In light of the Virginia Tech men’s basketball team staying home for yet another Big East Tournament, rumors abound regarding Ricky Stokes’s future in Blacksburg. This article is not intended to engender a referendum on Stokes, or to proffer an opinion as to whether he should stay or go. However, this article will address some of the more systemic problems associated with Virginia Tech men’s basketball in an effort to discuss some of the inherent limitations on the program. Regardless of whether Ricky survives -- and it doesn't appear he will at this point -- some of these limitations will survive, and they will make consistently winning a challenge for any head coach at VT.

There’s no way to avoid the fact that we are a team in the midst of ACC country without an identifiable conference presence. Some fans automatically assumed entrance into the Big East would give our basketball program an identity, like it did with football. That assumption has been wrong for two inexorably linked reasons: (1) VT did not experience any success initially after entering the Big East; and (2) with fourteen teams, the Big East basketball conference can pick and choose teams on television, and it isn’t choosing the Hokies for any national games.

Being part of such a large conference also makes it difficult to form rivalries with other members of the conference, especially for a new member like VT. Familiarity, and some measure of success, breeds contempt.

I live in Pennsylvania and had the following exchange with a Pittsburgh fan last week: Him: "Hey, I saw that we beat you guys in Blacksburg last week." Me: "Well, that ought to sew up that #1 seed you’ve been pining for the last month." Him: "Hey, why did we take a top five team down there for a non-conference game that late in the season? Is Howland friends with your coach or something?" Me (with head bowed): "Um, we are in the Big East for basketball too."

Unwittingly (the adverb I use most when describing Pittsburgh fans), my buddy had provided me with the biggest verbal barb of them all: he didn’t even know the Hokies were conference "rivals" of Pitt in basketball.

If I had that conversation with a guy who goes to 5-6 Pittsburgh basketball games a year, you can imagine the overwhelming response any Virginia Tech coach gets when trying to recruit in Pennsylvania.

VT faces a lot of challenges from its Big East brethren and ACC rivals. First, almost every program in those conferences has better facilities, more tradition, and more television exposure. Ask Temple in football – it is tough to constantly swim upstream against all of these factors when trying to build a program.

I have been to the Dean Dome, the Comcast Center and Wake Forest. There is an electric atmosphere for big games in those places (with a nod towards Sam Cassell’s "wine and cheese" UNC description), and that atmosphere helps everyone in the conference recruit. How many basketball players out there wouldn’t relish the chance to beat Duke in Durham? Cassell Coliseum has a great basketball atmosphere too, but not with 3,000 fans, and the facilities generally, while on the upswing, are not nearly on par with our competitors.

Tradition obviously plays a role in recruiting as well, and that is an area where VT is sorely lacking. One NCAA tournament appearance every two decades simply won’t cut it in the living rooms of recruits. Read the interviews Will Stewart and Chris Horne conduct of VT’s blue chip football class, and it is amazing how many of them talk about a national championship. Winning matters to these kids.

VT has been very fiscally conservative with respect to its basketball expenditures, no doubt a product of the steep ransom, err, entrance fee required by the existing Big East basketball schools. Couple that with the fact the Hokies aren’t sharing in the revenue, and the administration’s restraint is understandable.

Although I do not have the numbers in front of me, I believe VT has the smallest recruiting budget of any team in the Big East. That makes it very tough to compete for kids, especially when you don’t get the free publicity of television exposure that most other ACC and Big East teams receive.

However, as noted time and time again by Will on the basketball message board, the fact is that the money is there for VT to do something to change its fortunes. According to a February 18, 2002 article by Dave Hickman of the Charleston Gazette, VT was $1.5 million in the black in the 2001-02 year. With that being the case, the money is there to increase the recruiting budget and, presumably, make a change to a more experienced (read: pricey) coach. If the administration wants to have success, they will need to make a great financial commitment to the program.

