Friday, September 19, 2008
Hokies overcame roadblock for Wilson
Do Cavs pursue another QB for 2009?
Doug Doughty
Doug Doughty's College Notebook Plus is exclusive to roanoke.com and is posted by 5 p.m. Fridays.
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The football commitment that Virginia Tech received Thursday from Tyrell Wilson represented the final step in the Hokies’ reconciliation with Hampton High School.
“I told [Tech assistant] Curt Newsome when it started, ‘You’re climbing Mount Everest, boss,’ “ Hampton coach Mike Smith said Friday.
“That was a heck of an obstacle to overcome, persuading [Wilson’s] daddy.”
Wilson’s father, James, played for Hampton High School in the late 1980s and signed with the Hokies, only to be turned down for admission. He enrolled at Tennessee, where he was a four-year letterman and captained the Vols’ 1993 team.
Smith remembers James Wilson at Hampton in the spring of 1989, “planning to go up [to Tech] on a Sunday and Tom Fletcher called me and told me, he couldn’t get in because of a bad algebra grade.
“That was the longest story you ever heard, man. I said, ‘Don’t tell me that. I know what he got.’ He said, ‘Well, the conference said …,’ and I told him, ‘You ain’t in a conference, Tom.’ “
In 1989, the Hokies were in the Metro Conference, a basketball-only league. They didn’t join the Big East as a football-only member in 1991.
It would be more than 15 years before relations between Tech and Hampton improved.
For one thing, Smith was a close friend of longtime UVa team physician Dr. Frank McCue, an orthopedist who operated on kids from around the state. Smith had good relations with then-UVa head coach George Welsh and two assistants who recruited the Hampton-Newport News area, Tom O’Brien and then Danny Wilmer.
What little relationship that Tech had with Hampton turned sour in the winter of 1995-1996, when the Hokies attempted to recruit wide receiver Ahmad Hawkins and running back Darryl Smith, two players who eventually signed with Virginia.
Hawkins and Smith were scheduled to fly to Blacksburg one weekend but never showed up, leaving Hokies’ assistant Jim Cavanaugh steaming.
“They never got on the plane,” Mike Smith said. “ ‘Cav’ called me up and got mad at me but I knew nothing about it. I didn’t make the arrangements.”
In an interview several years after the Hawkins-Smith snafu, Mike Smith added fuel to the fire by saying Cavanaugh had forgotten where Hampton High School was located.
“He started landing over at Phoebus,” Smith said. “He and [Phoebus coach] Bill Dee started hanging out together. Cav shut us off, shut us down completely.”
There was a Cavanaugh sighting at Hampton during the spring of 2006, Tyrod Taylor’s junior year in high school. Cavanaugh continued to work the Hampton-Newport News area, where he has enjoyed success for more than a decade, but Hampton High School was turned over to Newsome, a close Smith friend since Newsome’s days as the head coach at Kecoughtan.
NEWSOME SUBSEQUENTLY had joined the staff at James Madison and was interviewed by Tech and Virginia in the winter of 2005-2006. Newsome met in December with UVa head coach Al Groh, who had lost offensive coordinator Ron Prince to Kansas State, where Prince was named head coach.
“[Newsome] would have taken that job,” Smith said Friday.
Newsome has never said he would have taken the job. Not to me, at least. However, he doesn’t rebut another Smith assertion, that he left Groh’s office that day thinking that he would be offered the job. Would Frank Beamer have moved up his timetable for adding Newsome to his staff? Probably so.
In bypassing Newsome in favor of Dave Borbely, Virginia basically took itself out of the Taylor sweepstakes. Only Newsome could have smoothed over a rift that had developed between Smith and UVa, but the Cavaliers may not have thought they needed Taylor. They already had put themselves in good shape with West Springfield quarterback Peter Lalich, a 6-foot-5, 225-pound pro-style quarterback who was in the Matt Schaub mold.
Nobody was going to get both Lalich and Taylor and, with or without Newsome, the Cavaliers had to feel their chances were better with Lalich.
“But, you know what, they were going to quarterback camps after [Lalich] had committed,” Smith said. “Tyrod was still going to those camps and they tried to get involved with Tyrod then.”
It is true that Virginia continued to show up on lists of schools that were recruiting Taylor or that Taylor was considering, but Tech always was considered the leader. There was no reason to second guess the Cavs on Lalich; after all, he was the highest-rated quarterback they’d ever signed.
(The basis for that is the SuperPrep quarterback rankings dating back to 1985, the first year SuperPrep All-America issue. That was Shawn Moore’s senior year at Martinsville High School but a call to SuperPrep publisher Allen Wallace confirmed that Moore was not mentioned in that publication).
Where the Cavaliers go now, without Lalich, is anybody’s guess. If he remains in school, do they even get his scholarship? Linebacker John Bivens has given up football due to chronic knee problems but he intends to play baseball, which means he must count against the football scholarship limit for as long as he plays. Don’t blame the rulesmakers; if you could add football or men’s basketball players by giving them non-revenue sports scholarships, it would happen all the time.
UVa already has taken 19 commitments for 2009 and will be stretched to take 3-4 more to be in compliance with the NCAA’s 85-scholarship limit. The return of two-year starting quarterback Jameel Sewell in 2009 would give the Cavaliers a total of three returning scholarship quarterbacks (Sewell, Marc Verica and Riko Smalls).
Recruit Ross Metheny from Sherando High School would make four, but then Sewell would be out of eligibility after the 2009 season. Whether Virginia re-enters the quarterback market at this point could hinge on Orange County quarterback Quintin Hunter, originally recruited as an “athlete” but now maybe worth a second look at QB.
I HAD FORGOTTEN the topic of last week’s poll question before calling up the Notebook Plus site and finding out that 60.9 percent of the 478 respondents said that signs should be allowed at college football games. (They’re currently banned at Tech, UVa and many other college venues).
Another 12.9 percent said signs should be allowed with approval.
I find a more interesting poll on the rivals.com UVa site, where respondents were asked to choose the better offensive coordinator, the Cavaliers’ Mike Groh or the Hokies’ Bryan Stinespring.
When I advised Stinespring on Friday morning that he had taken a slight lead with 52.34 percent of the vote, he asked, “Was that before or after Sarah Palin was added to the ticket?”
This might not make Stinespring’s critics any happier, but he does have a sense of humor.
This week's poll:
