Some Dr. Saturday love.

Matt Hinton runs a blog for Yahoo! Sports' college football section called Dr. Saturday, which is always one of my favorite reads during the season. This past Wednesday Hinton penned a reflective on the Hokies' 2010 offense, with specific emphasis on Tyrod Taylor's contribution. Click here to read the whole piece. It's well worth it.

It's the end of the piece, which focuses on the aftermath of Tyrod's departure for greener NFL pastures, that I'd like to note here, though:

"[Tyrod's departure] leaves a gaping question mark for 2011, considering towering, 6-6/240-pound successor Logan Thomas has barely played and both Evans and Williams are on their way to the draft with two years of eligibility remaining apiece. You can almost hear entire sections of the playbook going back under lock and key from here."

Yeah. Hinton understands VT pretty damn well.

Any reservations I had about Logan Thomas at QB evaporated with a pass over the middle against Miami on 3rd and 16 to convert for the first down. LT has the goods to be a legitimate QB. What he does not have, however, is the trust of Bryan Stinespring and Mike O'Cain.

The reason why Tyrod Taylor put together one of the most impressive careers at quarterback that VT has ever witnessed is not only because of his freakish athletic ability, but also because through watching his play the coaches on offense eventually developed enough trust in him to eventually say, "Okay, just go play football." And he did. And he kicked some butt.

Logan Thomas doesn't have that trust. He hasn't earned it yet. And until he does, get ready for a lot of LT looking to the VT sideline after the offense is set to get the audible. It's easy to forget how often we saw that just a couple of seasons ago, isn't it?

Beefing up the O Line

Quick hit here. Not much going on in Hokiedom except the general post-Orange Bowl hand wringing that will most likely continue into the Spring, but I did want to make mention that 2010 offensive guard recruit and local biggun Caleb Farris has enrolled at VT for the spring semester.

Farris has busted his ass getting ready to join the Hokies while spending a year since signing his LOI at a community college. I'm high on this kid just because of his mindset, work ethic, and... oh yeah, he's effing HUGE:

That's Farris on the right. On the left, for comparison's sake, is redshirt defensive tackle/jukyard dog/third trumpet of the apocalypse Nick Acree.

Farris comes in at 6'4" and 315 pounds. This is significant in two regards.

1.) He's not a converted tight end, and
2.) He has honest O line size.

Looking ahead to the spring we also have the redshirt coming off of OT Mark Shuman (6'6", 309lbs.) and new starting center Michael Via (6'7", 300lbs). Throw in BDC and David Wang and VT would actually have an offensive line without a body under 300 pounds.

It won't happen, of course, because Greg Nosal is not losing his starting spot (nor should he) and Shuman and Farris will not start as freshmen. But seeing these numbers signifies a shift away from the type of O linemen that VT has recruited since Curt Newsome came onto the staff.

The "smaller, more athletic" recruits haven't worked out so well for VT, and apparently the recruiters have noticed. Let's just hope that these behemoths can make Curt Newsome look competent the same way Tyrod made Stiney look like he knew what he was doing.

Bill Roth, would you please, for the love of God, shut up.

I'm going to quote something here. Then I'm going to rip it to shreds.

"In the ACC, Tech doesn’t play teams like Stanford, Boise State, Alabama or LSU. Thanks to some sensational recruiting within the region, Tech has better players than many of its ACC brothers. A record 13 players were named All-ACC, remember? But to beat truly elite teams, Tech needs even better players. It needs more elite players."

If you want to read this in its larger context, go here. But trust me, there's not much of a larger context to find. The gist of the article is Stanford pwned VT because Stanford had more elite players.

I call bullshit. (Pardon the French, but I gotta call a spade a spade.)

Bill, you're a hell of a play by play guy. I'd rather listen to you than to any ESPN announcer, and don't get me started on Raycom's mongoloids. But outside of the booth you're turning into nothing more than a Frank Beamer status quo apologist. Let's run down the list here, Bill.

Tyrod Taylor is elite. Ryan Williams is elite. David Wilson is elite. Jayron Hosley is elite. Bruce Taylor is elite. Half the freaking starting roster on both sides of the ball are elite players.

You know who isn't elite? Bryan Stinespring. The man couldn't make an adjustment if his jeans were too tight.

Bill, I love ya. I'll listen to your broadcasts of Hokie football whenever I can. And I can't really blame you for toeing the company line. After all, we all know which side your bread is buttered on. But you're throwing the players under the bus by saying that what beat VT in the Orange Bowl was a disparity in player talent. The talent gap in Miami was entirely between the two coaching staffs.

