Tech Football: The Beginning of the End?

Editor’s Note: This feature by Roland Lazenby was originally published in our Sept/Oct 2004 issue. We hope you enjoy looking back at this VT Football coverage!

Or the end of the beginning? That was the thrust of the assignment we handed to Roanoke-based sports author Roland Lazenby, whose books include insider looks at Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and the National Basketball Association. (His latest, “The Show,” is an oral history of the Lakers and is due in November from McGraw Hill.) With late-season collapses of, the past three years for Tech, with the abrupt stopped-­before-it-started Marcus Vick era, and the signs of chinks in the heretofore unblemished armour of head coach Frank Beamer, we asked Lazenby to take a hard look at the Hokie football program and come back with a perspective on whether what we’ve wit­nessed over the 44 months since the departure of Michael Vick is a bump in the road of the grand plan toward being a perennial national power, or a reversion to a former, lesser, Tech football identity. 

Former Virginia Tech quarterback Grant Noel saw it all coming four years ago. 

When Marcus Vick visited the Tech campus as a hotshot high school recruit, Noel wondered why he would even think about coming there to play. Yes, it was a fine school with a sharp coaching staff, but Noel thought it insane that Vick would attempt to follow the blinding legacy of his older brother Michael in Blacksburg. Why not go to another cam­pus where the expec­tations wouldn’t be quite so impossible? 

Now, with Marcus Vick’s struggles to hang on since July’s marijuana and reckless driving charges, Grant Noel’s wisdom has become all too apparent. Noel, after all, had learned his own painful lessons about the pressures of following in the elder Vick’s footsteps.

In fact, you could make a case that just about every Hokie has struggled under the weight of Michael Vick’s brilliance since 1999 and 2000. The team itself has col­lapsed beneath huge expectations each of the past three seasons, leaving head coach Frank Beamer’s face weary and troubled.

It’s not that the whirlwind that was Michael Vick has exactly been a curse. The football program now routinely rakes in $20 million to $30 million each season boosted by those primo weeknight games on ESPN. And the added credibility has landed the long-suffering Hokies in the coveted Atlantic Coast Conference, a development that still stupefies long-term observers of Tech football.

After Michael Vick carried Tech to the 1999 NCAA championship game, Beamer declared that his program wanted the expectations of playing for and winning a national title. Now Tech fans are learning if their favorite son coach has the stamina to withstand the bnital difficulties of such ambition. As the Marcus Vick case makes clear, the path to college football glory isn’t always pretty.

That helps explain why such an edgy mood has fallen across the breadth of Hokieland heading into the 2004 college football season.

Greg Roberts, Beamer’s friend and business partner, can hear it in the voices that phone his weekday afternoon local call-in show on ESPN radio in Roanoke. The University of Virginia opened the spring with an aggressive recruiting strat­egy that has brought the Wahoo staff 17, 18, 19 high school signees in the offsea­son. With the announcement of each Vir­ginia signing, the Tech edginess surged.

Roberts’ radio show is the prime col­lege football forum in Southwest Virginia, and he hasn’t liked what he’s heard from the Hokie faithful. He describes it as “panic.” Indeed, Hokie fans are question­ing whether the program is falling behind just as it opens ACC play this fall.

Virginia Tech’s players and coaches certainly wouldn’t say that what they feel is panic, but they have admitted to a sub­stantial sense of urgency in the program. 

“I think our kids really were devastated by what happened to us late in the season last year,” Tech quarterback coach Kevin Rogers says. “I think they really want to get that rectified, as do our coaches.” 

Rogers made that acknowledgment before the ultra-talented Marcus Vick was suspended in July for repeated knuckle­headedness. Athletic Director Jim Weaver also picked the day of Vick’s suspension to reveal that third-down back and top kick returner Mike Imoh would be sus­pended for the team’s first three games following his conviction for contributing to the delinquency of three teenage girls, one of whom supposedly got drunk, danced nude and had sex at lmoh’s and Vick’s apa1tment during the spring semester.

The loss of Vick and Imoh was a blow to an offense already stretched thin by graduation and injury. Did we mention that this young Hokies team is opening the season against co-defending national champion Southern Cal August 28?

