This class is going to be ranked somewhere between 20-30 like it is 90% of the time for VT.
The roster is set up nicely through 2022 (that terrible class will still only be r-sophs). A lot can change between now and then, good and bad, but assuming we have a good season in 2020 the smartest thing to do is let it play out.
So to summarize, we have no choice but to hope he can turn it around because the program is at its lowest point it's been since the 90s and we're afraid it might get worse?
this is what drives me freaking mad. Umm YES IT IS HIS FAULT. He is the head coach, FFS. He is the one that hired JHam, he is the one that recruited these players. EVERY team is dealing with COVID. There is so much teflon on Fuente its maddening. ALL of Beamer's players and coaches are gone. No more excuses. It's all his. Buck stops with him.
I'm not saying something must be done immediately, but I hope he's at least monitoring this and not burying his head in the sand.
Occasionally
Be
Closing
That's because the 'Cs' are directly influenced by the 'Ws'...we haven't been getting.
sigh
Happiness is a myth.
Oh god. This is going to be brutal to read about.
Heard the amount of turkey bacon present at team meals was a crucial factor in his decision. Will know more when the SI piece drops in a month.
At least he's got good battery life.
I mean, if you really think about it, we're probably going to be better off withou---
Does the guy throwing the shoes have any eligibility left? I mean we need a qb this cycle and he throws a mean shoe! /s
Dubya dodging those shoes will always crack my smile. That's lickety-split reflexes there.
He's my first pick in dodgeball
Matej Sis with new CB for DD Auburn. This won't end well guys, I've tried to stay positive but it's getting harder and harder to be a VT fan with no big money donor support, no recruiting ability at all, no consistency, frustrating is an understatement. Might just stay away from college football for a while, tired of revolving my life around a team and always being let down. Signing out guys
Well said
And the best assistant coach we ever had, and arguably a hall of famer, just retired. If Bud Foster couldn't "coach up" unheralded recruits, who can? We need to win games with either talent or scheme, and the defensive scheme that proved to be one of the best over 25 years, just left. Hard to be too optimistic about winning the ACC.
More like it's harder to have high expectations as a fan. My only expectation for the last few years has been that we will play football lol. I like football. If football happens I'll be happy. If we win game I'll be happier. If we lose games I'll just focus on other stuff in my life.
Apathy and low expectations turns the program into UVA Football from 2004-2019. That is the big suck. Fuck that. Raise the bar. Raise the recruiting expectations, stop the fucking excuses. "Facilities"- fuck that. We have the best indoor facility in America and a huge relatively new locker room for players. The most important "facility" is the most rocking stadium in the ACC when the team is competitive. Fuck that excuse and all of the others.. "we don't have a hudl subscription"- fuuuuucccckkk that. Seriously. Get some fucking players in here, or we are UVA football- with less money.
That is all true, but we have (essentially) no agency in whether or not that happens. So, it's not really rational to pin hopes or happiness on it. I want it to get better, but I have no personal control of that outcome.
So now we know who is going to stroke those big ass checks! Thanks dc for stepping up to the plate! /s
Nah I'm good . I watch football to have fun. I'm going to enjoy it regardless. I don't want it to become a job where I have to maintain a certain level of commitment or expectations to be a part of it. It's really just that as I get more and more removed from my undergrad years I care less about the things I can't control. The kids who have a maroon and orange jersey on come fall are the ones I'll root for. Until then, I don't care.
800% this.
At the end of the day, Tech football is something i choose to be a positive in my life. I love Tech and don't care if I'm rooting for a 1-11 team or a 11-1 team. Does losing suck? Of course. But making that trip back to my home away from home and seeing my people never will and I will always cheer for whoever decides to put on the maroon and orange and rep my school. To sit here and let the decision of a 17 year old shake the foundation of something we care so much about is worrisome. These kids futures are such an unknown. To get so upset about a kid that at best statistically has a 50/50 shot of turning into a good college player just isn't worth it. Whats worse, is the majority of the time, once he gets here and doesn't play right away, we'd tear him apart for being a bust or blame the coaches for not being able to develop. We just keep turning what should be a bright spot in our lives into a dark one. I just refuse to do it. Go Hokies!
Excellent point. We are creating misery for ourselves for no reason. I have recently gotten back to being a more dedicated fan of my high school team. The beauty of it is nobody has control over the talent. We just get to cheer as much as we can for a group of young men giving it all they got for the name on the front of the jersey. I wish we could get a little more of that at the college level.
Or we are the Hokies, back before Beamer hit his stride.
I like your approach. Of course we all want VT to be an elite program, but giving up on program loyalty would be nothing but anti loyal behavior. There's so much more to being a true fan of a program than enjoying domination. I've made many friends and some of my closest friends thanks to VT football. I've been to countless tailgates where I ate some amazing food, drank some great moonshine, and satisfied the necessity for fun social interaction that we're all very much deprived of these days. I can't picture any situation where I'd stop being a fan and supporting the team.
As a fan for now more than 50 years, I must agree. The one thing you can count on is that the Hokies are playing football. There is so much more to hope for, wish for, strive for, but in the end, really only one thing you can count on. They are either your team or they're not, your choice. 2-8-1 wasn't the most fun year, that's for sure, but I was still there for the home games and somehow found a way to enjoy going to a VT football game and cheering until I was hoarse. Yes, we'd all rather win than lose, and I always feel so bad for the kids who NEVER want to lose either, but they're my team, do or die.
Thing is, if you live long enough, we'll win and we'll lose, we'll change coaches and conference affiliations and ADs, there'll be highs and lows, ups and downs. That's Hokie football.
Honestly, if this class misses the mark and is a stinker like the one we saw last year, the apathy we saw toward the end of the Beamer era is going to look like a rabid following compared to what VT football and Lane Stadium will look like on gamedays.
Back to back recruiting classes like last year would set us up to have a legit terrible football team in the near future. We just won't have the horses to compete in a Power 5 conference.
Apparently that is already true... We barely compete in the Coastal Division, which isn't exactly P-5 football...
Oh I'm talking UNC in the John Bunting era levels of suck where you won 2-3 games a year and it took 15 years to recover, and even then many of the fans have permanently checked out.
You're right, we're struggling already in a bad Coastal. Unfortunately, our recruiting is going backwards while the recruiting efforts of our peers is improving. A very, very foreboding situation is unfolding and it doesn't look good for us.
Correct.. and "you can't hold 2016 against Fuente"- transition class. Well that class is now seniors or RS juniors and need to actually lead the team on the field. "2020 doesn't count" because the class is small because we changed coaches (like no other program ever does) and etc, etc. So if 2021 is an excuse class- because??? That makes 3 of Fuente's 5 classes "bad"- for whatever reason. You can't win that way in the ACC.
please stop inventing arguments about the 2020 class in this thread. nobody here is happy about it. it's true that it was a small class, and it's true that it wasn't good enough on paper. nobody here in this thread is saying Fuente gets a pass, but you keep hammering that home comment after comment.
I'll stop. The arguments are not invented in the slightest though.
thank you for stopping
I get it.
This is why a few years ago I made the decision to primarily focus on hoops recruiting and not football recruiting. It's been less painful and with a much better payoff. With football I'll still cheer on the guys we have and the team on the field, but I dont keep up when football recruits are committing or narrowing it down to a top 7 or whatever.
Money isn't the issue. Prestige, pride/dominance within the state, location and most importantly competency of our staff are the big things actually holding us back
I am not surprised. At all.
I'd be interested to see what percentage of kids who commit before their junior season is even over actually sign with the team they committed to
When the sec calls, cruits listen. Clemson, Ohio State and the sec pick who they want, and the rest can go where they may land
Welp.
Don't worry Brad, you can still run jet sweeps without DD
/s
I think the worst part about this isn't that we lost a great quarterback but that it completely ruins any recruiting momentum we had going. A couple weeks ago, it looked like we were getting Phillip Riley, and DD still looked firmly committed. Then we lose Riley and DD in a 24-hour span.
