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Note from Will:  this piece was originally sent out to approximately 250 A-Line subscribers.  I told Jim how much I liked it, and he gave me permission to use it on HokieCentral.  Thanks, Jim!

As we Hokies bask in the Music City Bowl win, a victory of both the team and the fans, and Frank has danced perhaps his last waltz with other schools and our Athletic Department, it is interesting to note one comment. Following the press conference where Frank announced that while the golf at Myrtle Beach may be nice, it wasn't that bad in Blacksburg and Bristol either and he was staying at Tech, Jim Weaver made the comment of "Our goal at Virginia Tech is to win a national championship in football." This comment has been repeated several times and has shown up in most of the state's media. The question that pops to mind is: can we win an MNC at Tech, and how do we do it?

I would guess the answer to the former, at this moment, is no. Winning the MNC requires much luck. God knows Tennessee had it. I would suggest a more relevant question would be could we become a consistent top 10 team, which would give us the opportunity to compete for it every year? Again I would answer no. Dave Braine in 1988 stated a 10-year goal to make Virginia Tech a top 25 program by 1998. This succeeded, and the ride brought us some pretty good moments. To take the next step and become a top 10 program by 2008 will be a little tougher. College football is increasingly about money, and, right now, we are not generating enough. A glance down any poll's top ten and a comparison with the Kansas City Star's compilations of who spends what in Division I reveals that virtually all of the schools at the top of one also occupy space at the top of the other. While we are near or only one more Weaver-inspired fundraising trip around the state the top of the bargain basement Big East, we are only in the middle of the ACC and in the bottom tier of the SEC. To paraphrase Napoleon, God is on the side of the bigger budgets, and we need a bigger one.

Winning football is about recruiting. We have gotten a lot of mileage out of some lesser recruits who prospered under Mike Gentry and the coaching staff. But, the recruiting in the early Nineties that netted JC Price, Jay Hagood, Cornell Brown, Torrian Gray and quite a few others resulted in trips to the Sugar and Orange bowls, while some recruiting misses, most notably in 1994, have yielded trips to the Gator and Music City. We need better players, and while there are better athletes, at least, preparing to move through the program, we need more. Next year's class of redshirt freshmen contains the most highly regarded and the best athletes ever to attend Tech. It is realistic to expect that we can make a run into the top 10 in 2001-2. The class behind it is not going to contain that kind of quality from top to bottom, in part because that high number of players was not available in Virginia this year. It can also be assumed that we will see in 2003 a slight drop off similar to what we have seen the last two years after the recruiting misses of 1994. Vick and Company may take us there, but it seems unlikely we will stay.

There may be indications that recruiting in the state of Virginia is maxing out. While there continues to be and will always continue to be high school players who elect to leave the state, for the most part Tech and that school up the road fathered, among other things, by Mr. Jefferson, have finally done what sports writers wrote about for decades: keep the better high school kids at home. The result is that the state's high schools have proven that they can support two consistent top 25 teams. North Carolina, on the other hand, is supporting none. Most of Carolina's success in recent years was based on Mack Brown taking the Tar Heels' recruiting national. It is doubtful, however, that the state of Virginia high school football system can support two top ten programs, or even one if the other remains as successful as both Tech and the hoos are likely to remain. The players to move up another rung will likely have to come from out of state and that will take more money. Airfare, hotel rooms, rental cars and all of the other expenses involved in recruiting on a national stage do not come cheap. And, we have to be prepared to budget for more recruiting misses. A decade ago, we recruited against the hoos and primarily East Carolina, NC State and Maryland. The Jeffersons are still there today, but increasingly we are tangling with Tennessee, Penn State and the Florida schools for our players. We are beating these schools at times [the names Houseright, Nelson and Jackson pop to mind], but this is a much tougher recruiting environment. We need more money, and the question is how to get it.

The first place to generate more cash is to develop a more positive revenue stream from our miserable basketball program. This team must put more people in the Cassell and increase our television opportunities. Our location in ACC country is a disadvantage that even full Big East affiliation would not overcome, but this is ridiculous. We cannot achieve in basketball what we have done and can do in football, but we can achieve Dave Braine's original vision of becoming a top 40 program that plays in some postseason tournament 3 out of every 4 years. It is highly questionable, to me at least, that Bobby Hussey can get the job done. Hussey is a very personable man who is the original nice guy, but he has been a part of this program for 8 years, and the improvement is marginal. Jim Weaver may soon have to make a very tough decision.