Basketball was, is and always will be a predominantly city game for men, especially on the East Coast. The vast majority of urban kids want to stay in the city because it is what they know, and, while I love Blacksburg, we can all agree it isn’t going to be confused with D.C. or Baltimore. It is an inherent recruiting disadvantage in basketball to have a rural setting when trying to recruit. That "disadvantage" can be overcome by tradition/television exposure at an institution (Duke) or in a league (ACC), but otherwise is very difficult.

Fans sometimes think that because a school has success recruiting in urban areas in football, that success should translate into basketball. Not necessarily. In football, VT’s coaches can recruit more urban areas in-state well because the kids and their coaches/parents know our program, and the prospective recruits already know a lot of their future teammates in Blacksburg.

A young man with concerns over Blacksburg’s environment is made comfortable when he sees kids he played with and against in high school on campus: he has a built in support system. In basketball, VT doesn’t have that same support system in place and it won’t be in place (although certainly Stokes hit the Virginia Squires hard in recruiting last year). That is the difference between 85 and 13 scholarships.

In addition to the fact VT is a rural school trying to recruit players in an urban game, there is a conference component to the Hokies being the odd man out. Want to draw an analogy to Virginia Tech basketball? Look no further than Penn State. Despite years and years of having a successful football program and having a beautiful state-of-the-art facility in the Bryce Jordan Center, they recently completed a 2-14 conference record. In fact, other than a shocking Sweet 16 run a few years back, the fortunes of PSU basketball and VT basketball have been quite similar. Why, you ask?

State College is in the geographic center of the state, far away from the traditional recruiting centers of Philadelphia and, to a lesser extent, Pittsburgh. PSU can’t get the city kids to come. They all opt for Villanova or Temple.

Also, in terms of conference affiliation, PSU is on the absolute geographic outskirts of the Big 10. PSU hasn’t been able to pull many recruits from traditional Big 10 powers, yet Big 10 powers have gotten their fair share of Pennsylvania recruits (see Brandon Fuss-Cheatham of Ohio State, the 2001 State Player of the Year). The Big East also benefited from this weak conference tie, as Notre Dame got former State Player of the Year Matt Carroll and Syracuse landed freshman point guard Gerry McNamara. In a nutshell, PSU is a Big East team in the Big 10. VT is an ACC team in the Big East.

Not coincidentally, every limitation I’ve mentioned thus far has a recruiting component to it. Really, more so than almost any other sport, basketball is predicated on bringing in talent that can work well together in a particular coaching system.

So where should the Hokies recruit? North of Virginia, VT can’t recruit the big time kids because our only advantage (the Big East name) is shared by a host of our conference foes. We really do not have the time (NCAA regulations) or resources (limited budget) to be seeking out sleeper prospects north of Virginia either.

In Virginia and in the surrounding states to the south, we are in the heart of ACC territory. Couple this with some of the other factors already discussed – urban kids tending to stay in more urban environments – and you can see how truly limited VT’s list is. This forces VT coaches to recruit kids that they like that do not really have "national" reputations.

With that being said, VT’s current team has some talent. Stokes has done a good job unearthing some sleepers like Bryant Matthews and Carlos Dixon. However, the roster has not had the overall talent and depth to compete in the Big East regularly. The future of the program will rest on this year’s incoming freshmen class, and the jury is still very much out on them collectively.

Although all VT fans want success for our men’s basketball program, the fact is that there are a number of factors conspiring to make it difficult to achieve consistent success in Blacksburg. That isn’t to say that it can’t be done, but the obstacles are greater in men’s basketball than in the other big name sports, football or women’s basketball.

In order to have success, VT will have to continue to upgrade its facilities and increase the basketball budget, and the coaching staff will have to recruit creatively. If Jim Weaver makes a change, he will be facing the dilemma of whether to hire a coach that has proven he can win and be a program builder, likely without a reputation for recruiting at a Big East level, or whether to take a chance on a younger assistant who presumably can make a bigger impact on recruiting but may not have actually X and O game experience.

If Weaver makes a change, my guess is that he turns to an established coach (having already tried the young assistant route with Ricky), but that’s why Mr. Weaver gets paid the big bucks.

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