I am confident Fuente can put out a sufficient product at quarterback whether that's DD or not. We need other guys, though, and losing DD is going to hurt that a lot.
Wouldn't be surprised to see a announcement from Latrell soon.
Latrell also retweeted that Bitter tweet re: the fallout.
But right after, he retweeted this
so Β―\_(γ)_/Β―
God damn Max, that's a cringe-ass tweet.
EDIT: We have a new leader for most cringe-worthy tweets:
Sounds like Brown wants him to stick with VT
or could be just fucking with us, who knows anymore
Curious has Va. Tech recently had a recruit decommit and then later sign?
yes
Tyjuan Garbutt did and so did Dejuan Ellis (fwiw)
Both of those ended well.
Ellis transferred and Garbutt is either starting or in the two-deep at DE and we don't know how it ends
You're absolutely right. I was thinking about Nathan Proctor.
Being a Hokie fan is hard work.
'Being a Hokie fan is hard work.'
With 30 years of practice under my belt, I can verify the accuracy of this statement.
Tyjuan Garbutt is the most recent I can recall.
Neville is gone too Ou fan just told him to look at other schools before he's stuck at VT with a .500 record and Neville liked it. Feel like the writing is on the wall guys
he's liking and retweeting stuff from both angles it appears
for example, he liked this one:
pls dont do this
Big shoutout to every know it all who said you were sure he would stick to his commitment..
Big come up for people who spend more time dumping on the program when things go wrong than celebrating when things go right.
Hey guys at least we helped them get their twitter followers up before they bolt to a different school though
I'm not trying to be a jerk but I can tell how this is affecting you and it's probably better for your mental health to stick to the "signing off" thing.
Yeah it's definitely hitting me pretty hard that a team my family has given up vacations our entire life to go see play EVERY season is becoming a joke. I can't flip the love VT switch off like some people can, I just can't, I get way too invested in college football and as much as I may feel like giving up on our program I can't because that's who I love. Sports are a weird thing man, can bring you so much joy and so much pain
Impossible to like Fuente and his staff. Its a damn clown show in Blacksburg. Someone needs to figure this out asap.
got any suggestions?
Be negative about everything on forums, that'll show em!
If we went 5-7 without any bullshit excuses, I'd be fine with it. But the Fuente era thus far is nothing BUT excuses. It's tiring. Fuente took over an ACC program that had a hall of fame coach, sold out stadium, great passionate fans, and some damn good players- NFL draft picks on the roster. We pretend he took over Nothwestern in the early 90's or Rutgers now. Schiano? HE has a dumpster fire to rebuild. Fuente at VT in 2016? lol not so much. But all we hear are excuses. ECU cancelled, so we got fucked by a 3-9 ODU team. The 2020 class is last in the ACC because..ummm.. Beamer didn't have 26 Freshman when Fuente took the job. LOL. We can't recruit virginia- because of 1,000 excuses and "damaged" relationships from 6 fucking years ago. It's tiring. Mook left so it fucked the entire defense. Tremaine went pro early, so it fucked the entire defense. This year the running game will suck because we lost Kill because Whit wouldn't pay him what Bama assistants make. Fuck all of that. If we suck, just say we suck and fix it.
ADDING /S WAS APPLICABLE
Gotta love the ever present exaggeration toward negativity too. Fuente has never gone 5-7 and of course dc knows that but he'll say 5-7 anyway just to make it worse and if you call him on it he'll respond, "oh sorry we only went 6-7 so excuse me for thinking that's no good enough."
Please re-read the first word of my post. Thanks
"Coach Fuente".. asked by someone other than Mike Burnop... " Kentucky was able to run the QB all over your defense today, including that last drive". Yeah tough deal, Farley was out. - yep Fuck that.. tired of it.
You continue to confuse message board users rationalizing losses with what actually comes out of the program all the time but keep going off.
Oh, right. The "program" has been very forthcoming with the media, and it's always no excuses coming out of Merryman.
the program has actually had a a pretty strong online presence in the last three months, fwiw. whether you think it's too little too late, or a sign of things changing probably says a lot about what you want to believe about the program
The new support staff has definitely improved Virginia Tech's presence online. Some of the new coaches have taken to Twitter too.
However, the athletic department still struggles to understand the importance of leveraging the media covering the program to promote the program.
Find me an example of Merryman coming out with some asinine excuse like "Mook left so it fucked the entire defense"
You won't because it didn't happen, but you're happy to say that it was an excuse offered by the program because you read it on a message board and you disagreed with it.
Fantastic. No excuses. You and i are on the same page.
Yes, the football program isn't making excuses like "Mook left so it fucked the defense". We are in fact on the same page.
I'll push back on the excuses things - I think Fuente actually give's pretty honest responses. They tend to be long winded, which is why twitter takes the hot sound bites, but I'm not sure what you want to hear?
Caleb Farley goes down, and all of a sudden we have a significantly less experienced player taking his spot, and that limits what playcalls can be made - what else do you want to hear?
This seems like a good time to remind everyone:
DON'T TWEET AT 'CRUITS!
Mods can we pin this.
Really gonna loose it when we trot Burmeister out as the starter this year aren't we?
this ends my year-long foray into following recruiting. If this kid, who at every turn seemed about as Pro-VT as any recruit I've ever heard of, decommits after all the recruiting he did for us then there's just zero point in following this dirty game they call recruiting anymore. Like my wife told me last night, "i don't worry about em until they put the jersey on." Perspective.
New job, working from home, no sports, baby to help care for.
All that resulted in less time on TKP. Saw this news on Reddit and took a peak here. I forgot how much dcwilson insists on dominating the negative news threads. Bad for my mental health. See you guys when sports are back.
This guy gets it! I would think that site (and other related ones, not just calling out TKP) is beginning to hurt more than just your mental health. Nothing good comes out of checking a site that is most popular when there is BAD news.
Some of y'all should just listen to yourselves. One 17-year old kid from Texas decided that he is having second thoughts about playing football at Virginia Tech, and I wake up and see 60+ comments of, "OH MY GOSH VT IS JUST SO INCONSISTENT, ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO LIKE FUENTE AND HIS STAFF, THIS PROGRAM IS A FREAKING CLOWN SHOW." Do you guys know how dumb that sounds? Virginia Tech is a program in the middle of nowhere Southwest-Virginia, and is one of the winningest college football programs over the last 25+ years. And at the end of the day I love CFB just as much as anybody, but there is SO much more to life than watching 19 year olds running around a field of grass.
To everyone who puts in work to run this site, so many of us really appreciate it, but the clowns are here on TKP, not in our football program. I'm signing off for a while too.
it's easy to channel frustrations from many areas of life into whatever happens to be in front of us at the moment, and this timing is pretty poor in that sense. Sure would have been nice to have picked up two commitments in the last week instead of seeing this happen. So instead of seeing good news, it's just more bad news. And instead of being a welcome distraction, it's something else on top of everything else.
It's not just one kid, it's been a trend over the past couple years. There's reasonable cause for criticism.
Are we? I know we were 10 years ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if the last decade has dropped us from one of the top 10 winningest programs to outside the top 20/25.
You can appreciate the work people do on TKP and still be very critical of the current staff. Not sure why you expect/hope to see only sunshine and rainbows here...
When diminishing athletic department revenue means they won't be able to afford even your reduced buyout
via GIPHY
Baylor pls.
Man, that seems like forever ago
When the pandemic means more teams are likely to keep their coaches so you're stuck somewhere you don't want to be:
This one is really tough.
I can't recall a commit being as sold out on the Hokies as DD was. How do you go from tweeting at guys to stop trying to gain clout off Virginia Tech if they weren't really going there, to announcing you're decommitting via the Notes app screenshot with a message that would've fit in a regular tweet?
Either our staff shit the bed, or Auburn's bag man decided to brave the 'Rona and take a nice south Texas vacation.
SEC doesn't even need a bag man anymore. Come to our school and you'll get a $100k endorsement deal at the local car dealership.
You don't think the SEC schools are still gonna toss cash at recruits and their families?