Evans and Williams are both GONE.

Darren Evans and Ryan Williams, two of the best Virginia Tech running backs ever, are no longer Virginia Tech running backs. Both have decided to take their talents to where they can get paid. Evans declared his intent to enter the 2011 NFL draft this past Thursday. Williams wrestled a bit more with the decision and finally announced today.

This sucks.

Not that I can hold it against either of them. Evans is projected to go somewhere between round 4 and round 7, which would normally mean returning for another year to improve draft stock would be in order. But Evans has a wife and a kid, and even 7th round money is enough to easily support a family of three.

Williams is projected in the first or second round. No one is stupid enough to pass on that kind of money. Right, Andrew Luck?

So it's the right decision for each of them. But it still sucks. It sucks that we had the greatest collection of talent at running back this season that VT has ever had, and yet the running game struggled to get going all season. It sucks that Darren Evans can't risk coming back another year to try to jump into the second or third round in 2012 for fear of Billy Hite's idiotic 3-back rotation limiting his carries too much to prove himself. It sucks that nobody had the balls to admit that 2008 was a rebuilding year and keep the redshirt on Tyrod, possibly enticing Williams - the fiercest competitor the VT O has had in a good while - to come back for TT's redshirt senior season next year for the chance at making history.

It all just sucks, mmmkay?

Welcome.

There’s a lot of new faces on the blog in the past couple of days, and even though many of them are using the “anonymous” user name, I just wanted to extend a friendly “welcome.”

For those of you who are visiting us for the first time, here’s the skinny on the blog: The Fire Bryan Stinespring Blog was formed in January of 2008 in the minutes following our 21-24 loss to Kansas in the Orange Bowl. It was an embarrassing game, to say the least. The goal of the blog was simple: to get Offensive Coordinator Bryan Stinespring canned and replaced by someone who could assemble an offense to compliment mastermind Bud Foster’s defense and Frank Beamer’s always impressive special teams.

In 2009, the site was handed over to myself, Illinois Hokie and HokieJayBee to run, and we’ve done our best to keep up the fight. We’ve redesigned the site, added t-shirts (which we don’t profit from, BTW), added guest bloggers, polls and pertinent contact info (feel free to send Jim Weaver a letter or email, while you’re here - his contact info can be found just below the t-shirts). We host discussions on what we can do to help raise BS awareness among the Hokie faithful, and we make suggestions on who might be a good replacement.

After reading and posting here for the last three years, we’ve had two important realizations:

1. Head Coach Frank Beamer, no matter what, deserves to run this team for as long as he wishes, since without HCFB, we’d still just be a random independent program with no direction. We wouldn’t have BeamerBall. We wouldn’t have Bud Foster. We wouldn’t have Michael Vick, Tyrod Taylor, DeAngelo Hall, Jake Grove, etc, etc. One could argue we wouldn’t even have Seth Greenberg and Malcolm Delaney, either, since football has financially supported our other athletic programs for years, and taken them from independent, to the Big East and now to the ACC.

1. Without the boosters, the anti-Stinespring movement will not succeed. As long as the money keeps streaming in, there is nothing forcing Weaver or Beamer to make changes. There are plenty of boosters who remember the old days, and would be content with an endless stream of 10-win seasons. We probably won’t reach them, but I know there are a few, a precious few, who are just as pissed as you and me, and they are the people we need to appeal to. We need to attract them to the site, and give them a voice.

I know you all are frustrated. I am, too, but we need to keep it civil around here if we are going to attract the boosters. So please, leave your personal attacks and put downs at the door. Don’t use the contact info for threats of violence. Don’t use profanity or petty name-calling - this isn’t a 3rd grade playground. Make your theories, suggestions and arguements, but keep it civil.

So on behalf of myself, IH, HJB and all of the real fans who frequent the site, welcome. There’s 240 days left til kickoff. Let’s get something done.

Can Someone Ask Him For Me?

With apologies to IH, pushing his Wednesday post down, I couldn't resist posting this little nugget.

I hadn't seen this article when it was written, on the 3rd, pre-Orange Bowl, by Darryl Slater.

The article starts like every recent Bryan article starts. VT O sucks, has for 9 years, here's some numbers and ranks and how badly we've really sucked. About mid-way down, there's the prototypical 2010 rhetoric, complimenting an improved offense and giving this year's ranks for scoring and total yards. This particular article even goes as far to say "Hokie Offense Ready for Stanford", well, at least based on an interview with Bryan himself......

