Doug Doughty

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What would Bill Brill think?

That was the first thought that crossed my mind when, on the drive home earlier this week, I spied the following Virginia license plate:

DUKE-VPI

A generation of sports fans has come of age since Brill’s retirement as Roanoke Times sports editor in 1991, so maybe a little background is in order.

Brill is a Duke graduate who has lives outside Durham, N.C., for the past 16 years. When I got to Roanoke in 1974, he was very big on ACC coverage when few Virginia papers would cover ACC games not involving Virginia teams. Duke wasn’t very good in basketball at the time and, honestly, it was some time after I arrived at The Roanoke Times before I realized he was a Blue Devils’ alumnus..

But, for the sake of this column item, the important point is that Brill was a longtime Tech antagonist. His only professed agenda was to “tell it like it is,” but right or wrong, he got under the Hokies’ skin.

Having been around Brill for most of my adult life, I could never conceive of anybody having a DUKE-VPI license plate, so I sped up to eyeball the driver of a van that was turning off U.S. 220 South onto old Rocky Mount Road.

I thought there was a chance I might identify the driver, but I couldn’t. It was an older, but not elderly, woman.

I immediately jumped to the conclusion that she couldn’t be a serious Tech fan because no real Hokies’ fans refer to Tech as VPI anymore. It’s almost a term of condescension among UVa fans who know that Tech fans wouldn’t want to be identified that way.

“Have you ever thought that DUKE-TECH would be too many letters?” asked my wife, shooting holes in my conspiracy theory.

I didn’t have time to think up a retort before she added, “And, somebody might have had DUKE-VT.”

If I had the time or inclination, I probably could check with the Department of Motor Vehicles, but the only person I ever knew with a Duke-Tech connection was Wendy Weisend, the late Tech sports information director who once had worked at Duke.

I wish I had taken a photograph and maybe blown it up and sent it to Brill. I had my phone available that day but not any longer, not after capsizing when Aaron McFarling entered my canoe in a team-building float down the James River.   

For more details on that excursion, check the latest Sports Timescast or Mark Taylor’s outdoor column in Sunday’s print edition of The Roanoke Times.

IT WASN’T JUST license plates that caught my attention this week. I also was struck by the following headline:

“Defensive tackle picks Deacons over Tide.”

Wake business grad Steve Bowery sent me a link to the Winston-Salem Journal story on a commitment the Deacons had taken from Ramon Booi, a 6-foot-5, 319-pound defensive tackle from Nease High School in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

Booi reportedly had scholarship offers from Alabama, Illinois and South Carolina.

It reminded me of comments made by Wake’s Jim Grobe, the 2006 ACC coach of the year, at the ACC Football Kickoff in Pinehurst, N.C.

When asked how many five-star recruits on his roster, Grobe responded, “I’d say zero.”

Certainly, the Deacons had to have decent talent to win last year’s ACC championship and Grobe admits part of that was luck. However, another part was character.

“If you get a great kid who happens to be a pretty good player, he might turn out to be a great player just because he’s a great kid,” Grobe said. “There’s really no science to that. We probably had a couple of kids develop even more than we thought they might.

“I’d much rather have a kid that has great character that’s a pretty good player than a great player with OK character. [Over] five years, I’ll take the kid with the great character. If you bring in a great kid with some innate ability, he’ll probably become a great player because he’ll work hard at it.”

Grobe said in Pinehurst that the Deacons are now receiving consideration from five-star recruits, but that’s a double-edge sword.

“We’re certainly in on some kids who are some high-profile kids,” Grobe said, “but, I’ve talked to my staff about it. There’s a danger in that. We can’t waste too much time chasing guys who ultimately are not coming.

“Even though we’ve got more interest from those-type players, we’ve won a championship with the guys we brought in in the past, when we didn’t have an ACC championship under our belt. We’re going to try and upgrade as much as we possibly can but I think we have to stay grounded and focused on kids that we’ve won with in the past and not forget how we built the program.”

So, if a player wants to keep Wake on his list until – or even after – he gets an offer from Notre Dame, what are the Deacons to do?

“You may have a blue-chip guy,” Grobe said, “but you’ve got to be realistic. While you work as hard as you can for him, you’ve got to continue to recruit other real good players that you think you’ve got a shot to get.

“In the past, we’ve taken some kids that really didn’t have a whole lot going on. Take Aaron Curry. Aaron Curry didn’t have much at all. We flat loved the guy and we haven’t coached a better linebacker. Once in a while we cut the film on, we fall in love and if we think he’s a really good player, we don’t care what anybody else thinks.

“We could be after some five-star guys but if we like guys who are maybe a little bit below that, we may take the other guy before we ever get a chance to take the five-star. I wouldn’t trade Aaron Curry for anybody, no matter how many stars [the other player] had. He could have 10 stars.

“I think there are some high-profile guys out there who are the real deal, but they aren’t the only really good football players out there. Programs are all looking for different things. We’ve never looked at recruiting as a quick fix. That’s never been a concern for us. We’ve looked at a guy who we want to be coaching in his fourth or fifth year.”

RANDY KING, WHO HAS returned from vacation and recovered from what possibly may have been an imaginary illness, has agreed to an Aug. 16 resumption of the Virginia and Virginia Tech Insiders.

Both will be posted by 5 p.m. Thursdays except in the event of a vacation that would coincide with an open date or a computer malfunction. The latter would be more likely to hold up the posting of a Tech Insider.