This is uncharted territory for Virginia Tech fans, including myself. Despite the nice language in this morning’s press release, Tech has fired head coach Justin Fuente. This marks the first time since the end of the 1977 season that VT has outright fired a football coach, when they canned Jimmy Sharpe. That was before I was alive, and before many of you were alive, so I’m afraid there’s very little perspective that I can add.

“But wait…didn’t Tech fire Bill Dooley in 1986?” – those of you who go back to the 80s.

Well, it’s hard to say. Here’s a good read from Will Stewart during his “A Year Of Our Discontent” series from 2005. Dooley served as Tech’s athletics director and head football coach. Yes, it was different times. As head football coach, Dooley went 64-38-1 from 1978 through 1986, but he had financially mismanaged the athletic department and donations were dropping due to his relationship with certain big donors.

As Will’s article states, we’ll never know for sure whether Dooley was fired as both athletics director and football coach, or only as athletics director. But I’m certain that 64-38-1 wouldn’t have gotten you fired as head coach at Tech in the 1980s. It’s certainly possible that Tech’s impending probation played a role; that said, no matter how you slice it, Dooley was not fired in any capacity for the team’s performance on the football field.

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