1) Should Power 5 schools form farm systems with smaller schools in the era of NIL and the Transfer Portal? Andy kind of talked about this on the podcast concerning Middle Tennessee State regarding football. But, does it make sense for VT to form alliances, formal or informal, with smaller universities to be a recommended source for their players who enter the Transfer Portal? For instance, VT has taken talent from Radford University in multiple sports (baseball, women’s basketball, etc.). In return maybe the smaller schools, could be a direction the coaches steer players who should play down a level or a place we could stowaway recruits who need more seasoning and can “call up” later like how the postgrad schools used to work for VT. – RUHokie

Chris Coleman: I don’t think anything like that can exist formally. There is so much coaching turnover these days. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Virginia Tech had a partnership with Appalachian State and they made such an agreement because the Tech staff knew the Mountaineers ran similar schemes. It’s easier to take a portal guy from a team that runs a similar scheme. That makes sense, in theory. Maybe there’s an agreement with the Appalachian State staff that they would recommend Virginia Tech as a possible destination to any portal departures of the prerequisite talent level.

But how long would a partnership like that last? Coaches come and go, and schemes change. Three years from now, the Mountaineers could be running a completely different scheme and the partnership wouldn’t make any sense.

Things are better off being informal, and it should be about coaching relationships rather than school relationships. For example, the Middle Tennessee thing. The Virginia Tech coaching staff has a tremendous amount of respect for former Middle Tennessee head coach Rick Stockstill, who was recently fired after 18 years (that’s why Sam Brumfield was in the portal). They know what they are getting when they sign a guy who was coached by Stockstill. In fact, they call him directly to find out! But that’s over now, because Stockstill is out of a job.

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