"We know you won't make shit off an endorsement deal until you come to campus. Here's $50K to tide you and your family over until you make it to the Plains."
That's true and I expect bag men will be closely intertwined with the people paying for endorsements. To your original point, I don't think COVID-19 is stopping any SEC bag man, though I have no reason to believe that's what's going on in this situation.
The 'braving the 'rona" thing was a joke, but the bag man thing wasn't. If coaches can't be in contact with these kids during this dead period, you best believe someone is still on the ground doing those schools' bidding. And the guy who is picking up that slack comes bearing gifts. Whether that guy is in contact with the coaching staff, I'll leave to your imagination.
Great points. DD sounds like a smart kid, why would he use the notes app screenshot route? A bit cliche. A bit too on the nose. Perhaps its a fake, a ruse, fake news, a contrivance meant to undermine our program. Perhaps DD has been locked out of his own twitter by the new SEC counter-intelligence department, unable to rebuttal and clear things up. Yeah, thats whats happening, everything is fine.
I just meant the message was short enough to be tweeted normally. He didn't give us a lot of insight, didn't thank the coaches, and didn't say anything positive about the program other than "no love lost" and that he'll still be taking his OV. It's just strange when you look at it in the context of how sold out he was on coming to Virginia Tech. Guy was positive and vocal and now we get 3 lines with a "respect my decision" sign off?
100% agree. I should have added /s, just meant to be funny and conceive of an elaborate scenario whereby we could pretend everything was OK
The young man needs to go where he feels is best for him. That being said f*#k the SEC!
:(
This is a big blow the fallout from other players who are part of the tx2vt movement could make fuente rethink what he needs to do but it may be to late. This guy and the other Texas players were a big part of the good vibe on 2021 but like normal it's fading and now looks like another meh year.
Does anyone else read DC's posts on here in a Charlie Day voice? That's what I picture when bad news comes up and he ramps up his posts accordingly.
So, we're just gonna let Marandora off the hook for this? /S
He's been heavily recruiting for us for a long ass time. Not only do we lose him, we'll lose everyone he convinced to join him along with the people he had considering us. He's single handily crushed this class. There are big consequences that come with being important people and being a class defining recruit at the most important position doesn't get more important. I don't see him recommitting. Even if he decided to come back, everything he was working to build has vanished. He gone.
moved
No hes now an insider and replaced BAG /s
Kid likes a school, makes up mind to commit. Actively recruits others, pitching them the future. New kids commit, because they buy what he is selling. The original kid, the foundation of the house he was building, leaves but everyone else stays?
What kind of dense do you have to be to think it takes a prophet to see that?
I was trying to reply to the comment above but it somehow kept going to your comment
My bad, I'm sorry for the retort :'(
I'll fall on the sword for this one
The last time I remember feeling this way was when Garbutt de-committed. In 2016, I posted this. I think the same sentiment can be applied for Davis, but there are more factors that we cannot control. For example, social media has exploded even more since 2016 and we are now facing a pandemic. Maybe he doesn't want to be that far from home or maybe he's just a kid who changed his mind. Either way, we can't get this worked up over every young kid that doesn't pick VT. If there's one thing I've learned over the last two months its that sports are really important to me, but they are not and should not be my whole world. Enjoy my two cents or not, I'm just trying to put things into perspective. Go HOKIES!
Original Post:
Social Media has exploded for all schools. All schools are facing a pandemic.
Yes, social media has exploded for all schools, but unless you're Davis himself, you don't fully understand the impact it's having on him and other kids.
Yes, all schools are facing a pandemic, but that is going to change things for recruits. Maybe VA kids will stay home, maybe they'll want to be farther away. I don't know, but I do think the pandemic will have both positive and negative affects on recruiting for all schools.
Edit: Overall point - a kid changed his mind and that's okay regardless of the circumstances that we'll never be able to understand. There are more important things in life.
Lol ok
what does this add to the discussion?
The full sentence was "Maybe VA kids will stay home, maybe they'll want to be farther away" in the context of how the pandemic could change things.
So are gifs banned?
are you?
I'm asking a serious question: Are you threatening to selectively enforce a rule based on whether you agree with the post?
who threatened anyone with anything? You're not banned and neither are gifs, last I checked.
All I asked was what that added to the discussion. You took half a sentence from a day old comment and went out of your way to hit it with dismissive sarcasm as if the six words you selected comprised the entirety of the post.
Looks like we got a new target
Probably put this recruit at the top of our board if I was in the recruiting room.
He was going to run the hell out of the jet sweep too.
/Ducks
Turns out a 17-year-old kid is more mature than some Hokies on twitter
Well, I hope he is right!
So do I...but as a Liverpool and England fan, it's the hope that kills you
Best case scenario seems to be 10+ wins with the very good 2020 team coming back and in December TCU hires Fuente to replace a retiring Gary Patterson. No buyout, no drama.
Or we wait for the dismal 2020 and soon to be 2021 recruiting classes to cycle through and get him fired with the huge buyout.
Either way, this iteration of VT football is over. The only thing worth discussing, to me, is the timing.
Or a G5 school with killer "facilities" calls.
If we win 10 games this year then you will be crying because he left
I won't, primarily because I've spent more than 5 minutes following this sport.
What's the most likely outcome when two years in a row of 50th or worse ranked recruiting classes have to fill up the starting lineup? The effects of Fuente's (hopefully) last two years here won't actually be felt immediately.
If we suddenly start recruiting better...great. Play the young kids early. On the other hand....a bunch of true freshman and redshirts starting before they were ready is a good chunk of how ODU 2018 happened, wasn't it? Which reminds me. This coach lost to Old Dominion.
If we win 10 games this year I will be trying my best to enjoy it. Because it's not going to last.
Beamer lost to JMU. 6 years in (granted the first few he was dealing with sanctions due to his predecessor's recruiting violations) he went 2-8-1. Everybody is so quick to want to get rid of a coach and completely ignoring the possibility of the coach being able to build something long term, or worse, getting a new coach they think can't be worse.
This is not an argument to keep Fuente specifically, but who do you think we'd be able to hire for the money we have (even without a buyout)? Everybody on here wants the wins of a Nick Saban or Dabo Swinney, but thinks the pennies on the dollar we could offer someone with those chops would actually land us that kind of coach. So we'd have to go for a young up-and-comer (like what we got) or, what? a disgraced coach that wants to get back in, an older coach at the end of his career? We seem to have deluded ourselves into thinking we can go out and hire whoever and be in the playoffs two years later. The more I'm writing, the more I'm convinced that whoever we get will probably be someone that is more than likely going to have to build something over a longer period of time.
We gotta get REAL honest with ourselves. We weren't winning ACCCGs when Beamer left. Bud is awesome, and I loved watching games where we'd held teams to what, 10 rushing yards in the first half, but mobile quarterbacks were his Kryptonite. And if we lost every game against a mobile QB, the future probably wasn't filled with Nattys anyway. Our D-line hadn't been dominant the way it used to be for I don't remember how long, and we haven't been producing the type of D-linemen the NFL looks for much. Our program was in need of a rebuild in a big, bad way if we want to get to winning the ACCCG again and putting ourselves in the running for the playoffs.
I'm not jumping off the Fuente wagon just yet. It's been really tough at times, but seeing some of the wins we have convinces me he is able to do it. Some of the losses have been REALLY tough. But again, we had to rebuild. We haven't had a new coach in over 30 years, so no Tech fans know what a rebuild looks like. Go look at the win record of a tier 2 P5 team the first couple years after a new coach. There are a LOT of 2-8, 3-7 type season in there. Some of you may be saying we're not tier 2 - I'd put the top tier ACC as Clemson, FSU, and Miami. Yeah, Miami hasn't done much recently, but it's Miami, 5 stars will go there because of the beach and they have national championships. We may have won a bunch of conference titles, but we have no Nattys.
These recruiting misses are incredibly frustrating, especially DD decommitting. But we also have no idea what Fuente can still put together. Tapp and Teerlinck is still a great combo for defensive players who want to go to the NFL, regardless of QB situation. Smith might be able to pull in Harvey. I don't know. Like I said, it's frustrating, but it still feels like it's too early to throw in the towel just yet.