Yet it’s only under the weight of all this difficulty that you get to the trne heart of this story and the unmitigated fun of col­lege athletics. It comes when you ask quarterback Bryan Randall if he’s eager to face the challenge of the Southern Cal game. Frankly, you know the answer before he gives it, because you·ve seen the twinkle in his eye.

“I want that,” he says quickly of the August 28th game in Washington, D.C. “I think we’re gonna be ready to play USC.”

Yes, it’s obvious that Tech’s starting quarterback the past two seasons flat-out loves to compete. Where Marcus Vick has played the prodigal son, Randall has stayed true to the task, doing eve1y chore he can find to advance his and his team’s interests.

Randall came into Blacksburg as a her­alded freshman in 2000, but he wasn’t there long before word leaked out from the coaching staff that his arm was disap­pointingly weak. That should have been enough to send him directly to rhe defen­sive backfield, another position he excelled at while playing at Bruton High in Williamsburg.

Instead, the six-foot, 222-pound Ran­dall hit the weights hard and willed him­self into the starting job. That’s the way he’s answered every challenge over the past two seasons. Now he’s a senior, now the odds are stacked against him and his team. And he likes it.

“We’ve had the reputation for playing some softer teams at the start of the sea­son and getting some easy wins,” Randall says. “This year there’s no time to get your feet wet. We’re jumping right into the sea. It’s really gonna be a good test for our team.”

Such chutzpah is one reason Randy King, the Roanoke Times’ longtime Tech beat writer, finds Randall irrepressible.

“I know he had some tough games last year, but he would come in the post-game interview room and sit there for 45 min­utes and answer every question,” King says. ”He’s a stand-up guy. He’s a leader.”

Perhaps never in their 113 years of playing football have the Hokies needed a leader as much as they do now.

“The younger guys,” Randall acknowl­edges, “are looking to you for help and for leadership, on the ways we’re gonna work, the ways we’re gonna study, the way we’re gonna come out to practice every day.”

Randall craves the kind of responsibil­ity that sends others scurrying for cover. “You really don’t realize how much peo­ple are looking to you for leadership until it comes down to the heat of the moment,” he says. “The guys come into the huddle, and they’re looking for you. All eyes are on you when things are going bad. They’re looking for you maybe to say an encouraging word. It’s always up to you to get their heads focused and keep them into the game.”

“Thank God we have him,” Rogers confided the day after Vick was sus­pended. “In my mind, he’s gonna have a great season. He’s just so confident. One thing you know he’s not gonna do. He’s not 􀀴onna choke. He works with a chip on his shoulder. He takes it personally.”

If it’s a chip, it’s a diplomatic one. Reminded that Hall of Farner Sonny Jur­gensen once said that playing quarterback “is like holding group therapy for 50,000 people every week,” Randall laughs and says he absolutely loves playing in front of that Tech crowd, even though it’s an anx­ious and impatient throng that has spent much of the past two years chomping to see Vick dazzle and dance. But any negative noise, Randall says, goes “right down my back like water. You’ve got to have a tough skin. The challenge is what keeps me going, when people doubt you and wonder if you can get the job done.”

King says it’s been amazing that, as tal­ented as Marcus Vick was, he was never able to pull the quarterbacking job from Randall’s steady clutch (he’s started 25 straight games and completed 61.2 per­cent of his passes last year). Even so, Rogers himself had indicated in February that he expected Vick to replace Randall. 

‘Being a quarterback, you’ve always got to remember that the most popular guy is the second-string quarterback,” Rogers said. “And I must say the last three weeks of our football season I thought Marcus was dynamic.” Vick built on that during spring drills, flashing his brilliance while Randall openly struggled at times. The senior laughs easily recalling the challenge of the spring, when the team was rebuilding both its offense and its defense while trying to work a host of young players into the mix. 

Rogers didn’t favor Randall playing for the Hokie basketball team last winter (although Randall did help the club earn its first-ever berth in the Big East Confer­ence tourney). 

