Slow Finish Puts Damper on Great Class
by Will Stewart, HokieCentral.com, 2/3/00

(See also The Class of 2000 by the Numbers, by James Arthur)

As is so often the case in athletics, and in particular with recruiting, the question begs to be asked: is the glass half full or half empty? As Hokie fans, coaches, and recruiting pundits look over Tech’s 2000 recruiting class, the answer is a little bit of both.

This class is a good one that features four of The Roanoke Times Top 10 recruits, a total that would be cause for celebration in any other year, and in fact, it’s cause for celebration this year. This class also includes Tech’s best recruit ever, if you go by the recruiting rankings – Richard Johnson, a DB/WR from Milford Mill High School in Baltimore, Maryland (more on Johnson later).

That’s why the glass is half full. Why is it half empty?

It’s half-empty because the Hokies landed only three recruits in the last four weeks of recruiting, an unusually poor finish for Tech, and because Tech lost out on a number of big recruits late and failed to capitalize on the euphoria and exposure of the Sugar Bowl appearance. It’s also half-empty because they missed out on some big-name recruits in two major areas of need: defensive tackle and tailback.

But Virginia Tech recruiting classes have never been Top 25 stuff. Past Hokie classes have ranked Top 30, at best, and yet despite that, Tech is now one of the top football teams in the country, often beating teams that have had higher ranked recruiting classes. And again, on paper, this class is as good or better than the ’98 and ’99 classes.

Each recruiting year is a dramatic soap opera of sorts that only ends partially on signing day. Even after the kids sign their letters of intent (LOI’s) the sub-plots continue. Will they all qualify? Will they report injury free? Will they stay at Tech all four years?

Nothing makes for good drama like the development and evolution of a recruiting class. Each year, 20-25 kids announce their intention to attend Virginia Tech (more, if you count the walk-ons), and from that point on, tracking their progress, or lack thereof, contains more twists, turns, and intrigue than a season’s worth of Days of our Lives.

It all makes for great fun. Most of the time.

When a class signs, there is only one way to evaluate it – by using the recruiting rankings. And by those measures, this is one of Tech’s best recruiting classes ever, and it features Tech’s top recruit, ever.

Cornwell’s system is now in its fifth year, going back to 1996. Here’s how Virginia Tech fared in his system for the last five years:

(Note that Tyrone Robertson intentionally failed to graduate from high school to get out of his letter of intent and never attended Tech.  He is down at the University of Georgia now.)

So you can see from Cornwell’s numbers that the class of 2000, when evaluated by the number of top players that it contains, is Tech’s second or third best class ever, depending upon how you perceive his rankings. Using these rankings, this class beats 1996 and 1997, and even 1999 (by a small margin). It does not, however, top the 1998 Vick/Suggs/Houseright class that landed 6 players from Cornwell’s list.

And it goes without saying that simply ticking off the top names in a class is not necessarily a good measure of how good that class is. One true measure of a class is its depth, and that is not easily determined by simply evaluating the top prospects. A class might have six All-Americans and nothing else, so that doesn’t mean it’s a good class. Like most ranking systems, Cornwell’s is sometimes little more than a fun exercise.

But the Tech coaches will tell you that the true measure of success in recruiting is how many kids were signed that were on the staff’s "A-List" at the beginning of the year. That’s great, but the Tech coaches don’t exactly go around publishing their A-List, so we’re left to guess at what it could be.

But I personally am willing to guess that with the exception of a small handful of kids, nearly every recruit this year was on the coaches’ A-List. Typically, the B-List players are some of the ones who earn scholarships down at the very end, when some of the A-List players don’t pan out.

Speaking of A-List players not panning out…

Even more exciting than the commitments from those players was the fact that Tech was highly rumored to be the favorite for #1 Brandon Royster and #4 Maurice Shanks, giving the Hokies a legitimate shot at signing an unprecedented six of the top ten players in the state of Virginia, including #1.

In addition, the Hokies were in on a number of heavy hitters out of state, and indeed, this year was supposed to be the year where Tech focused their recruiting efforts more heavily than normal out of state, due to a perceived "down" year in in-state talent.

