Character Counts

Before the 1995 season, Virginia Tech made a controversial decision to ally itself wholeheartedly with ESPN’s newest brainstorm: NCAA football on Thursday nights. The last 11 years have seen Tech leverage this usually-exclusive venue into a major boom in the program’s visibility. For all that can be said about ESPN, they’re loyal to their friends; Thursday night appearances led to more Saturday slots, which led to a quarterback named Michael, who brought GameDay in 1999, which generated a higher national profile, more interest, and greater appreciation for the football program of a once little-known school in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. As time passed, praise kept rolling in, the players kept getting better, and the coach became essentially unquestionable.

That visibility finally backfired in the fourth quarter last Thursday night, when the questions came hard and fast from ESPN color commentator Kirk Herbstreit. Watching an undisciplined Hokie team commit four personal fouls during a 22-3 implosion against Boston College, Herbstreit condemned the change in character of Hokie teams post-Michael Vick. He noted the Hokie coaches’ prior ability to meld a strong team out of unheralded pieces, and by comparison condemned the egos that came with Tech’s post-Vick access to more-talented, but NFL-focused and self-centered players — and the coaching staff’s inability to control those players. He then pointed out that the only time since 2000 the Hokies had finished a season strongly, leadership came from a player: senior quarterback Bryan Randall in 2004. Herbstreit finally excoriated the lack of leadership on this year’s team, conveniently illustrated during that fourth quarter by junior linebacker Vince Hall and senior rover Aaron Rouse nearly coming to blows on the sidelines and senior safety Brenden Hill dancing on the field to the BC band’s rendition of Sweet Caroline as the Hokies’ run defense took a late-game pounding. Herbstreit is no Hokie hater; far from it, he practically begged coach Frank Beamer to re-establish the discipline and character he’d seen in his early visits to Blacksburg, even appealing to Beamer’s family watching at home to try to make sure his message got through.

I wish I had something to say in Tech’s defense. I don’t, though. He’s right.

One segment of this issue that needs to be explored is the regional angle. A Tech coach was quoted off the record last year as saying that most of the Hokies’ discipline problems tend to come from one area code; a cursory roster scan can tell you he’s talking about Hampton Roads’s 757. Many of Tech’s NFL draftees of the past five years have come out of this area; unfortunately, their arrogance often matches their talent. There’s a Nike billboard overlooking Interstate 64 in Hampton just a few miles from the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel: a forty-foot-wide shot of Michael Vick in his Warwick High School uniform. The message is clear to every high-school kid crossing the water, and their attitudes in Blacksburg reflect it, from DeAngelo Hall to Jimmy Williams to (yes) Marcus Vick. Acting up off the field is a sign of stupidity; acting up on the field is a sign of selfishness, and that goes for demonstrations to the crowd as well as personal fouls. Is it limited to 757 kids? No, and nor is it universal in the Tidewater region — Randall’s from Williamsburg. Is it disproportionately centered on that area? Yes.

The longer this problem lasts, the more it affects results on the field. The 2003 collapse (opened 6-0, closed 2-5, with one of those two on a missed extra point by Temple) was directly attributed to intra-team dissension. An even bigger problem now is referees’ perceived need to establish control over our team, which shows up in heavy, tight, disproportionate penalties early in games. We saw some of that in the Gator Bowl, but the actions of one bowl crew from the Big XII aren’t nearly as detrimental as the establishment of consistent patterns with ACC crews we will see year after year. Attitude counts here too, not just in-play fouls; woofing over the prone ball-carrier you just tackled, or waving your arms to the crowd on every play, are actions that tell refs you don’t think you’re responsible to anyone but yourself. When multiple players on a team act that way, refs have one way to send a message, and they use it; when players can’t see past themselves to read that message, they start “making the fouls count.” That, in my opinion, is the real root of Tech’s penalty problems this season.

The coaching staff could control all of this. The first step is keeping the biggest malcontents out of orange and maroon entirely: not recruiting them. Some crack-ups are unavoidable, to be sure, but with all their time in the business, the Hokie coaches ought to be decent judges of high school football players’ character by now. Other top-25 schools keep these problems to a minimum, and if that means we skip some top-rated in-state recruits, fine. Character counts, and a full scholarship to Virginia Tech and a roster spot on its football team are privileges that must be earned through more than a 4.3 40. The next step, though, is a serious discipline program in Blacksburg. New initiatives are announced year after year, and not one outlasts the initial media blitz before we punch loopholes in it the size of a run-stopping defensive tackle. Players know it, fans know it, media know it, and it’s time it stop.

Can it stop quickly? No. Programs operate on five-year cycles. Would we see some immediate results, though? Yes, within a year — most likely through a small group of high-profile transfers to Hampton University or another I-AA school, and several high-profile Hampton Roads recruits heading to North Carolina. That’s fine.

But will we even try? Probably not. And that’s the most depressing conclusion I’ve reached about Virginia Tech football since a rainy day nine months ago in Jacksonville.