Why are people following recruits on twitter much less tweeting at them? I mean, someone please explain this to me. At this point, they're just normal kids! They're not celebrities, comedians, or even influencers (who, btw are cancers on our society). Just kids deciding what college to attend for free.
I mean, I want great players to attend, I just don't see a reason why I would EVER follow them on twitter, much less before they're hokies.
In short:
Its so bad people are even following people who are running through NCAA 14 simulations and tweeting out offers they get in that....
I wish I was kidding
ok boomer
woah welcome back dude. good to see ya around
But if we don't, how are they going to get to 10k followers? /s
Because, apparently "twitter love/follows" has a big influence on a recruits decision. So "fans" are encouraged to follow these kids.
Encouraged by who?
By the kids themselves. They're always asking for more followers
Oh, well by all means, we should follow them and tweet at them to make them feel good.
Moving the goalposts. Point is a strong online presence helps recruiting as cringe as it can be
No...it does not. Online presences from the school or the staff maybe. Fans liking or RTing a tweet. Nothing good comes from fans tweeting @ croots.
You want it to be one way, but it's the other way
Being a dick and negative recruiting by sending recruits screen grabs of other
canvasesfanbases is surprisingly effective. Ive seen it ruin a lot of opportunities, and it seems to happen against us frequentlyApparently, DD was a big fan of Van Gogh and VT fans wouldn't stop sending him Rembrandts./s
Oops
as someone living far from home and family during the pandemic (family east coast and Im in houston) I can definitely understand reevaluating whether being far from home is the right thing. i have a great job here, but it still hurts to miss out on family stuff back home (and the last couple months have really emphasized that)
Wait, you're in Houston? What are you doing go find Dee and get him back on board!
s/
if only I had influence like that.... the closest thing is the operators at the plant who are plugged into local HS football - they were all talking about him after he committed to VT. One of them has a kid who is a 3star RB.....
This is why I don't bother getting invested in recruiting unless a kid gives a commit during his senior year. And even then, with the way recruiting as evolved over the last decade, I don't get too worked up about it until the recruiting day officially closes.
I had said that this would be my last straw. I'm officially done with this staff. Where do I donate to a fire Fuente fund? We need to start an investment fund to grow when the market rebounds and have the ability to pay the buyout in 2021.
I still like Fuente but I have been trying to fight off the thought that VT is a mid tier football program. We have no chance of competing with the big boys and it hurts. I hate it.
VT is mid tier now. No two ways around it. Apparently we don't have the money to compete anymore. That's the bottom line. That's why Baylor thought they could poach our coach 2 years after they were 1-11. Baylor. Not Texas or Oklahoma. It will take a perfect storm of scheme and the right players in the right spots one year to win the ACC moving forward. IIWII. The sooner we accept that fact, the sooner we don't lose our shit when Duke kicks the shit out of us in Lane.
By win the ACC do you mean the Coastal or actually winning an ACCCG?
I didn't lose my shit over the Duke game which upon reflection, sucked. That is where my expectations have fallen to.
The whole ACC. Something we did 4 times in 6 years when we first joined the league. Now we settle for beating UVA and hopefully winning a down coastal every so often. Again, apparently due to money, this is who we are. It's not a blip or anomaly. Money is holding us - and will hold us- where we are. Bottom line.
When you look at the whole picture and history of VT football, the anomaly is the years you think should be the norm. I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but in the grand scheme of things since the playoffs have started college football has changed. The haves are greatly outnumbered by the havenots. It's unfortunate that the prime years that could've propelled VT into the haves happened prior to the 4 team playoff system.
That stretch also had Clemson and FSU messing around with the tail end of the Bowden administration and the rest of the ACC was in shambles. Really missed a chance to stake a permanent claim to blue blood status. A few breaks here or there and it's a total game changer.
Like allegedly not accepting an offer that may or may not have been made
It was made. That will go down as the dumbest move in VT school history. If we were in the SEC right now I have to believe our recruiting would be far better from money and competition alone.
This is grossly exaggerated. Plus at the level these decisions are made, there's a hell of a lot more to it than TV contracts. But I suppose Maryland is having loads of fun in the BIG 10 with all of their money getting dump trucked in every sport.
While the Twerps football team might be getting rolled....
Women's basketball was top 5 when the season was halted.
Men's basketball was top 12 when the season ended.
Men's Soccer team is arguably the top program in the country...and at a minimum top 3 currently.
Men's Lacrosse is typically top 10.
Women's Lacrosse is top 5.
Thats all fair. Their soccer programs and lacrosse programs have all been top notch for awhile. I don't know why I thought the Men's basketball program had struggled more than it actually has the last few years, maybe it's the constant complaining I hear about Turgeon. Though I will follow this up by saying that their AD essentially had to do it, Debbie Yow and then Kevin Anderson had come close to bankrupting their AD and I think they were on the verge of cutting a ton of sports.
Yeah, they've done all of this despite the AD's. They have been trash. And terrible at managing a dollar.
I'm envious of most olympic sports programs, since VT has never really won anything significant in any of them. Maryland and UVA, especially. They have over 50 nattys combined, and VT can't stumble upon one in any sport. It sucks. I get Maryland is a Lacrosse hotbed and located 8 miles from the DC border, but come on.
2019 NCAA Champion - Wrestling 165 lbs
I think he was referring to team sports
Yes- 150 years of competition, zero team titles. one of the only "major" conference schools never to win one.
Unpopular opinion: It was definitely the right move at the time
One argument I remember hearing at the time: VT collaborates with a lot of other ACC schools for research purposes. Those schools could/would have chosen to no longer worked with us in retaliation (for lack of a better term) for us leaving the conference. I'm no expert in intercollegiate politics, but if this is true, the university as a whole would have lost a lot more money than the $50m/year increase that the athletic dept missed out on.
Academically, the ACC is definitely full of peer institutions. The SEC, apart from Vandy, is not. Also, as a pretty big CBB fan, I SO much rather would be in the ACC and get to see my team play against Duke, UNC, now Louisville, instead of Mississippi St., LSU, etc.
Let's be fair, I don't think any of those four teams would beat out Clemson now. We have to actually improve over what we were to get to where we want now.
Well... Yeah
Our high mark as a program was 1999, but that run from 2004-2010 where we basically dominated the ACC kind of existed because the ACC didn't have a true Alpha Dog. We essentially became one by default, but during that run we didn't really have any major statement wins, and every time we matched up against an Alpha from another conference, we lost. We needed to take that next step to being an Alpha, and we never did, with our administration openly settling for being the best program in the Coastal and winning 10 games a year not wanting to do what was necessary to continue that going forward. And that's why we fell so far back as quick as we did when Clemson and FSU stepped up around 2011, and why we've not really made any legitimate strides in improving our situation since.
That's why I was hoping Fuente would take a team that was losing to GT and BC and actually elevate it. Nevermind beating Clemson. I was hoping that he could take what VT was- great fans, competitive in the coastal even with "down" years, great defense and actually elevate it. In 5 years that has gone from not only not elevating anything, but become the status quo and "welp, money and we will never beat Clemson". That's where we are.
This. We are a relatively young program, and we need to grow up out of the teenage years into mature adults. (It's the best analogy I could think of).
I watched a Florida recruiting video recently. They got tape going back into the 50s and 60s. We got 1995 and younger. That's a big swing. On top of that, we dropped big between 2012-2015. 2018 was our first losing season in decades. We have a lot of growth to do to get to where we want to be.
this is my real beef with Fuente and his staff. I expected him to come in and build something. It hasn't looked like it yet. Maybe we're all impatient and he's still in the "tear it down" phase but we were all fed the line that Beamer built a great foundation for Fuente to build upon and the implication there is that the building would be pretty much immediate because there was no "tearing down" that need to take place. So we were lied to about something. Either the foundation wasn't sound enough to build upon or the new guy doesn't have what it takes to build up from what was there.
