Friday, November 07, 2008
TCU coming to Scott Stadium
Mackey expected to re-up with Hokies
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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While switching back and forth between the Virginia Tech-Maryland football game and the Cleveland-Denver NFL game, mostly to check on one of my fantasy football properties, I found myself wondering what was going on in the Utah-Texas Christian football game.
TCU had been on my mind after learning earlier in the day that the Horned Frogs will be coming to Virginia in 2009.
The contracts will be signed shortly, but agreement has been reached. TCU is the final addition to a 2007 UVa non-conference schedule that includes Southern Mississippi on the road, William and Mary at home and an as-yet unnamed Mid-American Conference opponent in Charlottesville.
The MAC owes Virginia four home games in exchange for the Cavaliers’ trip to Middle Tennessee State in 2007.
I’m not sure about the origin of the TCU-UVa talks, but the Cavaliers would not visit TCU, located in Fort Worth, until 2011 at the earliest and probably not till 2012. The Cavaliers already have lengthy trip planned to Southern California for 2010.
TCU has won 10 or more games in four of the past six seasons under coach Gary Patterson, and the Horned Frogs were 9-1 and ranked 11th in the country before dropping a 13-10 decision on the road Thursday at No. 9 Utah.
Virginia Tech’s non-conference scheduling has been better documented to this point, although the contract has not been signed for an early-season game in the Georgia Dome against a Southeastern Conference opponent, most likely Alabama.
The game is more certain than the opponent.
Tech’s other non-conference games in 2009 will be against East Carolina in Greenville, N.C., and against Nebraska and Marshall in Blacksburg.
NOW THAT TECH has taken an oral commitment from Brookville High School quarterback and would-be receiver Logan Thomas, Thomas’ cousin and Brookville teammate Zach McCray is on the board.
Look for McCray, a junior defensive end, to commit to the Hokies at any minute. He would be in the class of 2010.
The next addition to the Hokies’ 2009 class could be Leon Mackey, a 6-foot-6, 260-pound defensive end from Newark, Del., who is in his second season at Hargrave Military Academy.
Mackey signed with Tech last February, after playing with the Hargrave postgraduate team while in his fourth year of high school. Once he began classes at Hargrave this fall, as a postgraduate, his letter-of-intent with Tech no longer was binding and other schools were free to recruit him again.
In a conversation with Hargrave postgrad coach Robert Prunty on Thursday, I got the impression that Mackey was relatively solid in his commitment to the Hokies but that another one-time Tech recruit, offensive lineman Robert Massie, has been harder to read.
Massie, rated the No. 1 prep-school prospect in the country by rivals.com, committed to the Hokies in 2007 but reopened his recruiting prior to signing day with the understanding that he would not be an academic qualifier. The Hokies are recruiting Massie, originally from Appomattox and Liberty Christian Academy, but he is far from a done deal.
As for Hargrave’s signature prospect, quarterback Kevin Newsome from Chesapeake, Prunty reports that Newsome recently took an official visit to Boston College. Virginia Tech and Penn State are still viewed as the co-leaders for Newsome.
As reported in Thursday’s UVa Insider, the Cavaliers are taking a long look at 6-8, 300-pound Hargrave offensive lineman Dan Polaski, originally from Massachusetts.
DON’T ASSUME the Cavaliers are out of the running for Will Hill, a defensive lineman from Lafayette High School in Williamsburg who has indicated he would like to graduate in December, an option that is available in only a few Virginia school systems.
Virginia has been reluctanct to admit football players in January, a practice at other schools around the country, but admissions dean Jack Blackburn has indicated there is no policy against it. In fact, at least one men’s tennis player and one women’s golfer have enrolled at mid-year.
“We may have one or two circumstances we’ll float out there as a trial balloon,” said Groh, who may have been referring to Hill in a Tuesday news conference.
CHRIS GRIER, the Decatur, Ga., shooting guard who took an unofficial visit to Virginia this past weekend, is the son of Andre Grier, who was the leading receiver for the Cavaliers’ football team in 1978.
Andre Grier married his UVa sweetheart and they have an older son, Andre Jr., who is graduating from UVa’s commerce school this spring. The Grier family had a family reunion at last week’s UVa homecoming, complete with younger brother Chris.
“That’s a lot of UVa legacies to be looking at,” Andre Sr. said Friday. “I think Chris might want to blaze his own trail but the way we’re looking at it is, we’re interested in anybody who’s interested in us. Chris was quite impressed with JPJ. Everything was wonderful except for the result of the football game.”
Andre Grier is best known for a spectacular, diving touchdown catch in 1976 that lifted Virginia to an 18-17 victory at Wake Forest and ended a 15-game losing streak, longest in the country at the time.
Euphoria quickly turned to shock when the Cavaliers learned moments after the game that injured teammate Kevin Bowie had been murdered in Washington, D.C., on the night before the game.
IT WAS SO refreshing to watch the Thursday night football games without the incessant political advertisements that had been running ad nauseum for months.
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