The second place more money can be generated is more seats in Lane Stadium. When we sell out the Pitt[sburgh] game and come very close to filling Lane for that embarrassing Temple spectacle, it becomes pretty apparent that demand for seats has outstripped the available supply. The discussion continues in some Hokie circles as to whether it would have been better to give up the momentum and positive feelings and experiences that came out of the Music City Bowl in exchange for the huge check that we would have gotten for being drilled by Florida in the Orange Bowl. I have mixed feelings [I had a hell of a time in Nashville], but that $4 mil check would have provided seed money for an expansion. Where does that money come from? Our land-grant status does not generate the ready supply of lawyers who can cut checks to create what is now the Carl Smith Football Complex featuring Scott Stadium and Harrison Field. Will Stewart at Hokie Central not long ago wrote an excellent examination of how to raise the money to construct the extra seats and luxury boxes that we could sell today. As distasteful as it sounds, the Taco Bell Lane Stadium may be in our future. We can hope that a giant picture of that dog does not show up at the top of the scoreboard, or the Marching Virginians '2001' theme replaced with the team taking the field to the shouts of 'Viva Taco Bell'. But, we need the money.

The third leg of the top ten stool is the Hokie Club. Things are looking up here. I do not know the exact numbers involved, but I have heard Bill Roth say on the radio network that we are raising much more in contributions than his alma mater Syracuse, and, while it is anecdotal, my local rep once told me that the Hokie Club raises more than any two other Big East fundraising operations combined. Given the nature of the BE [more about that later], I suspect it is not far from the truth. That same vaunted alumni base that makes us the talk of bar owners and chambers of commerce presidents from New Orleans to Jacksonville to Nashville is also making its presence felt with its checkbook. One of my hobbies is collecting game programs, and anyone who does the same check the number of pages devoted to Hokie Club membership and compare it to only a couple of years ago. The number of endowed scholarships is particularly interesting reading. Jim Weaver was hired in large part because of his demonstrated ability to convince wealthy alumni to hand him money, and he is doing just that. There would also seem to be a tremendous upside potential here. I suspect that our fundraising still lags behind peer universities such as Penn State and Texas A&M. This can be turned up a notch or two, and it is a part of the financial equation that few of our conference brethren can match. Which brings me to......

The Big East. We are in a conference that we can dominate. We are a large state university in a conference composed mostly of small private schools. They cannot match our fundraising ability. This has been shown in the Merryman Center. This was financed through a fundraising campaign, and offered evidence as to what can be accomplished. There is nothing that compares in the conference and nothing on any drawing boards. The proposed new weight training facility at Miami will not be in the Merryman Center's class, in large part because Miami officials readily acknowledge they cannot hope to raise that much money. Think about that for a moment. Taking a look at our competition:

West Virginia- Don Nehlen has been running a pretty damn good program for 15 years. Forget the bowl losses. They are a matter of bad luck as much as anything. WVU has played in them, and played in plenty. They are always a bowl-quality team that is very tough to play. They also have roughly the same amount of times they have rocketed to the top of college football and the occasions they have slipped below .500. Many Mountaineers disagree, and they are certainly closer to their program than I am, but it seems to me they have reached their level, and it is a consistent 7-4/8-3 level. The Big East has not changed their status, and suggests to me their potential has been maximized. This has everything to do with demographics. Tech has beaten West Virginia 7 out of the last 10 games, and each time Don Nehlen is quoted, at least in Virginia papers, about the wide disparity in the number of available high school athletes in the two states. He is correct, and that will not change. He does almost all of his recruiting out of state, and that makes his job one of the toughest in football. They will be tough as long as Nehlen is on their sideline, but we can continue to expect to win 70% of the time against them. It could go up. I would assume that Doc Holliday would continue the success WVU has grown accustomed to, but I find laughable some of the suggestions I read on Vernon's WVU board that call for changes. Does anyone really think that Terry Bowden, a man who couldn't recruit in the state of Alabama, would succeed at a program where virtually an entire team has to be recruited out of someone else's back yard? Nehlen will eventually retire. WVU lives on the recruiting edge, however, and one misstep in coaching could cause this program to get bad in a hurry. Tech's jump in status in the mid-90s left what used to be a strong rival, East Carolina, in the dust. If we make another jump, the Mountaineers could, and I emphasize could, be the next one left behind. If we make another move up, West Virginia, like ECU before them, couldn't match it.

Syracuse- As perhaps the best offensive skill talent Paul Pasqualoni ever will assemble moved through their program, they continued to turn out the 8-3s. That suggests to me that they have also reached their level. Pasqualoni already recruits from Maine to Ohio, and I really don't see the opportunity for a jump to the next level. This is another program that has been pretty good for quite a while, and I imagine their financial potential has been tapped.

