In a season marked by an unusual degree of coaching turnover, a third retirement hit the news wires on Sunday, as Frank Beamer announced that he would step down at Virginia Tech when this 2015 campaign ends. Beamer joins Steve Spurrier and George O’Leary as a retiree after many decades in college football’s arena of tumult and shouting.
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Two stories emerge more than others in the wake of Beamer’s retirement. The first is that patience is certainly recommended at programs which lack national stature or overwhelmingly high expectations.
It is true that Virginia Tech was a winning program in the several seasons preceding Beamer’s arrival in 1987. Predecessor Bill Dooley, who also won at North Carolina in the 1970s, produced winning seasons from 1980 through 1986, so it wasn’t as though Beamer took over a program in shambles; anything but.
However, Virginia Tech was a loosely-floating independent without the stature of then-independent programs such as Penn State, Notre Dame, Boston College, Pittsburgh, and others. The Hokies climbed as high as the Peach Bowl in college football’s postseason pyramid, but no higher. Penn State played for national championships (and won a few) in the 1980s. Notre Dame is Notre Dame, even today. Boston College won the 1985 Cotton Bowl. Pittsburgh won the 1982 Sugar Bowl. Virginia Tech, compared to those programs, was a nobody, and so when the Big East formed a football conference in 1991, the Hokies didn’t look down on the competition. They were looking up at other schools with far superior reputations and achievements.
When Beamer went 5-6 in 1991 and then 2-8-1 in 1992 — several seasons into the job — a modern-day view would have said that a firing was in order.
At Nebraska or Texas, yes.
At Virginia Tech — more precisely, the Virginia Tech of 1992 — no.
Good thing the school stuck it out, eh?
Three seasons after 2-8-1, Beamer led the Hokies to the 1995 Sugar Bowl and a convincing win over Texas. Over the next 16 years, Virginia Tech would make seven more Bowl Alliance (later called BCS, now New Year’s Six) bowls. The Hokies contested the national title in the 2000 Sugar Bowl against Florida State. They made the Orange Bowl a familiar, even expected, destination. They made themselves impossible to overlook, a marked shift from the mid-1980s.
At Nebraska, it is hard to think that Mike Riley should enjoy three or four seasons of drift if he can’t engineer a sharp turnaround. That’s because Nebraska should rightly hold itself to a higher annual standard of on-field performance. At the Virginia Tech which existed in 1987, it was unfair to hold Beamer to the same measurements. Because the Hokies were loyal to Beamer, their architect was loyal to them, and to his great credit, Beamer constantly fought for (and gained) higher compensation for his assistants, setting an example all head coaches would do well to emulate.
Patience — as shown to a head coach by a school, returned and repaid many times over — can still be a virtue in college football. At the elite programs, it’s much more reasonable to act quickly in the face of alarming situations, but if you’re an athletic director at a program which can’t expect an immediate turnaround, giving coaches more space, not less, is generally the way to go. Frank Beamer helps us understand this.
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The other main story of Frank Beamer’s iconic career in Blacksburg is that he successfully defied the two programs which comprised college football’s most important rivalry from 1987 through 2000. This is the most important football-specific legacy Beamer leaves behind, the one which should be mentioned in the first three paragraphs of any account of his career.
From 2004 through 2011, in a new ACC abode, the Hokies either won or played for the league championship six times, the only exceptions being 2006 and 2009. Virginia Tech became the team looking down on everyone else in the ACC for a long period of time. Only when Jimbo Fisher restored Florida State in 2012 did the ACC resemble the league John Swofford thought he’d have when Miami joined FSU in 2004, and the split-division format arrived a year later in 2005.
Frank Beamer shattered the conventional wisdom which held that the new split-division ACC — following the ravaging and subsequent destruction of the football Big East — would be one continuous parade of Miami-Florida State conference championship games. More than that, Beamer similarly shattered the notion in the mid-1990s that Miami would always reign over the Big East, before it was broken up and subsequently weakened.
Yes, Beamer needed time to figure out how to make things work at Virginia Tech. Once he turned the corner with those Jim Druckenmiller teams in the mid-1990s, however, he never looked back. He and Bud Foster were able to retain a winning formula, keeping it front and center to the extent that when Miami and Florida State slippped — several years apart — the Hokies were ready to pounce.
It’s important to stress that this notion of “readiness” was not confined to a game or a season, but to a few larger periods, especially 2004-2011. Virginia Tech wasn’t just the product of one or two great recruiting classes. The Hokies won an ACC with Bryan Randall in 2004, Sean Glennon in 2007, and Tyrod Taylor in 2010. They beat Miami in the Orange Bowl stadium to win that 2004 ACC crown. They took the ACC Coastal back from Georgia Tech on the two occasions when the Jackets won the division; the Hokies regained supremacy in the next two seasons (2007 and 2010). Virginia Tech, having defeated Miami to win the 2004 ACC, bookended its run of ACC dominance by beating the other Sunshine State power, Florida State, in the 2010 ACC title tilt.
There was — and is — an expansive, complete quality to the way in which Frank Beamer and Bud Foster developed their program. No one can say that the Hokies merely hit the jackpot with one recruiting class or one relatively contained series of events. They endured as a power in the conference, and as a result, this is now an infinitely more attractive job than it once was.
The irony, of course, is that the coach hired today at Virginia Tech will not — and, yes, should not — enjoy the patience Beamer rightly received in 1991 and 1992.
That irony, however, is precisely why Beamer’s performance rates as being worthy of a spot in the College Football Hall of Fame.