“Basketball had a little bit more of an a long-term effect on him than he thought,” the coach says. “He was worn down mentally in spring ball.” Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Randall is that he had no problem with Rogers openly boosting Vick’s candi­dacy. Hot competition for a starting job is a fact of life at a top Division I program, he says, plus he’s had complete trust that with Beamer and Rogers the best player plays.

“He’s done a great deal in changing the way I approach the game and my prepa­ration,” Randall says of Rogers, who coached Donovan McNabb at Syracuse. “He’s brought me a long way from when I first got here.” Rogers may have had his most talented pupil in Marcus Vick, but the steadiest by far is Randall. “That’s what his deal is all about,” Rogers says. “He’s a very unique person. He has this special ability to focus on controlling what he can control.”

Unfortunately, Randall can’t make per­sonal decisions for some of his teammates. With Vick out, a program that had depth at the position now has none. Behind Randall are two talented, but untested freshmen, Cory Holt (who entered school in December and went through spring drills) and Sean Glennon.

“Obviously it’s a blow,” the quarterback coach says. “The big problem is, they’ve got absolutely zero experience. With Mar­cus, we had two veterans and two young quarterbacks. It was going to be the first time we had that kind of depth in our pro­gram. The ideal is to have two older guys to mentor two younger guys. With Marcus gone, it’s created a tremendous disparity in experience. There’s no in-between. Before, there wasn’t any sense of urgency to use our young quarterbacks. Now there is.”

The situation limits the team now and in the future.

“We’re concerned about using the whole playbook now,” Rogers concedes.

Plus it means that Holt and Glennon won’t be able to redshirt this season, which could limit the Hokies’ depth in the future, Rogers says. “It could change us this year, net year and the year after that.”

Coaching

Can disappointment be a good thing? The 2003 season was supposed to be the year that Virginia Tech football roared to the top.

“There were a lot of expectations,” Randy King says. “The coaching staff said it was going to be the best team they’d ever had. Schedule-wise everything was set up for them. But after that West Vi. ginia loss everything went steadily down­hill for them. They had started off 6-0 and gotten to number three in the polls. It was just a train wreck from there on. A lot of things happened down the stretch that were very uncharacteristic of Virginia Tech football. The reason that happened goes from the players all the way up to the coaching staff.” 

The team finished 8-5. “It’s not like the bottom fell out,” Beamer said later. But in many ways it did.

In the aftermath of the debacle every phase of the program came under scrutiny. Was it the staff’s tactics and strat­egy? Was it recruiting and personnel? Was it the quarterback controversy that para­lyzed the team? Was it chemistry? Was it coaching? Was it heart? Or, worst of all, was it all of the above?

Each of the questions demanded its own answer, and some were startled when they looked into Beamer’s face afterward and saw a deep weariness.

“Frank’s had better times,” King says. In a moment of frustration during the West Virginia game, Beamer slapped receiver Ernest Wilford upside his hel­meted head, an act caught by ESPN’s cam­eras for a nationwide audience. It brought first raised eyebrows, then condemnation. 

‘I’m sure that was overblown,” King says. “If anybody knows Frank, he’s a nice, gentle guy. It would be the last thing he’d ever want to do, to disrespect a player. He apologized immediately. But if you got Frank away, I think he might tell you the coaching staff wasn’t as good as they’ve been.”

Beamer took over a program 17 years ago that had a laughable history in terms of going to bowls, the measure of success in college football. He’s coached the Hok­ies to 11 straight bowl games now and posted a 125-74-2 record in Blacksburg.

His coaching staff is a tight group that’s been together for years, except for the 2002 addition of Rogers. They were caught off guard when selfishness and pettiness divided the roster last year. For the first time ever, there was a sense com­ing out of the locker room that things had slipped from Beamer’s normally firm con­trol.

Beamer’s staff responded over the spring and summer with a renewed sense of purpose. Coaches and players began poring over tape of the team’s 1995 sea­son, viewed by many as the program’s hallmark, to look for clues on how to get back to what they wanted the program to be. 

“I remember covering that ’95 team,” King recalls. “They had a bunch of guys nobody wanted. J.C. Price, George Del Rico. They were just tough, physical guys who came out to play every game. Most of them were just old country boys who couldn’t believe they were getting the chance to play Division I football. They’re getting better recruits now, getting more talented recruits. But sometimes better recruits, they’re supposed to be better players. They’re not always better players.”

