Well, it takes two things to win college football games: talent and discipline. A disciplined team can play above their talent level (for short periods of time, at least). Talented teams are notorious for playing below their level because of poor discipline, but when they play with both, they are hard to beat.
For most of Frank Beamer's tenure, he was limited in recruiting by the relative obscurity of VT in the football world and focused on building a highly disciplined team. And the team became more and more successful, slowly and incrementally. Then they got Michael Vick and won the Big East (I was at the game that clinched it vs BC). Suddenly they had the chance to get talent. And, given the choice, most talent would far rather play in places that treated them like stars (as opposed to those with tremendous discipline... because it's harder to be disciplined. Powerhouses like Alabama can get away with both, because the players want that shot at a national championship and the path to the NFL that they'll put up with it. But at a mid-tier school? Nah, they'll just transfer or commit somewhere else). Beamer saw the chance to make some national noise with his program near the end of his career, so they started to compromise on their discipline for the sake of recruiting talent (see Michael Vick's brother...). And what made the program successful fell by the wayside. They had a flash-in-the-pan of relevance, and now they are losing to mid-majors.
It would take decades of grinding (and who is going to coach for decades to get there, or keep their job for that long?) or a celebrity like Neon Deon (whose players will put up with whatever in order to play for him) to turn the program around. And it's highly unlikely. I have former students who make the team (VT football) every few years, and the stories they tell...
As an alum of a school that went from a mid-tier program to a national powerhouse in about 5 years, and a huge college football fan and follower, I can't agree with the first or last paragraph.
To build a winning program in modern college football, it's a pretty straightforward formula: keep up in the facilities arms race, find the right coach and pay him
and his staff, and implement an attractive NIL program. All of those things need to happen to maximize the program's recruiting and player development, which ultimately decides their competitiveness. And all of those things need buy-in from university administration and athletic department. Discipline gets you nowhere in the modern game without talent or elite scheme.
VT's facilities are second tier, at best,
in the ACC. As far as I can find, their practice facility cost $21M, and has recently gotten around a $5 million upgrade. Compare that to Clemson, that built a $55M facility with a recent $5M upgrade, and Florida State, which is building a new $100M facility. Sub-par facilities make it more difficult to attract both playing and coaching talent, which is evident in their most recent coaching hire....
Justin Fuente was an unmitigated disaster for the program. He put a generally terrible team on the field, was a lazy recruiter, and didn't play the booster circuit. That leads to lagging attendance, a talent deficiency, and donation shortcomings. Hiring Brent Pry screamed "we can't attract anyone else", likely due to financial constraints from the administration. While investment in football has improved under Babcock, and VT was in the top 25 in college football spending in 2022, I suspect that Fuente's buyout payments had significant impact there. VT's bread and butter under Beamer was mining Hampton Roads to unearth elite talent that was slightly underrecruited. In Fuente's last 4 recruiting classes, he had 9 players from that region, total. Pry's tenure will be defined by how well he can recruit Hampton Roads and the DC area, and if he can make the right staff hires, for both recruiting and on-field development.
Dabo Swinney, Ryan Day, Lincoln Riley, etc. were far from superstars or celebrities when hired, but they were the
right guys.
I'm admittedly ignorant on VT's NIL approach, so I won't expand at all there.
TL;DR: Monetary investment + the right coaching hire (who doesn't have to be a celebrity) = success.
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