Pitt[sburgh], BC and Temple- These guys can and will be trouble [God knows 2 of them have been recently] but are programs that will really have a difficult time moving up. The Pitt [Don't Call Us That]sburgh Panthers are another small private school surrounded on all sides by much larger and much better funded state universities. They have terrible facilities and little hope of improving them. Boston College is the very epitome of the small private school with very good academics. A lot of the better recruits are simply unavailable to them, and on top of that, some serious mistakes have been made in both their major programs [Was Dan Henning a disaster or what?] that are proving difficult to overcome. My guess is that if Tom O'Brien can string together a couple of winning seasons, he will be quickly out the door and they will be starting over yet again. Temple, well, they are Temple. Bobby Wallace won't be there long.

Rutgers- The BE's, at least IMHO, great enigma. These guys should have done what Tech did. They have it all, location, huge alumni base, facilities [that is a beautiful stadium]. They should win, and win big. Perhaps Terry Shea will prove that this year was not the result of a scheduling fluke that had the Knights playing Army and Navy as well as an I-AA team, and things are turning around. Even so, they are at least 5 years behind us. We have stolen a march on them, and should use the next 5 years to maintain the distance.

Last but certainly not least, Miami. Are the Canes back? Time will tell. What is apparent, to me at least, is that Tech and Miami will be the teams to beat in the BE over the next few years [This does not mean that either team will win all other games against the rest of the league, only that they are in the best positions to do so]. There remains much animosity among Tech fans towards the Canes, but I admire what Butch Davis has done. He took a job that many other people turned down flat [Sonny Lubik, et al] and walked into it with his eyes open. He quickly weeded out all of those who made the Hurricanes college football's version of the Dalton Gang and puts a team on the field comprised of kids who do credit to what is a fine university. And this year the wins came back, or at least many of them. Butch has tactical limitations. Too often the Miami sideline during big games resembles a Chinese fire drill, but much of this can be credited to inexperience [Frank Beamer was a head coach for many years before he came to Tech- Butch Davis was a career assistant], and besides, there are quite a few coaches [Bobby Bowden, Tom Osborne, among others] who have proven that having a lot of very good players is more important than sideline expertise, and Davis is getting the players. It remains to be seen whether Miami can compete again on the national stage. Depth, as Nebraska and Tennessee have recently proven, wins the MNC, and Miami won't have a full complement of scholarship players until 2001, a time when I imagine Butch will be gone. Miami is under enormous financial pressures. Their athletic department is annually running deficits of $3-4 million, and it will be difficult to erase them. While they are located in one of the nation's most talent-rich areas, they remain a small private school with limited fan support. They haven't taken a bowl trip since 1993, and the nearby Gator Bowl has made it perfectly clear they don't want them. Instate rivals Florida and Florida $tate both have much bigger budgets that translate into better facilities. Every year they pump out many more alumni than Miami does, further widening the gap between them. Those are also cards we can play to a certain extent. One wonders what would have happened had Howard Schnellenberger elected to stay at Miami and spend the next decade campaigning for the state of the art stadium that he eventually got built at Louisville? He didn't, however, and the Orange Bowl is what they have and will continue to have, and it has problems, to be charitable. One day not too far down the road, one way or another, Lane will undergo a significant expansion and renovation, and will combine with the Merryman Center to give us an advantage in the inevitable recruiting wars that will occur between the two schools with an expanded Tech geographical recruiting base. Outspending them will go a long way to beating them consistently. We may not beat them four in a row many more times, but we can hold our edge.

The Big East is the conference where we can win the MNC, and it appears that it is not going anywhere for some time. ACC Commissioner John Swofford's recent comment to a Greensboro sports club that the ACC would most certainly not expand to take in any more underfunded private schools can be taken to mean exactly what he said. The school they want is Florida. It remains to be seen whether they will get them. The only BE school they have expressed interest in is Rutgers, but they are already in the New York market and I would imagine it is doubtful the Knights would move. ACC basketball money is not that much more than the BE's, and not enough to offset what would be greatly increased travel costs. The Big 10 is also not going to add another potential Northwestern. There is probably SEC membership in Tech's future. Any Hokies at the MCB probably agree that Vanderbilt Stadium is the biggest dump they have ever been in, and there is nothing Vanderbilt can do about it. The Titans are going to cause serious problems for what tiny fan base the Commodores have. Financial pressures brought on in large part by Title IX will eventually drive the Vanderbilt's of the world out of college football. We are the logical candidate to replace them. Our schedule would then begin with Florida, Tennessee and Georgia along with our friends up in hooville. That would be much tougher than what we face now, even with a rejuvenated Miami.

While we may never win a MNC, it would seem we could become a top 10 team on a regular basis, and do it in the Big East. Frank obviously thinks we can. We have come a long way in a decade, and it is time to spend the next decade putting the final pieces in place.

- Jim Alderson