So a recruiting class that yielded a bumper crop of highly-rated verbal commitments early had the potential to easily be Tech’s best year ever, without question. As the football season started and the Hokies rolled up victory after victory on their way to a national championship game appearance, the momentum that the Tech program was building promised to sweep up a recruiting class full of future stars in its wake.

For the first time, the Hokies were on the verge of a Top 15 recruiting class nationally, perhaps even Top 10.

Alas, the big finish never happened, and instead, the Hokies fizzled out and ended the year not with a bang, but a whimper. Shortly after the Sugar Bowl, on January 6^th, the Hokies received a verbal from DE/TE Jason Lallis from DeMatha High School, and at the time, Lallis was perceived as the first of a likely flood of January commitments that the Hokies would receive from players who were basking in the glow of Tech’s Sugar Bowl appearance.

Instead, after the Lallis commitment, the Hokies suddenly had a hard time getting players to commit. One by one, the names dropped off the board, as targets committed elsewhere. The expected flood of commitments never materialized, and in the last four weeks of recruiting, the Hokies landed only three more players, FUMA DL James Davis, WVU decommit Eric Green (who fell into Tech’s lap), and Channing Reed, a second-team All-American defensive tackle from Montgomery Community College in Rockville, Md. Davis was an A-list recruit for Tech and a great catch, but Eric Green was a surprise, and Reed wasn’t even on the radar screen of those who followed Hokies’ recruiting.

Tech had grown used to finishing strong in recruiting in recent years, so the inability to close the deal in the last month left a bad taste in many Tech fans’ mouths. In 1998, Tech finished by getting commitments from Michael Vick, Lee Suggs, and Jake Houseright in the last week, and in 1999, the Hokies landed Andrae Harrison, Nathaniel Adibi, and Keith Willis in the last week.

All six of those players were listed in the Roanoke Times Top 10 for their respective years, so Tech coaches and fans had grown accustomed to landing big-name in-state players in the final week of recruiting. It’s no wonder that this year’s poor finish, which included losing #1 Brandon Royster and #4 Maurice Shanks, has caused fans to grumble.

But to characterize this class as a poor recruiting class is way off the mark, and indeed, only the most uneducated of fans would venture to label this class a disappointment (and in their defense, although HCMB posters are upset about the slow finish, they’re not labeling this class a disappointment). It’s a good class, stocked with a handful of big recruits, just like the 1998 and 1999 classes, which are perceived to be Tech’s best classes ever. This class of 2000 ranks right up there with the ’98 and ’99 classes, poor finish notwithstanding.

One thing that’s different between this year and previous years is the success the Hokies had on the field. Many Hokie fans think that the on-field success should have translated into similar recruiting success immediately, causing the Hokies to start landing top 20 or top 10 recruiting classes, but there’s one way in which the success may have actually hurt the Hokies in the short term.

For much of the months of December and January, Tech’s Frank Beamer was on the road, traveling. In prior years, he was on the road recruiting, but this year, he was attending numerous award banquets with Corey Moore and Michael Vick, as well as picking up loads of trophies as the National Coach of the Year.

Think about it. In any given year, Coach Beamer might have one star player that is up for national-level awards. But this year, not only did he have two with Vick and Moore, but he himself was taking in more hardware than Home Depot. The multiple award show appearances, including the Heisman Trophy presentation in New York, were a serious drain on Beamer’s time at an important juncture in recruiting.

During the critical December/January time frame when many head coaches are wowing the recruits with home visits, Beamer was busy appearing at awards shows. And don’t forget that the bowl game the Hokies played in this year was January 4^th, two days after the next-latest bowl, and in many cases a week or more after many other coaches were done with their seasons and could get back to recruiting.

Take the case of Derek Wake. The DeMatha defensive lineman, highly sought after by Tech and others, had Tech on his radar screen but eventually committed to Penn State. Most observers think Wake never really seriously considered Tech, and a look at his Rivals100.com database entry supports that theory. He mentions Tech over and over in the interviews that are posted on Rivals100, but whenever he mentions a favorite, it’s always Penn State.

