...The VT Offense in the years after '98. We had an offensive coaching staff that just plain wasted a lot of talent. The offenses should have been much more productive. I love Beamer, but his refusal to address the Not-Ready-For-Primetime-Spring offense problems held back the program in the early to mid-2000's.

The next is recruiting, with a few different thoughts. One, 'Bama and the like have massive budgets and can easily afford national recruiting. They also have a brand recognition that we don't. VT is well respected, but we aren't on the level of 'Bama and their peers in that recognition.

Next recruiting thought is when we had the chance to get a better national recruiting profile after '99, we didn't take it. Beamer was right when he said if you could clean up within 6 hrs of Blacksburg, you could compete for National Championships. The problem is he said it out loud, and other schools noticed the success he was having. They started paying more attention, and now FSU, Clemson, tOSU, etc. pilfer the best talent.

It's also harder to find the sleeper guys that get overlooked. In today's environment, top talents don't slip by the notice of the big boys anymore. Between that, and they've taken a good chunk of their increased revenues to devoted it to support personnel to help find all the good talent, they just don't miss guys anymore.

Add in all the times we shit the bed in big games. All those bowl games like Kansas, UGA, Michigan, Boise State, etc. where we clearly choked. Those hurt at a critical time and prevented us from landing the recruits we needed to stay at the ACC top or step up to the next level. IIRC, it was mainly the offense shitting itself that led to those losses, so see prior comment above.

Final thought - we've done very well with the Washington Defense. But it's not a scheme run in the NFL a lot. I think the scheme hurts recruiting. Bud's a great coach, I have a feeling if he were to switch up to something that was a closer to match to what they do in the NFL, I bet he could run it and produce top defenses just fine.

These days, we also aren't exactly playing an exciting conference slate. We're playing a variation of the old Big East again, without WVU, and an up and down non conference slate. I like the games against Penn State, Wisky, etc. that we have scheduled, but it's still tough to line up a decent schedule in our current conference division. Miami is about the most interesting team on the slate regularly, and both VT and Miami need to up their game to make it a compelling draw for viewers, exposure, and therefore recruits again. Heading up to Pittsburgh, Syracuse, etc. - it's just not sexy enough for recruits these days.

So that's it - wasted opportunities to step up in the past, in a bad conference division, don't have the recruiting budget that 'Bama and Clemson now support, and while still well respected, not considered a sexy spot to go on a football scholarship.