Either way, I think VT is worse off than we were in 2016. Recruiting continues to be a point of contention and there doesn't appear to be any real development of the talent that we do have. Fuente's offense looked really promising in year one when he had a great JUCO transfer at QB and polished carry-overs from the Beamer years everywhere else. But since then the offense has been stuck in mud and the defense has been under-resourced because apparently we need to have 16 WRs to run all the jet sweeps. Despite being adamantly focused on "fixing" the running game our offense hasn't demonstrated that they can move the ball on the ground with any consistency. Nor has the team shown any tangible progress to that end in over the four seasons Fuente has been in charge. That's a heck of an indictment on it's own.
Excuse me for being pessimistic about where this program is headed. But we have four years of evidence that suggests one of two things. 1) The foundation Fuente was supposed to be building on wasn't sound enough and has to be torn down and rebuilt or 2) He's not capable of building upon the foundation Beamer left him and his missteps are doing nothing but eroding whatever might be left of the foundation we had four years ago. Neither case is good news. Best case scenario, IMO, is that we were lied to about the foundation he had to build upon and he's been tearing it down for the last few years and will build it up again in the coming years. But I'm skeptical that is the case, sadly.
Can we move on from him at this stage? Probably not. I think we're stuck with him for at least another three years. Perhaps longer, depending on how this COVID crisis impacts VT's bottom line. Let's hope that the best of Fuente is yet to come. Let us hope that he is, in fact, building something great in Blacksburg. Rome wasn't built in a day, after all. But if it doesn't work out, we'll be seven or eight years into an experiment that has gone terribly, terribly wrong. The potential negative impacts of that terrify me. There is a good reason college football has such a "what have you don't for me lately" over-reactive, itchy trigger-finger mentality. Any steps in the wrong direction spell severe consequences. VT is not in a position to be taking missteps. We're not Tennessee. Despite being terrible for decades they still recruit with the best of them. They hire and fire coaches just as quickly as anyone but they're still in position to find lightning in a bottle. VT doesn't have that luxury. So here's to hoping Fuente is smarter than all of us. Here's to hoping he's truly building something great.
I remember that Whit had said during this process that improvement in recruiting would be the top priority of the new staff once the hire was made. To see little to no improvement in that phase 4 years later is.... frustruating
via GIPHY
Not a good look. I don't really buy the argument that Fuente is excused for being under-resourced. I'm sure that Whit laid out for him what he would have to work with and what the expectation was. If VT is serious about improving recruiting then Whit would funnel resources in that direction. I imagine Fuente has everything he was promised and he agreed to the task of improving recruiting based on what was available to him. Falling short is on him.
this version of upset dcwilson is my favorite version of upset dcwilson
I sincerely don't think it's money. If the program inherited a billion dollars today, what would it change? What can't it change?
additional support staff, staff dedicated to recruiting and improving recruiting relationships, new facilities, opportunities for better uniforms, better transportation for recruiting, an increased overall budget for more room to operate. just to name a few
So if we had all of those things, are we confident we would become an elite program?
Here are the top 15 schools in Athletic Department Revenue (from usatoday.com) https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/
Lets see if these schools sound familar.
Here is us:
39. Virginia Tech
The difference between us and Texas in revenue is ~$110 million.
I'll grant you it isn't 1 to 1 recruiting to revenue, but yeah. If we suddenly had all those things due to a billion dollar donation, I am very confident we would become an elite program.
The only way I make a 7 figure donation let alone a 10 figure donation would be if I won the lottery...
Also worth noting that only public schools publish this information. Notre Dame, USC, and others aren't included on that list.
But Clemson is 20th.....Roughly 20mil separating us from 2nd in the Coastal and a Natty.....lol
Everybody has been a mid tier football program since 2007/2008. The same folks are at the top.
Delusions of grandeur are why so many people think we will get anywhere close to 99.
Look at recruiting. Look at $$. Look at who plays in the playoffs/championship games.
Well all of those "I am ready to get hurt again" GIFers should be rolling around in this like a pig in... you know.
Let's hope the staff can get him back
So many more Belk Bowls to look forward to π₯π₯π₯*
I really fear that if we go a while without an ACC title appearance or being ranked, we might lose that atmosphere that sets us apart from so many schools. If we don't turn the corner to winning the coastal on a semi-regular basis, the enthusiasm from the fanbase (esp. students who have only seen a crappy team) might fade away.
*(technically not the Belk Bowl since there will be a new sponsor)
I'd argue that we've already lost it.
Welp...there went that "transformational class" There are exceptions but it is distinctly rare for decommits to return.
I'd estimate it's 50/50 at this point if the OV happens or there is a commitment announcement on Twitter in a week or two once the dust settles.
Agree that I am done with the "excuse Rolodex" for this Staff. DD was the obvious centerpiece for this class...inexcusable to have him leave. Vice and Beau Davidson are the only ones making anything happen. Start producing or start packing.
And we apparently lost our best recruit to a HC who is on the hotseat every other year and an OC whose claim to fame is being OC at a school that has had progressively better offenses since he left. He then somehow turned a losing record at a mid-major into an SEC job which he was canned from in less than 2 years.
Honestly, I was concerned with a late offer from Oklahoma or UT for DD. At least that would have made sense...it's pretty damn hard to argue against the success of Lincoln Riley, but losing him to Auburn is pretty damn difficult to accept.
I can't believe you feel losing a top recruit to Auburn is hard to accept.
They are a tier II SEC team and they have a recent Natty plus Heishman trophies. VT is nowhere close to them.
This is a self-defeating attitude.
"VT just can't compete with SEC teams for recruits"
You said it best...Auburn is a Tier-2 SEC team with a retread as an O.C. If we can't start winning battles against these types of teams, we will never compete for anything meaningful.
The 1999 Virginia Tech Hokies have entered the chat.
You're conflating success on the football field (which is widely variable) with success in recruiting (relatively constant).
You're also calling a team who won a National championship within the past 10 years a Tier-2 team.
There's a difference between a self-defeating attitude and a realistic one.
Saying we will always suck at football because we can't attract top-tier talent is definitely in the former category.
What did anything I typed have to do with a 99 team?
The simple fact is, Auburn is a middle-of-the-pack SEC team. They've only had one top 10 finish since 2013. Mahlzan been near- firing at least twice.
Their Natty was 10 years ago, not last week.
While they certainly have more recent success than VT, its not overwhelming.
Again, at some point, we have to stop resorting to the convenient excuses that make us feel better and be honest about the situation. DD was/maybe is a perfect fit for what our Offense wants to do. Losing him isn't okay.
More talent wins more games. The near-monopoly in the CFB Playoff over the past 5 years supports that. VT needs more talent to compete at a higher level. Period.
Saying, well we never should have expected to keep Davis because they had Cam Newton 10 years ago with a different HC and when Chad Morris was still at Clemson is a cheap and pointless excuse.
This is harsh on Auburn. I don't like them at all, but they play in the toughest division in college football and their two biggest rivals are Alabama and Georgia who is a locked crossover. They have one of the toughest schedules in the country guaranteed almost every season AND OOC they've been playing Clemson home and home, Washington, and Oregon.
They don't always have a great W/L record but in context it's not usually unimpressive. Not to mention Malzahn has held his own against Saban, and even won the division three times during his reign atop College Football.
They are not a middle of the pack SEC team.
But for me that isn't an excuse for our recruiting failure.
Someone noted that AU has Bo Nix, who could be there for at least 2 more years. So if that is where Dee is going, he won't see immediate playing time and could have less time to play if Bo stays longer.
Granted, right now, we seem to have a decent cupboard, and Dee could be waiting on Hooker, QP, or both, but seems like he had a faster route to playing at VT.
Calling auburn a middle of the pack sec team may make us feel better, but auburn beat no 6 Oregon,, and lost to natty champs lsu by 3, along with losing to Alabama by 3. Auburn would clearly be the second best team in the acc. The sec is a different animal, all all we have is Clemson for a big dog team
Which would be my point. We want to win the ACC...to do that anytime in the near future, we will need to beat Clemson.