And the night of January 5^th, while the Hokies were still recovering from their January 4^th Sugar Bowl appearance, Joe Paterno himself was in Wake’s living room, meeting with him and his family. On that day, Beamer was in transit between the Sugar Bowl and Houston, where he received the Bear Bryant award for coach of the year on the night of January 6^th.

Yes, Wake was a PSU lean and probably would have committed to them anyway, but it’s quite possible that Paterno’s visit finally put Wake over the edge. What if the situations had been reversed, and Paterno had been the one coaching in the national championship game and flying around to pick up coaching awards? Could Beamer have snuck in a visit to Wake and swung him over to Tech?

We’ll never know. In recruiting, there is often a fine line between getting a commitment and not getting one, and it’s very often the little things that make the difference. It’s interesting to note that Tech’s recruiting momentum seemed to slow at the very same time that Beamer began making his travels to award shows for himself, Corey Moore, Michael Vick, and the Sugar Bowl.

Certainly, you can’t second-guess Beamer here. He has to travel with Vick and Moore to support them. History – and many other observers -- would not be too kind to a coach who skipped a visit to New York with his Heisman Trophy candidate, for example. And he has to pick up the coaching awards. It would be unkind to snub those who are honoring you, and the coaching awards are an investment in the future that builds his reputation up to a level that approaches those of the top coaches in the game.

And that Sugar Bowl thing was a can’t-miss for the head coach.

Since I’m not privy to Frank Beamer’s day-to-day travels and recruiting visits, I can’t do anything more than just wonder if his loaded schedule crimped his recruiting. But how often does the Coach of the Year have the Defensive Player of the Year and the Offensive Player of the Year on his team? Beamer will likely never see that again in his lifetime, and it’s probably a good thing for both his health and the Hokies’ recruiting.

The good news is, as I said, the travels paid off. Beamer is now a certified college coaching celebrity.

One coach I spoke to during the recruiting process this year said bluntly, "They (Tech) better not forget what got them where they are."

This coach was specifically speaking of the Hokies’ talent for finding and developing diamonds in the rough. He was implying that despite the Sugar Bowl appearance, Tech’s national reputation in recruiting is not such that they can start going after the same recruits as the big names (Tennessee, Michigan, Notre Dame, et al) with the hopes of landing a large portion of them.

But that doesn’t mean that the Hokies don’t want blue-chippers. Tech’s formula for success since the ball really started rolling in 1993 has been to surround a few national-caliber blue-chip recruits with home-grown projects to create a cohesive, hard-working team with great chemistry. The blue-chippers include Cornell Brown, Maurice DeShazo, and Michael Vick, and the home-grown projects … well, they’re a cast of thousands.

Every program needs blue-chip difference-makers, though. Without them, no team can succeed at the highest levels. But the Hokies are in a transitional phase in their program’s history right now, trying to make the jump from rising program to national power, and it would be a huge mistake for Tech to assume that they have already reached the destination and start trying to recruit like they have.

Tech is slowly, year-by-year, making the move, but the fact is, they are still a newcomer with very little national football tradition, a mid-level conference, and a small football stadium that doesn’t exactly blow away the recruits. But Beamer and his staff know all this. They’ll continue to do what got them here, and they’ll grab their blue-chippers where they can. And hopefully, some day, the Hokies will be able to sign mostly blue-chippers. But that day is at least several years away, maybe more.

Success on the field has some immediate off-the-field payoffs, but most of the off-the-field payoffs, such as recruiting, are delayed. A Sugar Bowl appearance this year doesn’t necessarily sway one of this year’s recruits to attend Tech. Many of the big recruits that Tech was battling for late in the process didn’t have Tech on their list early in the year and weren’t really serious about Tech at all. They were just attracted to Tech by all the hype.