To emphasize the turnaround, this year’s Hokie squad was greeted during the first session of Tech summer school (sum­mer session is a way of life for Division I programs) with a withering conditioning program that sent a clear message: “No matter what happens, we’re going to have the legs to compete.”

“I sense a new fire in all of the coaches, and Coach Beamer especially,” Randall says, “I think this year he’s got a new agenda. We had some problems going on with individuals, some egos, some things going on internally with the team. Coach Beamer’s done a great job this year riding out those problems where he sees fit. Right now he’s been stressing so much that we·re gonna do things right. If you’re not gonna do them right, then we don’t need you on this team.”

Things seemed on track with the fresh start until July. Then Beamer used his scheduled welcome speech to open Tech’s second summer session to inform the team of Vick’s latest charges. The frus­tration was obvious among the players, according to those in attendance. The coach has never tried to pose as an inspir­ing speechmaker. Instead, he uses every opportunity to remind his players again and again of their responsibilities. He used this occasion to reemphasize his demands for a new team-first attitude.

“I think our biggest challenge is to have a great team chemistry, a really cohesive group,” Rogers offered. “In my heart of hearts, I think that’s what we were missing last year. You cannot have individual agendas. You have to have a total team effort, and that’s what we’re looking for.”

Mixed with the disappointment over Vick came the beginnings of relief.

“At least we know the cards we’re playing with now,” Rogers says. “The guys we got there now are solid. We know we can trust ’em.” 

Defense

This unit has been the heart of the Hokies’ pride. Last year it let them clown. “Bud Foster, some of the gleam has gone off of his star,” King says. “He’s been considered one of the best defensive coor­dinators in the country. They couldn’t stop anybody clown the stretch last year. The Insight.com Bowl was like watching an NBA game.”

Opponents in the Big East Conference had grown used to the Hokies’ aggressive style and learned how to make them pay for it. In the Insight game, the University of California did the same. In recent years, the Hokies had overplayed with huge pressure from their ends while relying on their corners to survive in single-man cov­erage.

They paid a price for it, and now Fos­ter has adjusted for the upcoming sched­ule. They’ll often drop into a two-high safety look, where the rover, the team’s well-known freelance defender, drops back to safety to provide more opportuni­ties for zone coverage. Now, Tech’s cor­ners won’t be so exposed.

The other issues involve personnel. Hard charging defensive end Jim Davis, who missed last season with a torn pectoral muscle, returns this year. The Hokies lost pressure on the quarterback last year, but Davis and his ability to get to the passer will change that.

The Hokies also had become weak up the middle, clue both to size up front and linebacking play. This year, two-year starter Brandon Manning has slipped to a support role, and two redshirt freshmen, Vince Hall and Xavier Adibi have moved into the mix, as has junior Blake Warren. They’ll push another returning starter, sen­ior Mikal Baaqee.

Will it all be enough? From what he saw in spring drills, Randall thinks so. “They confused me a little bit during the spring,” he admits with a grin. “I think they’re going to surprise people. Over the last couple of years I’ve been used to see­ing the same defense. Now they’re doing a lot of different schemes.” 

Most important, Randall, says, “They’re disguising their coverages pretty good before the snap. And they’re not just going out there and playing a couple of base coverages and trying to hit you up a lot.”

The reshuffling in the secondary moved senior Vincent Fuller from corner to safety, and junior Jimmy Williams from safety to corner. Senior Eric Green had his embarrassing moments last season after coming back from an injured year to play corner. The biggest news may be his big new approach in the offseason, filled with leadership, good attitude, and most impor­tant, a rediscovered ability to make big plays.

He’ll need to do that to help replace the big play capability of DeAngelo Hall, who left school early for the NFL.

Offense

Randall and the offense put up strong numbers for much of 2003, yet there’s no question for the need to open things up, especially with the ACC competition loom­ing. Unfortunately, the Vick factor comes into play here as well. After seeing their success in the Insight Bowl, the coaches were salivating at playing Vick and Ran­dall together.

