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News With Commentary by HC Staff Thursday, July 27, 2000 Big East Media Day Today Players, coaches and journalists from around the Big East Football Conference are gathering in the Meadowlands in New Jersey today for the Big East's annual Media Day. As far as I'm concerned, this is the unofficial kickoff of football season. Now is when the coverage begins, with the annual Miami Hurricanes Pre-Season Love-In, and journalists will gather enough quotes and material from the assembled players and coaches to last a few weeks, at least. Once again, the Hurricanes will be picked first in the Big East, although I'll have to admit that this year, it seems the logical choice. While the Hokies' defense and special teams are gutted from last season, the Hurricanes return a solid nucleus in all phases of the game, plus they've got Virginia Tech at home this season. In any event, HokieCentral is the place to be tomorrow morning, in particular, HC's VT Hokie News page. Linkmeister HokiefromWV will be one seriously busy person tomorrow morning, bringing you a huge mess of links from Media Day. If we're lucky, maybe Miami Coach Butch Davis or the players he's bringing will say something outrageous, or downright dumb, and we can laugh about it ad nauseum on the message board.
In the past week or two, Tech's three highest selections in the most recent NFL draft all signed contracts and are ready to get to work. John Engelberger (2nd round, San Francisco), Ike Charlton (2nd round, Seattle) and Corey Moore (3rd round, Buffalo) all inked multi-year deals. Here are the details:
Wow, that's a cool $7.75 million to those guys over the next few years. Engelberger has already pledged $100,000 back to Tech, and instead of getting a room in the Merryman Center named after him, he wants Tech to install a "john" and name it after John Ballein, Tech's director of football operations. I kid you not.
Now that things are starting to take off, a lot of important dates are going to start happening soon. Mark these events and occurrences down on your orange and maroon calendar:
Much like Microsoft, the Virginia Tech Athletic Department's Internet strategy is very late, but it appears solid. In case you missed it last week, the Hokie Huddler has finally gone on-line, after all these years of readers bleating for it to do so. In the process, the name "The Hokie Huddler" will be retired, and the publication will be renamed "hokiesports.com the newspaper" -- a funny, awkward name, but there you have it, nonetheless. The good part is, the Huddler ... er, hokiesports.comthenewspaper ... is being offered as an on-line subscription, a paper subscription, or both. So, if you like your news on the web (and who doesn't?), you can just subscribe to the password-protected electronic version for $25. Or, if you like getting the print version, you can pay $37.95 to have it mailed to you. But if you're like me, and you want the immediacy of the Internet, but you'd love to have a paper copy to collect, you can subscribe to both for $50. Students get a discounted rate. For more info, plus a free preview issue, head on over to the web site for hokiesports.comthenewspaper (honestly, www.hokiehuddler.com would have been so much easier and cooler -- if you want that domain name, go get it, because it's still available). In other web-related news, VT has launched a web site to promote Michael Vick for the Heisman. It goes by the clever name "www.hokiesportsinfo.com/vick" -- they're calling it the MV2K web site, and wouldn't you know it, www.mv2k.com is available, so why not use it? -- and is a slick production featuring a profile, statistics, records, and more multimedia than you can run in a year on your 166 MHz Pentium with the 33.6k modem. All in all, both web sites are great moves by the athletic department, appropriate for a technical school like Virginia Tech. Like most athletic department web productions, both of the new sites are slow to load -- hokiesports.comthenewspaper took 55 seconds to load, and the MV2K web site took at least one minute and ten seconds, both times on a 56.6 modem that was banging away non-stop. Aesthetically, hokiesports.comthenewspaper isn't anymore pleasing to the eye than hokiesportsinfo.com is, but I'll readily admit that the MV2K web site (which, remember, can be found at www.hokiesportsinfo.com/vick) is sharp. Longtime VT webmaster Damian Salas outdid himself on that one.
As you can tell from the new format of this News and Notes update, HokieCentral.com isn't sitting still, either. A site revamp is underway, with minor visual changes and some structural changes going on. The visual changes include a new background image with a gray right-hand border on it, plus new page headers (meaning, the News and Notes bar near the top has been revamped, as have the bars on most pages, like the HC Columnists page). The entire site has not yet been revamped, so a few pages still have the old look, but we hope to have all pages updated soon. One of the biggest changes is the vastly improved archiving of News and Notes. Check out the new News and Notes archive page, which contains links to archives for the years 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. That's right -- for the first time, each News and Notes update ever posted on HC has its own individual page, and each year is indexed with headlines and links to those pages. If that sounds like a lot of "huh?", then just click the links above and poke around, you'll see what I mean. The new News and Notes archives beat the pants off the old ones, which weren't indexed at all and were almost useless. One more thing...
Lastly, HokieCentral.com has a new Recruiting Message Board, which is linked on the home page and, of course, at the top of the main message board. Sorry it took me so long to set the board up -- no excuses. But the board has a decent amount of activity on it, so if you're interested in recruiting, join in. And even if you're not interested in recruiting, check it out -- you'll be hooked before you know it!
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