But the Sugar Bowl appearance did make a huge impression on a bunch of ten-to-seventeen year olds who will be coming up through the recruiting ranks in the next decade. To a lot of young kids, many of whom had no knowledge of college football, the name "Virginia Tech" is now solidly imprinted on their brains, and they’ll never forget it. And that will pay off in the coming years.

For nearly the entire decade of the 90’s, the UVa Cavaliers dominated in-state recruiting, and I think a lot of that success can be traced back to the #1 ranking they achieved in 1990. There was a lot of hype and hoopla surrounding that season for UVa, at a time when Tech was more or less floundering. UVa’s emergence onto the national scene had a huge impact in the minds of young kids across the state, and that, along with some other factors, was largely responsible for the Hoos landing more of the top in-state players for years.

In the coming years, with the 2000 Sugar Bowl appearance and the constant hype surrounding Michael Vick adding to the momentum, the Hokies should have a good foot in the door with many of the young kids around the state and around the region.

Tech isn’t used to getting visits from the #1 recruit in the state, much less signing him. HokieCentral has archives of Doug Doughty’s Top 25 lists going all the way back to 1988, and out of those thirteen lists (including Doug’s Top 25 of 2000), only two #1 players ever visited Tech: Royster and Anthony Poindexter from Jefferson Forest High School, back in 1994. Poindexter, of course, chose UVa, and went on to star for the Cavaliers at safety.

This year’s #1 was running back Brandon Royster from Fairfax, and for the first time in a long time, the #1 recruit in the state gave Tech a serious look. Royster’s teammate and friend, Mike Daniels, committed to Tech early in the recruiting process, which was thought to help Tech, and Royster made many favorable comments about the Hokies along the way.

The "buzz" on Royster had him favoring Tech all along. He wants to be an engineering student, and Tech boasts one of the best engineering schools in the country, so things looked good for the Hokies.

But Royster shocked almost everyone when he signed with Stanford, and immediately, the puzzled questions began. Among other things, Hokie fans wondered why in the world Royster would pick a school so far away, particularly one that features the passing game and not the running game. You can’t argue that Royster picked a great academic school, but football-wise, you were left to wonder what went into his thinking.

The short answer (and we’re dipping into the rumor mill here) is "family." Royster was born on the West Coast, and word is that his mother still has family out there. More importantly, although Brandon was rumored to favor Virginia Tech and its engineering program, his mother didn’t hold Tech in high regard academically and pushed him towards Stanford. And indeed, she made some comments in the wake of his visit to Stanford in which she positively gushed about Stanford’s academics and the professors they met while she and Brandon were out there.

We’ll never know how much Brandon wanted to go to Tech, and we’ll never know how much his mother swayed him. But I’m betting that the answer is "a lot," in both cases.

In any case, landing the #1 recruit in the state would have been a huge coup for Tech. It would have broken a decades-long stranglehold on the #1 recruit by UVa and out-of-state schools. Equally importantly, it would have given the Hokies their only running back recruit of the year, following Shyrone Stith’s defection to the NFL.

Tech is becoming thin at the running back position, having recruited zero players there in 1999 and 2000. That’s right – the Hokies’ last tailback recruits were Lee Suggs and Keith Burnell, back in 1998. Sure, those two are good running backs, but a team can’t go a full two years without recruiting a single player for a given position.

Two years in a row with no recruits at a position is a bad thing, no matter how you slice it. So not only does missing out on Brandon Royster mean the loss of a great student-athlete and the corresponding public relations windfall, but it also means the Hokies pull on 0-fer at a key position for the second year in a row.

Every year, I try to figure out why the recruiting process fascinates so many of us, and every year, I come to different conclusions, but in a way, those conclusions are actually all the same.

It’s the people. The kids. They fascinate us. Nothing is more interesting than an unfinished story, and each one of these kids is exactly that. We have no way of knowing where their lives and football careers will go from here.

Will we be watching them play in the NFL six years from now, or will we be sitting around scratching our chins and asking questions like, "Hey, you remember that kid Demetrius Smith that signed with us back in 2000? He was supposed to be good, but he never even played a down at Tech. I wonder what ever happened to him….?"

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