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Synaesthesia

Joined: 07/25/2008 Posts: 5017
Likes: 1729


Having players drafted off a 6-7 team would've been a worse indictment


Even though it's been said many time, I guess people don't like it because it's only a backward-looking confirmation, not a forward-looking prediction, but the penultimate measure of much talent a team had is how many players they had drafted.

There was a 3-year span in the mid 2000s, I believe from 2005-2007, where the only programs in the country with more players drafted were Texas and Southern Cal. It's no surprise that's right there in the heart of Virginia Tech's prime years. In fact you could even make the argument that they actually underperformed a little, considering how good those other 2 programs were at the time.

The lower number of players drafted from 2012 onward, the erratic/inconsistent counts YoY (some years had very few, even 0, others had a respectable amount) fits hand-in-glove with the performance of the program.

It's almost entirely about talent, and not nearly as much about coaching. Aggressively mediocre coaches with supreme talent can dominate and win national titles (e.g., Dennis Erickson at Miami). One of the most persistent myths of the Beamer era is that they were taking 2 star talent and developing it into 4 star results. In the overwhelming majority of cases though, these players were only rated so low because they were undiscovered. I.e., they didn't turn into 4 stars, they always would have been 4 stars if they had played at a name-brand high school, they were merely undiscovered in an era where there wasn't a video camera attached to every cell phone and people as a whole were still dumb as hell about the Internet.

Virginia Tech's 10-win season run lasted from 2004 through 2011. Facebook came out in 2004, but was restricted to .edu addresses only until 2006. Youtube first appeared in 2005. The first iPhone came out in 2007, smartphone market penetration went from about 20% to 50% by 2012. Virginia Tech demonstrated the level and abundance of talent that existed in the state at the same time the technology trends vastly extended the geographic reach of the largest and richest programs in the country, and it's no surprise we found ourselves in the present situation. Their recruiting edge back then was secrecy, an asymmetry of information, an arbitrage opportunity. That's all gone now, though, the state gets strip-mined by every major program with far more money to spend.

The last remaining edge Virginia Tech has is a gadget defense that can occasionally make use of players who don't fit as well into other teams, and an offensive system that only needs elite players at a few key positions (but they really, really need to be there), instead of across the board like a typical pro-style offense.

(In response to this post by SHPHOKIE)

Posted: 04/28/2019 at 11:04AM



+2

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