If Auburn would be the 2nd best ACC team, then we need to be able to win a recruiting battle for a coveted QB prospect against them. If we have no chance of doing this and we should just accept the loss because "well they're an SEC team," then what is our outlook on winning the ACC? Should we give that idea up too?
Right now? Yes. We should absolutely give up on the idea that is something we should expect. Given our talent compared to our competitors, it's unrealistic to expect that in the next 4 years. And persistence in expecting it will only lead to disappointment and disillusionment.
I understand your pain. Tech is in a conundrum, and we cant get out of our own way. Clemson put themselves into a winning position by having a dynamic coach that could recruit, and his team bought dabo and his vision 100 percent. We are no where near having anything like that. The sec teams sell their schools by talking up all of the big time games, and how their cruits can showcase themselves with the best players in the country. Tech just doesnt have any flash, and our coaches don't project a vision that anyone is buying right now.
Auburn actually beat Alabama by 3 this year. Second W in 3 years against Bama, plus a W against #1 UGA 2 years ago. They play Bama, UGA and LSU every year, plus the rest of the SEC and typically top 10 OOC opponent (W vs. Oregon and UW). Malzahn is a real good recruiter and an average coach, who can compete with the best teams in the country. Diehard Hokie, and spend a bunch of time in Auburn, and sad to say we are not in a class with Auburn. They pull in more 4 and 5 stars in a year than we do in 5. There is a huge talent gap that is not closing.
Out of curiousity; what are your thoughts on the 1995 Virginia Tech football team? Successful season? Yes or no.
Losing DD sucked, but it's his choice. Were it up to Justin Fuente I'm certain we'd still have an elite quarterback committed to this class.
Have you considered just not following football recruiting? It's basically just a couple thousand of these little assholes, making decisions of which school to attend, every damn year.
Un. Fucking. Bearable.
..........
You asserted it's impossible to compete for anything without top-tier talent. We already competed for a Natty with all the talent of a mid-tier Big East roster. In a sport that bears a strong resemblance to the one we're still discussing, no less.
Staring at a 6 year trend in a 150 year old sport is notable. It does not erase the entire history of the sport; or sports in general. Moderate gaps in talent are not only surmountable, they are overcome regularly. They're called upsets, and they can be hella fun. Some of the time...
Will we make the playoffs less often than Alabama? Certainly. How to fix that...
......
If you insist that Auburn is a mediocre football team, I'm not going to fight you on that. Take it. Good points. You win.
If you think that ever mattered in the course of out-recruiting us thoroughly for the last half-century, you'd be in for an awful surprise. Auburn has been pulling in higher level talent since college football teams began awarding scholarships.
We have not.
They've had a football program with the goal of taking down Alabama since college football was introduced to their state. (Not always successful in this, but you probably wouldn't have guessed that they're 9-11 in the last 20 Iron Bowls, either).
Our arch rival over the earliest of these decades was the Virginia Military Institute. It's why we got Skipper!
Before we joined the Big East, we didn't make Top-50 class recruiting lists. As an Independent, we were essentially a G5/non-qualifying caliber program.
As a Power-5 program, our talent level is currently above average. We don't draw elite talent. We both seem to agree on this.
Our disagreement seems to be in where we are as a program. You might not realize it, but you seem to think we're a blue blood. We should kick Auburn's ass every year in recruiting, too, right? Do you know who DOES consistently out-recruit Auburn?
Texas, Michigan, Ohio State, USC, Notre Dame, Oklahoma and Alabama consistently out-recruit Auburn. Bluebloods consistently outrecruit Auburn (Except Nebraska; they're like the loser blue blood. Another decade or so, Clemson will probably definitively replace them).
I don't see that.
We're not even at Auburn's level of "recruit draw". Want proof? Look at the entire history of the composite recruiting rankings.
Kids tend to choose Auburn over VT. It's a reality. It's not a comfort-driven thought. I don't think it's defeatist. Saying we'll always suck until we jump over the moon in recruiting is what I'd call defeatist.
It would probably be a hell of a lot easier to see this were we still firmly in the G5. You think Boise fans bitch about outrecruiting Auburn? I mean they could make one hell of a case. Shit, they might only out-recruit a handful of Power 5 teams. What an identity crisis that must be.
Wishing we could become as big of a draw as Auburn, or shoot, just catapult right on past them, isn't a quick or easy fix.
If we can turn our program into one that resembles one of those Blue Blood schools, we should have no problem out-recruiting Auburn year in and year out.
......
So how do you remedy a lack of a half a century of success, multiple national championships, a respectable arch-rival, and a donor and alumni base likely several times larger than ours?
Hire a dude and his crew? Wait it out a couple of seasons? Have them coach the football team in their spare time?
Should do the trick, right?
I'm not going to bother with the 97% of your post that is irrelevant to recruting D. Davis.
I'm not sure how a thread about a 2021 recruit brings up any mention of '95 VT, '99 VT, or VMI. I do have a really nice reproduction program from VMI-VPI game in 1947 from Victory Stadium if you would like to get even mote off-topic.
Fact is, DD committed here almost 6 months ago and we allowed Chad Morris who hasn't had a stitch of success in 5 years to talk him out of his commitment. Auburn is currently the 3rd best team in their division (possibly 4th if A&M steps forward). If VT wants to progress as a program, they need to win these recruiting battles.
Better players win games. Getting better players will make VT a better and more competitive football team.
If this Staff can't get it done, then one that can needs to be brought in.
UNC and Tennessee are absolutely killing it in recruiting right now. Both are coming off of relative downswings in their Programs. Part of the reason is they aren't making excuses.
UNC has zero National Championships and no significant ntional rival.
In the end exuses are what they are. Recruiting is 100% results-based and no 17 year-old gives a crap what your Program did 50 damn years ago.
Progress or disappear. Save the excuses.
Please disregard the 100% of the post you don't comprehend.
There is no further reason to carry on this discussion.
Not comprehend....lol..
Nothing you posted was particularly insightful or original. Its just a rehash of the same stuff that gets posted every time VT comes up short in Recrutiing...just in a more meandering and rambling way.
-Auburn has traditionally recruited better than VT----SHOCKER!!!
-Auburn has won a Nat. Championship----REALLY????
Unfortunately, you forgot a bunch of the random other favorites like better facilities, more support staff, bagmen, and all the other meaningless excuses that are made here.
None of this has anything to do with the Recruitment of Dematrius Davis. He signed to VT despite the fact that VT has absolutely nothing going for it and we should just give up trying to Recruit against pretty much anyone in the SEC or Big Ten other than Vanderbilt or Rutgers. (We lost our top recruit to Rutgers in 2020 too....I suppose it was their long history of Football Success, Top-notch Facilities, and huge Football Booster base that caused that too, no???).
The fact is that DD signed here despite the pittiance of football capital that we now apparently have. And our Coaching Staff let an O.C. whose past 5 years in CFB have been and abject failure (like 18-40 level failure) come in and convince him to decommit. Chad Morris is nothing more than a name at this point, he's far removed from his last successful stint in CFB and truthfully, he's not produced any QB at the College level that have made even a slight impact in the NFL.
This is another shortcoming on the part of Fuente and his Staff, nothing more and nothing less. They had the player they wanted and their system needed and they lost him. All the excuses for why don't matter. Its not hard to comprehend that, never was, but its psychologically easier to make excuses and paint them as hard fact.
This is, at best, an obtuse statement. Of course what actually happened and the realities of the situation matter. Nothing happens in a vacuum. There are always reasons for something, and likely multiple ones. Understanding, articulating, and working to fix those reasons is how you grow. Ranting about how the reasons don't matter and it just has to get done anyway is how organizations get managed into the dirt.
you basically just explained the difference between a reason and an excuse -- you're not wrong, but the ramifications are totally different. Side note: It's kinda funny to me how English has evolved to the point that "excuses" don't really "excuse" anything, but a "reason" probably does.
