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My 7w gave me confidence that I could hit my 5w. Those are now my two favorite clubs in my bag and I'll probably never touch another hybrid

Maybe I should've bet on him this morning!

VT in general needs to realize it's not special. It's absolutely special to us, but every single grad/fan can say that about their school. Operate with a hand tied behind your back because "we do things differently here" and this is where you end up.

Given they've sucked for last two years that coincide with moving to Big 12, they had a good 5-year run from 2018-2022. But that was in the AAC fwiw.

Funny how the trajectory of the University of Cincinnati football program has changed since Babcock left. You could argue it was built on his efforts, but you could argue much more easily that they are much better of without him.

Sucks for me too. I had the evening planned with back and forth and beer and food. Oh well, can't waste the beer and food. Maybe Gilligan's Island reruns? Or McHale's Navy, yeah the better choice. But I do digress.
This time of year in B'burg, base and soft ball is often at the mercy of the weather, and a good day is sunny and 50 degrees with less than 10 mph wind. But I've seen the umps with neck ups and gloves and most fans covered up pretty well and figured the players couldn't enjoy those days much. Forecast looks better for Sat. and good for Sun.
Gotta go buy more food and beer.

I was listening to SVP talk on Russillo's podcast yesterday about how bad he wants to see Rory win and complete the slam with all the struggles he's had for the last 10 years and basically mentioned how, especially at the masters he'll have a great first 14 or 15 holes with it looking so easy and then just implode the last few and ..thats's exactly what happened yesterday

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What did Michael Brewer say? Scared money don't make money?

Yeah well VT has been operating with scared money for the last 25 years. Every investment needed to be vetted 15 ways til Sunday to make sure the ROI was already there before the money got invested, and as such we've been spinning our tires the entire time.

Every time in our history we have tried to innovate we got cold feet and ran back to the warm comforts of the status quo, because we are too chicken shit to ever actually change. Just look at the Nike Pro Combat campaign we were in about 15 years ago. We were routinely showcased as one of the top Nike brands in football, given preferential treatment over others, and we turned our back on it because it was too forward thinking and made our donors uneasy because it wasn't blue collar enough for them. And now look at where we are, a pathetic merchandise deal that pales in comparison to everyone else where it easily could have been additional areas of income for us now.

Now look at basketball. We went out and got Buzz, a huge coup in the grand scheme and immediately gave him a top 10 salary in a sport that didn't make money for us. And what happened, we became a regularly ranked program, made the Sweet 16 for the first time in forever, and turned basketball into an actual revenue generating sport for us. So we obviously paid big for our replacement when Buzz left, right? Oh, right, we stripped all funding of the program to hand back over to football to allow basketball to collapse into a shell of its former self now being a net negative again on the financial sheets.

We are who we are. We are never going to change because we're too chicken shit to actually keep up. We're comfortable being a small regional school in the backwoods of Virginia, even if that means intentionally holding back progress to keep us here.

That's one point of contention, for sure. And not even just being mean and cut throat...it's also skewing too far away from that "perfect Hokie football guy" model that Beamer & Foster embraced. Fuente, I think, flirted with that a bit, maybe because he didn't understand that player model or maybe because he wanted to win at all costs. But the administration pushed back on him and he also handled those kinds of players extremely poorly (among other things). Pry is swearing to bring that back, but that's also like trying to bring back pagers as a way to stay in contact with everyone. Those kinds of players are getting washed away by the greed of NIL and pay-for-play (if everyone else is getting theirs, gotta get mine too!). VT doesn't want to, nor do they probably know how to, play that game of buying the talent to win, and for that we are doomed to fail.

But I would still agree with VTJ12 that there is a lot of fear of trying...Weaver was notorious for not wanting to do anything if it meant the budget was going to flirt with going in the black, or god forbid ever go in the red. (didn't he try to avoid night games because of the cost of electricity running the stadium lights, which amounted to less than $1/ticket?)

Babcock has shown time and again that he's afraid to change anything up that might upset the aging fanbase who helped build the program up to what it is today (or at least was 15 years-ish ago). Nothing innovative, nothing saying "Hang on folks...just trust me with this and you'll see, in 5 years, this is going to pay off big." It has only been "I wont admit it, but we're 5 years behind everyone else, so we're going to do this thing to try to catch back up."

I see what you mean, but I am also not "far from accurate." 72 of the top 100 players in the portal are already committed according to 247's portal tracker. Half of #100-200 are gone too.

4 or 5 guys in the top 500 is not going to turn things around for VT unfortunately, as that's essentially worse than what we got in the portal last year (Schutt, Burham, Lawal, Brown Jr were all between #228-376). For example — Rechsteiner is #219 in the portal. Let that sink in — there are only like 80 guys left in the portal who scouts think are better than Rechsteiner, who was mediocre at best for us. Hence, we are cooked already and just don't know it yet lol.

For comparison, UVA is going through just as much turnover as us, if not more, and has already landed 4 guys from the portal, the lowest of whom is #207.

I don't think they're afraid of trying; I think they're afraid of being mean and cut throat. I think the boosters take pride in VT being a friendly, aw shucks organization. I think the administration thought that winning a title required you to be 'good enough' and then you just get lucky.

It's as if we lost the prisoner's dilemma because we insisted on being honest when everyone around us was like 'fuck that.' There's no honor amongst thieves, and college football is a sport of thieves.