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Western Kentucky vs Jacksonville State (JSt -4.5)
Tulane vs 24 ARMY (Tul -4.5)
19 UNLV vs 10 Boise State (Boise -3.5)
Ohio vs Miami of Ohio (M-O -2.5)
16 Iowa State vs 12 Arizona State (AzSt -2.5)
5 Georgia at 2 Texas (TX -2.5)
Marshall vs Louisiana (Cajuns -4.5)
3 Penn State vs 1 Oregon (Ducks -3.5)
18 Clemson vs 8 SMU (SMU -2.5)

BOTW: Brew Sheet #7 from Dewey Beer...no dog in the fight, just enjoying the weekend.

West Kentucky
Army
Boise
Miami-OH
Iowa St
Georgia
Louisiana
Oregon
SMU

Young can coach x and o's- he just can't keep players around. Imagine this team with Kidd, Maddux, Pedulla, Buchannan and Collins starting? and have Rech, Poteat, Schutt, Barnham on the bench to play 10 mins a game at most? Totally different scenario. That will be young's undoing.

I'll say it right now, if Mike Young finds a way to win 12 or more games this year he's a genius and should have plenty of job security. However I don't think that's possible I'd put the number around 9 right now.

If he can't win 9 or the guys aren't showing improvement he should be fired. Full stop

A way to work around it, and it's too late for this to really work, is to set up an entirely separate pool, have everyone sign in, and pick all 9 games. If it was a 20 game week for a full on free-for-all, maybe that's worth it. But for just 3 more games, not quite enough juice for the squeeze.

As I stated in July, no matter the resume Alabama is in this field for the foreseeable future. It's like St. Mary's in hoops. No matter that their best win is Utah state and they lose to Gonzaga 3 times, they are in. Bama football is the same. Lose 3 games, 2 to bad teams? No problem- you are in.

This Hokies team is BAAAAD. Can't defend can't score off the dribble can't do anything really.

think the focus needs to be on making Virginia Tech the best, not making it easy for assistants to have a soft landing.

Agreed and I don't think you can do both especially if that soft landing is eying the NFL that'll put us in way too much of a hole for valid candidates.

Go get Bill Brechin from Miami of Ohio or Nick Benedetto from NIU. Both are coaching top 40 defenses that have (at best) top 70 talent, paired with offenses outside the top 100

I like this approach - find someone at a lower level who is already working as a DC and has play calling experience. Bonus points for someone who has fielded a good unit relative to the available talent. Will we do that, though? That's a big question - until our organization actually does something like this I'm going to view it as something that is unlikely to happen (it just makes too much sense)

Don't hire a retread who's ceiling is known to be low.

agreed

I'd rather hire another position coach who's never been a play caller (ie; Marve 2.0) than hire a play caller who I know is bad (Graham).

I'm actually not sure I agree with this. The biggest issue I think a lot of folks have with Marve is that he's just super inexperienced. I don't think it's a good idea to hire a position coach to be a first time DC for us after the experiment went horribly wrong with Marve. That would be repeating the same mistake, IMO. The odds that Grantham would improve and be better than Marve because of his experience are slightly better than the odds that some random position coach with no DC experience will be better than Marve. Especially when you consider that a position coach wouldn't have his own defensive identity and would require some mentoring and coaching up from Pry, which would mean that we stick with the defensive scheme for which there is very little coaching tree. If it's not going to be Bud Foster, I don't think I want someone trying to copy that scheme. I'd rather go out and get a DC who is running a more modern defense with a larger coaching tree so that when he inevitably gets poached for having our defense in the top 10 we'll be able to seamlessly transition to the next coach.

I don't want Grantham. I don't want a young up-and-coming position coach with no DC experience. Stick with your original idea and grab a guy who has a few years of DC experience at a lower level and has proven that he can put a defense on the field that is better than the relative talent.

dc is a good sport about it - I don't think there's a problem with some ribbing

We did our part even if ESPN gave the win to the SEC at the end of the game.

This isn't uncommon, our defensive backfield was littered with high school QBs back in the Beamer era. A lot of HS may not have a true QB on the roster, so they put their best athletes at QB because that gives them the best chance to do something good with the ball. These guys may not be P5 QBs, but they're still great athletes. I'd expect one or both of them to get some QB reps and then get talked to about other positions.