When you compare it to a recruit who has us in the mix but is uncommitted -- Ford, Slade, KJ Henry, etc -- it's frustrating to see them pick another team instead of us. It's way more frustrating to sell the vision, secure the commitment, and then not be able to maintain it. It's a lot less "excusable" to lose a commit than it is to not land one in the first place.
I totally agree it is frustrating. Losing a commitment of this caliber is never a good thing. I just don't think its reasonable to abstract it away to just generic coaching staff failures, instead of considering other potential reasons for this to occur. History, resources, current team trajectories, distance from home, all of these things have a non-zero impact at every stage of recruiting. Including maintaining current commitments.
I think that Fuente has a lot of room to grow as a recruiter, but we can't also hold him accountable for all the institutional shortcomings we are also experiencing. If we do that, we will just consistently run coaches out of town without addressing the other reasons recruits might not want to attend VT.
sure, a lot of those things are "reasons" -- but you'd think that those factors stay constant and would be more easily addressed factors to the guy who is already committed. Blacksburg didn't get further away from Houston since November. The things that do tend to change are the levels of engagement from both recruit and recruiters.
It just feels to me like it's a better process to apply those underlying institutional factors to VT recruiting on a macro scale (e.g., why can't we break into the top-15 recruiting) rather than invoking them on a micro scale (e.g. why did Malcolm Greene pick Clemson) unless one of them is specifically invoked by the recruit himself.
Not to go all dc here, but why can't we
I would expect a P5 head coach who is building a program to address those institutional shortcomings. If everyone knows that we struggle to recruit (and no one is saying we don't) wouldn't you look to improve that area. We have seen some of that this past year - additional recruiting specific staff, the football only marketing/graphics hire but the question remains is it too little too late. My struggle isn't this 1 decommit, it is what does this 1 decommit in conjunction with last years class, and our recent trends say about the overall health of the recruiting program and I think that the best we are going to get is
I'm not sure that we've seen a effective recruiting strategy from CJF in his time here. It does come back to what is his vision for the program, and how does that get communicated to everyone, not just recruits but everyone who can help pitch that vision.
We can hold him accountable for institutional shortcomings IF he has the capacity to change them. One institutional shortcoming is proximity to recruiting hotbeds. I don't think Fuente can move Blacksburg, so I won't hold him accountable for that. If a recruit doesn't pick the school because he would rather stay closer to home, not Fuente's fault. If doesn't pick the school because the vision is unclear, definitely Fuente's fault. Seem fair?
I disagree. That is like saying getting to the Superbowl and losing is worse than not getting there.
bad comparison to me, because all teams are working against each other, not with each other.
more like "the girl will go on dates but doesn't want to be exclusive" vs "fiancee calls off your wedding"
which is worse: getting perpetually turned down? or thinking you have something and then it's pulled out from under you? or better (worse?) yet, getting perpetually turned down and THEN thinking you have something and THEN it's pulled out from under you?
We're the backup plan. The one you jump at the chance to secure so that your floor is risen on where you can go. But in the end, we're rarely someone's top choice, and when a better opportunity comes calling, its easy to move on because you never really wanted to end up there in the first place.
We're the safety school of top recruits. And I'm not sure our staff realizes that they're routinely getting played.
That doesn't sound like a staff specific issue as much as a VT issue.
Isn't the saying "better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all"?
Lets look at it specifically with DD. They convinced him of something. He loved something about VT to commit at a time when he didn't need to at all. Now, something changed. Maybe it was the distance, maybe other schools are appearing sexier, maybe we truly did something to turn him off. But, I am happier we got a date with DD than if we would have gotten an eyeroll.
but he even said "no love lost" /s /s /s/ s
Even better
Did Chad Morris not produce Deshaun Watson? He's done pretty well for himself in the NFL. His offense, that clemson has barely changed since he left, is also producing NFL draft picks like few schools have ever done. And will produce the #1 pick in next year's draft. Yes, I know he hasn't coached Lawrence, but it is still his offense.
Morris is also a pretty good recruiter...it would not surprise me at all if he's had Deshaun in DD's ear since they live so close together. Pure speculation, i know...but he would use an NFL player for that purpose.
And I don't completely agree that Fuente lost him. VT lost him. Our conference lost him. How easy it for Malzahn/Morris to point out that playing against alabama, lsu, uga, a&m every year is gonna prepare you better for the next level compared to the gt's, bc's, and duke's of the world. Yes, our gameday atmosphere is awesome, and the entrance is the best in football...but after the entrance, we're still playing opponents that don't move the needle. It pains me to say those things, because I love VT...but that's where we are now. I would love DD to recognize how we could tear apart our schedule and make serious noise with him and a few other 4*'s joining. But if there is any blame for Fuente and staff, it is not being able to drive that point home enough to make it stick...they're more coaches than salesman, unlike the mack's and dabo's of the world.
Well to answer your question....No.
He coached Watson 8 games in 2014, Watson then went on to Thrive under Jeff Scott (as has the entire Clemson Offense).
So since Morris left, Clemson has only been better on Offense and Morris has had a pitiful HC Record.
Even Offensively, his teams haven't been that impressive:
2015 SMU - 8th in AAC
2016 SMU - 8th in AAC
2017 SMU - 4th AAC
2018 Ark - 14th SEC
2019 Ark - 13th SEC
But now that he's at Auburn he's an Offensive Genius again and we should all just blindly accept that our Staff can't win a Recruiting Battle against him?
Sorry, I don't buy it.
You got that right. Gus is the offensive genius, and Chad is just his newest sidekick.
So, if the answer is disappear, what will you say to the next guy? Because it's entirely possible that we are at the ceiling, not the floor. Not saying definitively that is the case, but we have to consider it a possibility.
THIS MIGHT BE AS GOOD AS IT GETS.
And we might have to be ok with that.
Great response. Thank you for saving me the time of having to lay that out.
What? Weren't a quarter the posters on here having wet dreams about Chad Morris possibly coming here as OC 6 months ago?
Well, recruiting news was fun for a little while when we looked like things were getting really hot. I guess it's time to start paying a LOT more attention to the fishing threads and brush the dust and cobwebs off my various rods.
There are several tweets that continue in Will's thread.
And when that didn't happen...he bailed? I suppose I get it, but seems like reverse logic.
The overarching point is, it is the Staff's job to get recruits here, and they didn't produce here.
It plays to the narrative of big dawgs want to play with big dawgs.The ball was slow to get rolling and we didn't close with the other big time recruits yet. Yes, we got Neville (for now) and Tyas. If we convince other high profile guys to come, DD could come back. I agree it would be a lot easier if he stayed on board for us to convince those recruits.
Agree completely
This makes sense. And I hate it.
I think I really like Fuente and his staff as people, just from interviews and how they conduct themselves. But, what do i know? I don't know shit about football. I know that. I'm really pulling for our coaches, but maybe they aren't the right fit for a program with high aspirations and marginal means. Maybe we need a guido to come in here and change our identity. Sell these kids on something other than the promise of hard work. Wouldn't be blue collar football anymore, but shit, that was only fun to say when we were winning.
Is this the same guy that started publicly putting out the locker room cancers? The bad apples tweet? That's this guy right?
I don't know, I don't follow him but somebody like or retweeted so it was on my timeline. I thought his explanation for what DD might be thinking was logical for this situation.
You might be thinking of Ox because that does not sound like Will.
Well at least he got our official name right...
Remind me to be upset on Signing Day if he doesn't show up. Anything can happen between now and then.
#aintnoringonthatfinger
I wonder what moahwk, show up at Devon Hunter ceremony guy, thinks of this. Would love his input. /s
I just read through all of this...ever since someone mentioned he removed VT from his Twitter I was checking daily for this to happen and sure enough it did....one thing I thought I would never see though...DC getting so many upvotes!!! lol
Some of you need to take a breather and let this play out. Yes this sucks (at this moment) but he very well still may end up here. It's a 17 y/o who wants to take all of his OV's (once he is allowed) to make sure he makes the right decision. Some people on here are just doom and gloom 24/7, and read wayyyyy too much into twitter. (my reference to Alec's post is he still thinks DD is coming here... who knows!)
this stuff happens all the time. Yes this hurts more than other since he is a top end talent that seemed to be sold on VT, but it is May... a lot can still happen... And this can be applied to other recruits who have committed elsewhere.