“The idea of the double-pass and all the things they could do was going to drive defensive coordinators crazy,” explains a Hokie defender who faced the scheme during the spring.

Those plans are gone in a whiff of herb, and now there are help wanted signs hanging all over the unit. Fullback, traditionally a key component in the Hokies’ scheme, presents a huge vacancy.

To fill it, the coaching staff audi­tioned an array of players in the spring. “Eve1y time I turned around we had another guy in there,” Ran­dall said, laughing. “It’s like, ‘Where are they coming from?’ We’ve got to try to get them reps and get them used to the system.”

Apparently redshirt freshman John Kinzer has won the job, with incoming true freshman George Bell, a touted recruit coming off knee surgery, getting a look at backup duties.

The coaching staff, though, fig­ures to alter things a bit by going with a double-tight end set instead of relying so much on untested full­backs.

Running back poses similar questions with the departure of jun­ior Kevin Jones to the NFL. His backup, Cedric Humes is coming off a broken leg and just began run­ning again in July. Plus he has to over­come some fumbling difficulties. With Imoh, the backup and key third-down back, suspended for three games, depth here is a desperate situation.

How desperate? The coaches figure that receiver Justin Hamilton, a former back, could see time in the backfield.

Humes should be the featured back. At 230, he’s shown a solid ability between the tackles, but the hard news is that the backfield will show nothing that comes close to Jones’ breakaway speed.

Although Wilford, me school’s all-time leading receiver has gone on to the NFL, Randall is upbeat about his receivers.

“The group we have now is probably the best since I’ve been here, as far as speed, athleticism and catching the ball,” he says. “We have a lot of young guys — Josh Morgan and Justin Harper — they’ve both been catching the ball and running good routes. The upside I see is tremen­dous.”

The veterans include Hamilton, sopho­more David Clowney, often-injured senior Richard Johnson and redshirt freshman Josh Hyman. Randall likes to point out that former quarterback Chris Clifton ran a 4.3 in the 40-yard dash during the spring and could well be a factor this fall. 

The challenge at center will be replacing All-American center Jake Grove, a task that seems to have fallen to former walk­-on Will Montgomery, a guard last year.

“The thing is, he’s never played center before,” Randall says. “There’s no problem with the way he plays. I wouldn’t doubt him a second. He’s a tough guy. But with him never playing it before, the thing is the snap. We were having problems getting off the ball.”

The rest of the offensive line is anchored by tackles Jon Dunn and Jimmy Martin, returning starters who played well last year.

“We are trying to stress to the offensive line that they have to work together as a unit,” Randall says. “When you have that one breakdown it can be the difference between a 15-yard pass and a sack.”

The bottom line for the offense is that everywhere Randall turns, he finds young players learning a new system.

“There are gonna be some mistakes made by younger guys,” he says. “What I say to them is, ‘We’ve all been through it. You’re gonna make mistakes.’ It’s a lot to learn. I don’t think people realize how detailed things get out mere.”

If the Hokie faithful don’t realize it yet, they’re about to get the full picture. A few preseason college football guides have projected Tech to finish in the Top 25, but most have them no better man seventh or eighth in the newly revamped ACC.

The huge question is, how will the school’s demanding alumni handle a sea­son of adjustment? Will the Hokies labor again in Michael Vick’s shadow?

“They’ve got that trophy case up there in Jamerson Athletic Center waiting on that national title trophy,” Randy King says. “I don’t know if they’re ever going to fill it or not.”

So much of what happens in college football comes down to perception. The Hokies, of course, don’t have to win the national championship this season. They do, however, have to show that they’re going to be fierce about holding on to that lofty perch they’ve come to enjoy. In mat matter, much of their fate lies in the hands of the little quarterback who believes he can.

“We’ve got something to prove to a lot of people, and we’re young,” Randall says. “But the same time, we’ve got a talent base. We’ve got the leadership in the right positions to be successful. But everybody has to come along.”

There’s one other thing, of course. They have Bryan Randall. “I’m taking it upon my shoulders,” he says. There’s no hesitation, and his eyes are clear.