It is at this point that I'm going to make an assumption of Darryl's interview conversation with Bryan, based on the context of the article. My assumption is that Darryl asked something along the lines of, "is this season rewarding?" / "how does it feel to have a highly ranked offense and silence the critics?" / "does this season vindicate Frank sticking with your sorry ass all this time?" / etc.
[editor's note, don't knock my assumpted conversations! Maybe Darryl did say "sorry ass"!]

Anyways, digression is a hobby of mine. Sorry. Oh yeah, I assume it was a question similar to that from Darryl to Bryan at that point of the interview, because Bryan answered:

---"""I'm going to reserve final judgment on that until after the Orange Bowl," Stinespring said. "But going into this game, I think this offense has been exactly what you've been looking for."""---


Well well well. Here we are. After the Orange Bowl.

Could someone with access to Bryan ask him for me? It's after the Orange Bowl, can we please have your final judgment on VT O 2010?

Ass.

The third biggest game of Frank Beamer's career.

This one's tough to write.

It wasn't the worst loss I've witnessed as a fan of Virginia Tech football. Losing to JMU at home was more humiliating. And the 2007 dismembering at the hands of LSU was actually more painful to watch. But I don't think I've ever been so tempted to put something through my Vizio as I was in the second half of this shitty, shitty game.

I could spend forever breaking down the X's and O's, but I seriously think that would sink me into a tailspin depression that would last into the spring. But I will say that this game highlighted more perfectly than any other game that the offensive success Virginia Tech has enjoyed the last two seasons has been solely to the credit of Tyrod Taylor. In the second half, when Stanford started dialing up their chaos blitz package - designed to always bring 5 or 6 guys after the quarterback but to disguise where the extra bodies are coming from - about every third or fourth down, Tyrod's trademark magic was essentially snuffed out. That's not a knock on T-Mobile. But after going down two scores in the third quarter VT was in full on pass mode and Jim Harbaugh knew it. He also knew Curt Newsome's O Line could not pick up the blitz quickly enough even though they had the numbers to stop it. In a situation like that, it takes coaching, not an athletic quarterback, to lead a team to victory. Instead Stiney dialed up five step drop after five step drop, essentially serving Tyrod up on a silver platter. Typical results from an atypically horrible offensive coordinator.

There are so many things for which Bryan Stinespring could be crucified in this game, but the list reads like every criticism we have heaped at his feet for the past nine years: the trademark power run up the gut on 4th and 1 that was DOA, the lack of screens or slants to keep the opposing defense honest, the glaring absence of toss sweeps to David Wilson when the weakness in Standford's run defense all season has been speed to the outside.

Make no mistake, the talent on offense could have won this game for the Hokies, and despite the final score it almost did. Tyrod's interception at the two yard line would have been a touchdown had he led Boykin straight into the endzone rather than toward the middle of the field - away from the pursuing corner but toward the safety. Jayron Hosley could have set a single season record for interceptions and put six points on the board but simply couldn't hang on to Andrew Luck's errant pass in the third quarter. But once the floodgates opened for Standford it was simply too much to overcome, and the Cardinal did to us what we have done to teams the last two years. And my God does it suck to be on this end of it.

Frank Beamer said in the week leading up to this Orange Bowl that it was the third biggest game of his career, behind the 95 Sugar Bowl and playing for the BCS championship against FSU. And in the third biggest game of Frank Beamer's career Stanford proved how woefully inadequate Frank Beamer's offensive coordinator is at his job. I'm getting so tired of writing this, but when it mattered most Bryan Stinespring produced the least. When the game was on the line and it was up to his offensive coordinator - not his five star miracle of a quarterback - to find a way to win, Frank Beamer got embarrassed in the third biggest game of his career.

Welcome back, everybody.

It was fun while it lasted. Eleven game winning streaks make this place pretty quiet. But tonight we saw... again... what happens when Stiney's original gameplan is stuffed by a good - make that great - opposing defense.

Some people are also raking Bud Foster over the coals for this one. And yes, the defense sucked it up. But as I've said before, the defense gets a total pass from me this season no matter what. Bud Foster has earned a rebuilding year.

So anyway, the tshirts are over there --->

So is Jim Weaver's contact info.

Let's make some noise.

Orange Bowl - Open Thread