A Study In Decline: The Virginia Tech Hokies

Families are always rising and falling in America – Nathaniel Hawthorne.

From 2004-2011, the Virginia Tech Hokies won 10+ football games every year. The zenith of a program that was essentially willed into national relevance by head coach Frank Beamer who, over his 29 years, led the Hokies to national prominence, regional dominance, and a 238-121-2 record during his tenure.

That number is even more impressive when you consider that Beamer started out 24-40-2 over his first six years. After that, he won 72.5% of his games and never missed a bowl game.

Whether attributable to administrative patience, a belief in Beamer’s ultimate vision, or a simple of lack of funds and viable replacements, they stuck with Beamer and were paid off with 16 Top 25 AP finishes, 6 BCS games appearances, a national title game appearance, and 23 consecutive years of bowl games.

After 1993’s breakout season, and until 2015, anyone filling out a preseason Top 20 that omitted the Hokies would have been rightfully mocked. They were the steady metronome of college football. The only question year to year was whether to list them at #19 or #9.

Beamer built one of the great developmental programs of his era.

Blacksburg isn’t easy to get to, nor close to many population centers, and sits between talent-poor Appalachia and the athlete rich South, but Beamer owned the underrated and poorly scouted recruiting grounds of Tidewater and Hampton Roads, raided into the smaller cities of upper North Carolina selling grit and hard work, developed a cult around elite special teams and hard-nosed defense (a brand soon known as Beamer Ball), and built a fan culture that reveled in tight wins decided by a blocked punt and a fumble recovery.

It helped that the Hokies played in front of one of the boisterous and underrated home crowd environments in college football.

That success obscured the fact that in its infrastructure, Virginia Tech was the last program of the 1980s, perfectly calibrated to its narrow ecosystem, but incapable of leveling up in an evolving world of conference have and have nots, media rights, facilities wars, NIL, and revenue maximization.

Frank Beamer’s unique on-field genius allowed a poorly adapted program to live well past its useful life span.

When Beamer retired, his successor Justin Fuente rode Beamer’s fumes to a 19-8 record in his first two seasons before the bottom fell out. Fuente was replaced by Brent Pry who has also had little success.

Since 2018, what had been arguably the most reliable winning program in college football of the prior two and half decades is 41-46.

What happened? Was it simply the loss of a once-in-a-lifetime coach?

At one level, yes. The financial and organizational realities of college football caught up to a quaint personality cult.

But it also revealed a visionless, parasitic administration that squandered 25 years of success.

The whole idea of an upstart program is to use the lightning-in-a-bottle coach to build something more lasting. Virginia Tech not only didn’t do it, but they had administrators that appeared to not even understand that it was their job.

Beamer can be criticized for his role in not building out the larger program, but Beamer’s job was to win. The administration’s job was to turn those wins into a durable program and a future post-Beamer. They never even tried.

In 2018, Virginia Tech ranked 6th out 8 public ACC schools in sports administration expenditures and when Justin Fuente arrived, they had five total recruiting and operations staffers.

At the time, Clemson had 22.

When Fuente attempted even the mildest of reforms or reorganization, he was met with pushback and civil servant mindsets.

“We did it this way under Frank. Look at the results. You know better than him, hotshot?”

Fuente’s perceived ham-handedness was an unfortunate contrast to Beamer’s unpretentious approachability and charisma.

Virginia Tech football didn’t have a dining hall or a dedicated football building. They had to repurpose weights from the student recreation center.

Right now, the Cincinnati Bearcats – who have lost 250 million dollars over the last dozen years – have a larger assistant coach salary pool than Virginia Tech.

The revenues and social capital that Beamer had earned during their long streak of success were never reinvested in the product and they were plagued by an administration of notoriously horrific dealmakers.

For example, they negotiated Virginia Tech the worst Nike deal in college football – half that of cross-state Virginia and on par with the absolute dregs of the Power Five.

Virginia Tech was small-time football hidden behind a facade of winning.

Victory defeated them.

First in the Big East, then in the ACC, with a brand of high floor football and maniacal effort that virtually guaranteed wins over numerous sisters of the poor. This was the time to level up into something more, but it never occurred to them.

Even during Beamer’s tenure, the ACC’s emerging power – Clemson – were 7-0 against the Hokies since 2011. Once sleepy Clemson was playing an increasingly cutting edge brand of football with elite supportive administrative structures. The Hokies scored over 17 points against them only once in those seven straight losses.

Instead of seeing them as a model worthy of emulation or inspiring some self-reflection, they reveled in their wins over Wake Forest and East Carolina, even as the athletes from Virginia’s poor back roads that they’d built the program on were being raided by Penn State and various national recruiters. No more secret recruiting grounds that only the Hokies knew how to unlock.

Frank Beamer had built an environment where Frank Beamer could thrive in a certain time and place. No Virginia Tech administrator considered that they might have a program post-Beamer that would have to learn to compete in a different ecosystem.

It was all laid bare virtually overnight. A program that once embodied a guaranteed bowl game and a winning record is now a national afterthought. Not even relevant enough to taunt.

Virginia Tech is a great cautionary tale. Evolve or die. Rise or fall. There is no stasis.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a platitude espoused by the self-satisfied and visionless who imagine an immutable world. They can’t fathom that every product requires constant proactive maintenance, if not periodic creative destruction.

We’ll see more of them.