VT-ECU short shots

It’s cliché to say this was a different football Saturday than ever before in Blacksburg, but it’s the truth. So all criticism, particularly of first-half play, should be taken with the caveat that I expect smarter, more-focused play in every other game this year.

That said, 17-7 was a far cry from the score we expected from a Virginia Tech-East Carolina game, and we need to discuss why. ECU was a bowl team last year, and has a defense that would be mid-tier at worst in the ACC, but 34 yards rushing is unacceptable from any Virginia Tech team.

Offensive line was a known problem going into the season. Sergio Render aside, it remains so. Branden Ore didn’t seem completely on his game, but the OL was pushed at least two yards deep by the time he got the ball on each play. The most effective run plays were misdirections; the rest were almost completely useless. Pass blocking was marginally better, but Sean Glennon will still need to improve his throws on the run in order to maximize his opportunities.

Speaking of Glennon, had his first pass gone incomplete rather than been intercepted, the postgame impression would have been of a solid day under heavy pressure. 22-of-33 for 245 yards, 1TD/1INT is tough to argue with. The problems were the complete lack of run-game production to complement Glennon’s arm, and the resultant lack of sustained drives, which forced the defense to stay on the field longer than they’re used to. Through the third quarter, ECU held the ball for 25:37 to Tech’s 17:14. That fatigue cost yards, but thankfully only 7 points.

But, since Michigan helpfully provided a major distraction to the general football public, a win’s a win. We learn more about the OL this weekend, and our entire ACC schedule remains ahead of us. A loss against LSU we can take if it teaches us a lesson for the conference schedule.

And a win? Well, I’d take that too.

Roundabout: Soccer, Shootings, Senate, FOOTBALL

In which Josh takes a brief spin around the bloggable items in his head this evening.

Soccer

Rob tipped me off yesterday to the latest English column critical of MLS and its handling of David Beckham, by Martin Samuel of The Times. Unlike most of its genre, though, it’s actually well-thought-out (which I would expect, since it was Rob that sent it to me) and merits a response.

I can confess to being at least as confused as Samuel at the post-Beckham proliferation of coverage of MLS in the English press. The league is getting better and pulling in more stars, but it’s barely more newsworthy in the English context than, say, the Portuguese or Greek domestic leagues. They care about Beckham’s fitness for international play, and that’s all, which is fair; the variety of Premiership jerseys in my closet is entirely based on the wanderings of Claudio Reyna, Brad Friedel and Tim Howard. But the other problem is that, since Beckham plays for the Los Angeles Galaxy, the public face of MLS management in Britain is Alexi Lalas. For those of you not up on your American soccer history, consider Lalas as GM the equivalent of your favorite team in another sport hiring, say, David Wells, Sterling Sharpe, or Jeremy Roenick. He’s always been an entertaining commentator because he’s opinionated and unconcerned with public reaction. But that doesn’t make him an intelligent manager, and does make him an awful ambassador. I’ve said all along that I don’t mind having Beckham in MLS, it’s just a shame he had to go to such an incompetent organization as L.A. The image Lalas projects to an international audience is why.

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Resurfacing

The definitive quote on blog disappearances has to go to Evan Kirchhoff of 101-280, from the title of his post last Wednesday:

I Never Quit, I Just Made 124 Unrelated Daily Decisions To Not Post Something

Well said. I only got into the twenties, but that’s long enough. Let’s review the past month.

• Toronto: quality trip, if too short. There’s nothing that beats going to see the Stanley Cup as a fan of the champs. Also notable was the dress code of the lower level at the Air Canada Centre during the Maple Leafs-Lightning game I attended: a truly shocking number of men in suit and tie. I recognize that (a) Leafs games are the gold standard of sporting event tickets in Canada, requiring both fantastic seniority and fantastic amounts of money to purchase season seats, and (b) Canadian business dress standards are rather more conservative than those in America. But even given that data, I would have expected some of the denizens of the yellow seats to have changed to team attire for the game, as I’ve seen in Montreal at the Canes-Habs games I’ve attended there. Nope — there were more ties there than in the Hoo student section for a football game these days.
• Holidays: fun, if a lot of driving. We did at least two hours of driving every day of Christmas week save Christmas itself and Saturday in Atlanta.
• Oh yeah, Atlanta: well, it was fun other than the fourth quarter! The QB position needs to be open in spring practice, but I think we underestimated how much of a road game this was. Glennon only played in two challenging road environments all season, Boston College and Miami, and his performance in this game showed it. He’s a sophomore, though. He’ll get better — or he’ll get benched.

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2006 football in pictures

In lieu of actual blog posts, a few pictures from the last half of the football season…

Groves Stadium at Wake Forest, before Tech’s 27-6 triumph. The crowd was at least 35%-40% Hokies.

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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.