Recent Comments
Hokie Grill represent!!
Maybe, if one of the later games gets us a better timeslot because the broadcaster wants to leverage the new face and new resources he'll have to tell a compelling story.
I agree that we overpaid Pry. I have said it before South Carolina hiring Shane did it right. Intro contract, re-evaluate after 2 years, and again after another 2 years.
crippling the program.
Well then you are in luck because we overpaid Pry and crippled the program 4 years ago!
I want to tell you about a girl who only eats plants.
You have probably not heard of herbivore.
Today's price ain't yesterday's price.
We should pay the going rate for a big time coach, otherwise what's the point of this new investment in athletics.
Get yourself some butter because we're gonna be getting lots of biscuits this year
Are you insinuating that we are not crippled now?
I think the issue is getting the buyout right. If salary is enormous, we'll recover if it goes south. If we have a stupid buyout, that will burn us.
Regardless, I think the risk of not landing a good coach is greater than the risk of overpaying Franklin. We've had a decade of mediocrity across three staffs, while our conference is trending further into mediocrity... that signals 'distressed asset' to the coaching market. Need to turn that around asap.
Does all this media attention get us more of those ACC $$$'s in the latest contract revision? /s
He certainly made some money.
I was one of the civilian employees that had to work without pay during the Covid shutdowns and never got my backpay. My wife was forced to close her office and so we paid employees while we were forced closed. We are almost financially recovered from that.
If we don't take a shot now then when should we?
I probably need to apologize for derailing the Franklin discussion, but I do appreciate the TKP community and their willingness to discuss just about anything.
I agree - We can attract lots of good coaches with the resources we are willing to expend and the spending on the rest of the AD/football program will elevate the floor of whoever we hire.
My real worry is overpaying for Franklin and crippling the program.
I almost started a new thread titled "Sauces 👀" just for recipes but decided that might break some people
I opened this thread and it had like 80 comments.
Come for the recipes on sauces, stay for the legality of federal shutdown backpay. This is classic TKP and I love it.
I guess since we suck this qualifies as off season. At least we can't lose again this week.
I don't think Franklin is the only coach who could make VT successful
EXACTLY!. Its why not hiring him wouldn't be a huge letdown....unless...
I think VT has to nail this hire
...this doesn't happen. I agree that VT needs to nail this hire. I don't agree that Franklin is the only coach for VT to "nail this hire". But if we end up hiring Shannon Dawson then I think we'd be pickle-f*ed.
The general feeling, I sense, is that if we hire Franklin now we'll know we nailed the hire and feel good going into 2026. If we hire some up-and-comer G5 coach like Helton, Huff, Chesney, etc. we will probably be split on whether or not we nailed the hire but we won't really know for another year or so. If we hire anyone none of us has ever heard of before then we might know that we absolutely didn't nail the hire (though, in fairness, we likely wouldn't know for a year or so).
It's unlikely, but (similar to Fuente), if we hire Franklin and he doesn't work out then we'll feel like we nailed the hire only to find out in a few years that we absolutely didn't. That would be super sucky.
Could it be JF travelling with his daughter?
My wife got laid off back in March when a bunch of the VA contracts were terminated and her old company had to lay off like 50% of their corporate workforce. Thankfully she was lucky in this job market to find something new in about 2.5 months in a much more stable field (legal). It's been a roller coaster of a year for us to say the least.
I have a shirt I wear when I'm on travel, especially in a group of friends. "Sleep well, I'll most likely kill you in the morning."
I agree here. It seems Elko was extremely interested in this job, but for whatever reason Whit was not interested in taking the call. Even if we had hired Elko, I think it still would have been under the old Whit mentality with funding for the program. "Weights weigh the same"
However this Franklin decision shakes out, I think this has actively forced VT leadership to commit to far more resources for the program if they want to compete at a high level. I think if we get this deal with Franklin done, the details of the contract may shock the entire college football landscape. Donor interest would likely be sky high. Would send a huge signal that VT is for real.
So in short, Elko may have gotten us a year or two of better results, but it wouldn't have shaken the foundation of the program like this search and takeover of VT athletics has achieved, IMO.
It's frustrating, but not surprising. I'm furloughed and I view it as anything but a vacation since those are paid.. especially when the mortgage, daycare, bills, groceries, car payments, etc still need to be paid. Like I said above my wife and I are fortunate that we can ride it out for a while but those things add up fast.
I am trying to be productive every day and do some things around the house with the time, but that's mostly to keep from going stir crazy. I would much rather be doing my actual job that I really enjoy doing. I really feel for the people who are commuting every day to a job that they're not getting paid for. Just an all around bad situation.
CC over on TSL just posted an article, Chaos is a Ladder, which has a lot of good stuff in it. I'm not going to copy/paste it all, because it's a subscription article, but I'll put a couple paragraphs here that have some information that we all should hear, bolding what IM(ns)HO is the biggest part. (Mods, delete or truncate if you feel I pasted too much from the article.)
It sounds like whatever we end up offering him, or the eventual coach, it won't be crippling the program.