Illinois Hokie's Recent Comments

He... could... go... all... the... WAY!!!

Back on track.

Let's kick some Catholic ass.

Fuck Matt Ryan.

David Cutcliffe is a wonderful man and an example of what a coach should be. He is also the coach we face after one of the most humiliating, gut-wrenching losses VT has ever endured. And so I feel sympathy for what David Cutcliffe is about to suffer.

All Good Things is the best TNG movie we ever got.

Because there's good in practice, an there's good in live games.

How many clutch throws did this kid make under pressure? I swear at least half a dozen times he turned what I thought for sure was going to be a sack into a throw for a first down. A lot of that was our young secondary breaking down in coverage against the scramble drill, but LaRussa deserves mad props for still finding the open receiver under duress. The kid took some shots, too, and kept getting up.

Don't expect to see our CBs turn for the ball in man coverage more often. They haven't been taught to do that for years. It's been a consistent feature of both our best and worst defenses recently.

I think you're overstating your case here a bit. The loss to JMU and the hit recruiting took in the years that followed were both symptoms of the same disease (complacency) rather than a direct cause and effect. The 2010 squad was carried on the shoulders of an NFL caliber QB, and as soon as he was gone, glaring deficiencies in recruiting became apparent. We had already started losing recruiting battles before we lost to JMU, and we continued losing them until Beamer retried. Sure, other programs might have used that loss against us, just like they might try to use ODU against us, but any player being recruited by a P5 program has at some point in their football career been beaten by a team they had no business losing to. It happens. Any single loss, no matter how historic, does not derail a program.

The backslide that occurred subsequent to the 2010 season occurred because Beamer was old, tired, was battling cancer, and had an incompetent offensive staff that no elite recruits would want to play for. Blaming it on the JMU loss is revisionist history.

Right now Andy Bitter is using the fact we were preseason ranked to say why preseason rankings need to be abolished.

Well, he's not wrong. It was obvious after FSU had to rally to beat Samford in the 4th quarter that our ranking was bullshit. We were given way too much benefit of the doubt for beating a team with a lot of hype and no credentials. But once the pollsters put us there after week one, they couldn't drop us significantly after it became apparent FSU wasn't the signature win everyone thought it was, lest they admit the level of bullshit involved in preseason and early season polls.

Yeah, same. I wondered when I asked that question if I was going to come across as accusatory. It wasn't my intention. I'm interested to hear if others are noticing behaviors or tendencies from Fuente that are establishing a less than disciplined culture at VT. So far he seems to be saying and doing all the things I would in a similar situation, but I always want to hear counterarguments. I just couldn't tell from your post if you were making a general observation, or a specific criticism of Fuente.

I can blame this on the coaches in the sense that they didn't scheme well for a team they thought they outmanned, and I can blame them for not making necessary adjustments during the course of the game. But I can't blame them for not having the team "ready to play." I've played enough team sports to know that's not how it works, and I think every analyst and contributor on TKP has, too.

A coach can rake his players over the coals for being lazy and complacent, he can scream at them to work harder, he can preach focus and discipline and 1-0 every week, but what he can't do is force his players to buy into that. From everything I've read and heard about the sideline and the locker room for this game, there wasn't buy in, and there's a dearth of team leadership in this year's squad. The first time they got punched in the mouth, they folded. And that's because they're young, and they bought their own hype.

This is a terrible loss. It's also a fantastic teaching moment, probably the best Fuente has had since he got here. So far, from his public statements, he's handling it exactly the way I'd want a coach to handle it. I hope his "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" message seethes and festers among the players, and galvanizes this young roster into a squad of monsters.

TL;DR. You can preach discipline, but you can't teach discipline. These young men are going to have to learn it on their own.