And btw screw crytal ball predictions... I bet everybody was happy and trusting them when they were coming our way before DD committed, and look where we are now.... Sure they are going Auburn's way now, but for the most part, they are as useless as Anne Frank's drum kit.... especially in May.
Decommits are low-likelihood to return to the fold. We should acknowledge that.
The best case scenario here is probably this..
He at least says he is still going to take his OV to VT. I think that was planned for late June.
That gives the Staff a few weeks to get it in gear and see if they can close on these supposed multiple silent commits and/or get a few new prospects into the fold. Possibly, if they can do that, they can get DD back on-board.
Given this Staff's recent yields in Recruiting and the fact that it's only going to be harder without DD, there is a hefty dose of pessimism to be had.
The fact is, the likelihood he ends up at VT went down drastically today, Fuente and Co. have to step it WAAAYY up to rectify this.
there were several blue chippers who were scheduled to take OVs the same weekend. if (big if) it still happens, it could be huge
I, for one, would like to talk about the guys that WANT to be here
via GIPHY
You guy know I'm a harsh critic of Fuente. I believe the issues on the field reflect a lot on this coaching staff. Results, records, wins, bowl wins matter. Putting guys into the NFL matters. While 2016 was a pretty good season with 10 wins, the rest are not so good. I do give credit to Fuente for making the switch to Hendon, I think that speaks to making tough decisions to right the ship. I do think he has gone after some states NC2VT and TX2VT which is good but we still need to get more top 10 Virginia guys like Devon Hunter and Tim Settle.
In my humble opinion in this era of college football where its "win now", Fuente is the transition guy. I do believe he will leave for a higher budget school. I'm not sure what the future holds for VT anymore.
We want the 10 win season, that's kind of our mark, get at least to the Orange bowl, if not the top tier secondary bowl, then win that bowl. I do believe there are still guys out there especially in Virginia we can still get, I mean top 10 guys for Class of 2021 so its not over yet.
I'm now pondering my own topic if we should have gone after a 2020 QB (I'm sure we will get a walk-on)
https://www.thekeyplay.com/content/2019/november/22/ask-tkp-do-we-need-q...
Self awareness:
If the volume of your posts is heaviest in decommitment threads and meltdown threads I think it is 100% fair to call into question the authenticity of your fandom.
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... What is there to say that hasn't been said at this point.
What a bummer. What an absolute bummer.
I'm just happy for once somebody got the official name of our school right
Actually the state should be with a capital "S", so he got that wrong. It's all bad. Except that Wa Are Virginia Tech. Sucks to lose him, hope he comes back, but wish him the best wherever he lands. Regardless VT Nation will press on and persevere.
I looked beyond the S - didn't care - if he's still taking an official visit AND got the school spelling correct then that tells me he's at least done and will continue to do his homework on us. I'm still optimistic.
Everybody is losing their minds over a kid that would not be a factor on the field for at least 3 years. We have AT LEAST 3 really good QB's in the program now and none are seniors. Does it suck? Of course. Will it matter in 6 months? No. Everything has changed with the portal and transfer rules. Every team Is shuffling the deck every year
Bigger picture man, bigger picture.
When I woke up and went to work today and just blessed to be working in these times as ice cube said "it was a good day"....around lunch time it was not a good day...I didn't mess around and get a triple double...one of the positive things that kept my mind off of things was that hokie football was finally making a comeback with DD and the other recruits we were getting. After lunch in my work truck I went back to work thinking we just can't close the deal on these top guys. I'll keep on working and waiting to get back to lane and yell my lungs out no matter who is on the field as long as the VT is on their helmet. But man that was a bummer....maybe his official visit will change things and believe you me I pray it does..but I'm afraid of even more to de commit and send us into absolute average 6-6 purgatory relying on a bowl game to have a winning season. Such is life, go Hokies
If we have a football season and we win, then there is still plenty of time to persuade recruits to select us on signing day. If I recall, aren't a bunch coming in for the PSU game?
I know it sounds crazy but I'll just say it:
I think that the Penn State game is going to be really important for our recruiting
Any news on that front btw
Beating Penn State and winning the coastal are key to Fuentes future career in Blacksburg imo. If we don't do either he's probably finished in the long term. If we do both the program momentum will be off the charts
Anyone want to argue over some minute differences in opinion? I don't see that happening enough in this thread
You're dead wrong! It's happening just the right amount.
Getting a QB will always be difficult. There's only one Vick, only one Tyrod...
Looking back at 2019 Class the coaching staff was able to pull through Seven 4-stars https://247sports.com/college/virginia-tech/Season/2019-Football/Commits/
We may be getting a good cast out of that class plus Brock Hoffman, Crawford, Kendricks, Pollard and Gallo.
And while the 2020 Class wasn't much to write about, we did pull in a 4-star on the last day.
I think we are good for the next 2-3 years in terms of contributors. 2021 isn't over yet, even if we don't find a top notch QB, if we can fill in other spots with top talent, we will be solid for a little while. The top 8 are solid in Virginia, we need to land someone from there. QBs will still be available and there are potential flips, maybe Dee will recommit
Imagine a world where a 17 year old kid breaks a pinky promise and a large group of adults, largely made up by professionals with advanced degrees, all collectively lose their shit.
Right now we are the friend zone for recruits. The past 2 years we have 1 NFL draft pick, we have a mediocre record, we need to win and we need to put guys in the league, until then we will continue to have average recruiting classes. We need guys like Farley, Turner, Deablo, Waller, Mitchel, Darrisaw etc to not just get drafted but be drafted rounds 1-3 and we need to have multiple guys each year get drafted to show kids that you can make it to the league coming here.
Another one that wasn't 800% committed y'all.
This is why I dont pay attention to recruiting anymore and don't give a damn about high schoolers until signing day is over
It is definitely disappointing. The dude was basically the crown jewel of the class. However, I will say that I kind of just shrugged my shoulders when I saw the news yesterday. I'm not saying that it doesn't suck....I think I've just gotten used to this kind of stuff happening and there isn't much that I can do about it.
His recruitment isn't over, but the mighty SEC came in, pushed us aside, and got what they wanted.
All:
After talking things over with my family, I've decided to decommit from this thread and open up my recruitment to other threads. I appreciate the moderators and Joe for the opportunity to comment on this thread. I still plan to make an official return visit to this thread in the future. Please respect my decision.
Dave
You weren't a scheme fit for us anyways.
I'm sure he found a place with nicer Dorms too...
Totally been passed up by better posters
Oh yeah, totally buried on the depth chart, so I think we can all understand the decision.
There's another poster with fewer legs, but the posts are really underrated. Diamond in the rough. I'd rather read his posts anyway.
Hasn't our recent recruiting of the defensive line and linebackers improved?
DD will be back. He committed for a reason, and that reason persists. I don't know what that reason is, but nothing has changed appreciably since his commitment. Does a guy his size REALLY want to get pounced on by 330 future HOF's?
Sigh.
If he wants to prove he's the best QB out there, hey may want to face them. Yes, that reason may persist, but you can't assume all other things being equal. Variables change, sometimes more than one at once. People have brought up at least two (Auburn and the guys he was trying to get on board not committing). There may still be things Fuente and company can do to bring him back on board. As people have mentioned, he was high on VT for awhile. If the coaches can swing some of the recruits he was trying to bring on board, he could swing back.
Until the LOI is in, nothing is absolute.
He is gone. I bet LAhokie would agree.
So by that logic he also decommitted for a reason.
This whole thread has turned into one giant shit show
To have faith, you need a reason to believe.
I got you fam...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJylcQ7CGfI
Aaaaaaand he's transferring π€·π»ββοΈ
Wow. Probably heading to a more prestigious academic school like UAB or Texas State
Start. A. New. Thread.