A Day in the Life of College Football
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IF THE CALL IS GUN WEAK TREY DALLAS
BLAAAAAATTTTTTTTTT!
Every few minutes, an earsplitting horn sounds at Virginia Tech practices, informing coaches to move on to the next item. Each day’s timetable is broken down into hyperspecific increments: punt-coverage drills at 5:23 p.m., punt-return drills at 5:29 p.m., and so on. At the center of the practice field is a tower from which assistants videotape every aspect of each run-through; coaches will then stay at the football office far too late, reviewing not just game film but practice film. A student volunteer controls the horn; being a student volunteer for a ranked college football program is quite prestigious. More than a hundred players are on the practice field, joined by a dozen coaches and a coterie of trainers, graduate and undergraduate assistants, journalists, academic tutors, sports-medicine majors, “compliance” officers and boosters.
Not all present are men: most of the tutors and sports-medicine majors are female, and they blend in without apparent gender tension. On the tower, a bright digital clock shows the countdown to the conclusion of the NCAA-approved amount of time the Hokies may be on the field that day.
BLAAAAAATTTTTTTTTT! Practice is over. Most of the players sprint toward the locker room, knowing an appealing “training table” meal awaits, along with Gatorade. College football players drink Gatorade at breakfast, lunch and dinner. They down several bottles a day, including in cold weather, in the belief that having Gatorade in your system at all times reduces the odds of muscle cramps.
Even if you’re thirsty, the thrill of yet another Gatorade can wear off. Want a Frost Ripetide Rush? Some Rain Tangerine, perhaps? The players also quaff Gatorade protein shakes and munch Gatorade “energy bites,” basically high-tech candy. Candy is the exception to the otherwise impressively health-conscious diet of today’s NFL and NCAA football players: most locker rooms have a bowl of Snickers and 3 Musketeers bars, for a sugar rush before practice. In the halls of the Virginia Tech football facility, hundreds of cases of Gatorade sit shrink-wrapped on shipping pallets.
As practice ends, a few players are taken aside for interviews by assorted sports media, from ESPN to a college-owned house channel, all catering to the insatiable American desire for information about football. A few hear their names called out by their position coaches—like all college programs, Virginia Tech has not only a head coach, offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator, but coaches for each position, including a coach for inside linebackers and a coach for outside linebackers. Your name called out at the end of practice is not good. This means you are in minor trouble: missed a class, didn’t hustle. (Players in major trouble would not be practicing.) As everyone else leaves to relax and grab some ice-cold Fierce Wild Berry Gatorade, the players whose names were called are marched by their position coaches to Beamer, who leads them through up-downs.
Of the many drills football players detest, up-downs might head the list. Chop the knees high for fast running in place; then drop to the grass and do push-ups; then leap high and resume chopping. Beamer doesn’t say anything as he works his whistle to govern the up-downs. He doesn’t need to. No player wants to be left on the field with a sixty-six-year-old coaching legend while everyone else heads to dinner. That Beamer does the miscreants’ drill himself makes players really, really want to stay on their coaches’ good sides.
“Life is ten percent what happens to you, ninety percent how you react,” Beamer says to the chastised players as their up-downs end. “Young people make mistakes. Sometimes it’s okay to make a mistake. It is never okay to repeat a mistake.” He waves, and they trot off. Beamer muses, “It’s so important to bear in mind that these are not professional athletes. They are college students. They are here first to learn, second for sports.” At more than one big-college athletic department, this statement would be considered hopelessly naïve.
* * *
THE SCHOOL YEAR STARTS EARLY for Division I football players. Typically they report to campus in early summer to begin conditioning sessions and take one or two courses—picking up credits over the summer allows players to carry light course loads during football season. This only matters to colleges, such as Virginia Tech, that enforce strict academic rules for athletes. Auburn’s undefeated 2004 team was marred by the revelation that many members “remained eligible through independent-study-style courses that required little or no work,” The New York Times reported in 2006.
An NCAA athlete must carry six credits per semester—at most universities, this defines part-time attendance. “Six credits per semester is not being a college student,” says Cory Byrd, a former Hokie who is now an athletic tutor. Virginia Tech requires football players to carry at least twelve credits per semester, with the team average being fifteen.
Whether athletes excel in the classroom is a matter of a college’s own rules, and of the expectations set by coaches and the college’s administration. NCAA rules govern whether an athlete can receive a sports scholarship, but once that happens, colleges self-certify academic eligibility. That was how Auburn could declare players eligible based on “little or no work”—all too often, when it comes to football or men’s basketball, “little or no work” is fine to the college, so long as games are won.
When the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team met Bucknell University in the 2011 March Madness tournament, Connecticut entered the game with a 31 percent graduation rate, Bucknell with a 91 percent graduation rate. Victories was all the UConn Board of Trustees seemed to care about, since they did not enforce any GPA standard on athletes: if the men’s basketball players were flunking out, that was perfectly fine with UConn administration. Bucknell felt differently, not allowing athletes to practice unless they were making regular progress toward graduation. Bucknell imposed a strict internal GPA standard on its athletes, though the NCAA requires only a token standard. Virginia Tech has a similar policy. To many big-university athletic departments, requiring the football and men’s basketball teams to be in class makes about as much sense as requiring water to flow uphill.
The NCAA allows a Division I college to have eighty-five attending on football scholarship, so the scholarship players who spend summers with their football programs have their tuition and living expenses paid. Players who are not on scholarship—often, ten to twenty are in this situation—must pay their own summer costs, unless they receive regular financial aid. Those who are not on NCAA scholarship are not required to attend summer drills, but know their chances of playing are minimal if they don’t.
Occasionally a college has an unused scholarship slot and awards it to a walk-on. Leftover scholarships are intensely desired—in a sense, representing a second chance to be recruited for the boy who did not receive a Division I offer out of high school. Jim Leonhard, eventually a star with the New York Jets, went to the University of Wisconsin in 2001 and played as a walk-on, not receiving an athletic scholarship until his senior year—he had been named All Big Ten before he had an athletic scholarship. At Virginia Tech in 2011, a walk-on named Martin Scales, who was attending the school as a history major, planned to drop out of college when his father lost his job. Beamer awarded him an unused scholarship. Scales occasionally played as a reserve running back and went on to graduate.
Until 1977, there was no limit on the number of football scholarships. The result was that a few programs—Texas, Oklahoma, USC—dominated the Top 10 every year. Armed with booster money, they would award scholarships to a hundred to two hundred top high school seniors, far more than would ever take the field in college, just to keep them away from competitors. As the NCAA began to impose scholarship ceilings, fixed at eighty-five in 1994, college football became democratized. Players who a generation before would have been fourth string at Michigan became starters for Appalachian State, which would defeat Michigan, on its home turf, in 2007 in one of the greatest upsets in sports annals. Spreading the football talent helped induce more colleges to compete in top-level football—from 239 schools playing Division I football in 1980 to 260 Division I programs in 2010.
The universities competing in the NCAA’s Division I (big school) and Division II (medium-size school) have about twenty-five thousand scholarship players in any given year. (Many liberal-arts colleges field teams in Division III, but this classification forbids athletic scholarships.) That means about twenty-five thousand young men each year attend college essentially free, owing to football—one of the leading pluses of the sport.
There is a hidden benefit—a Division I football scholarship can last five years. Many players redshirt as freshmen, taking classes and attending practice but not dressing for games. Those college programs that care only about winning have players focus on lifting weights in their redshirt year, so they are physically magnificent when they step onto the field. Conscientious programs such as at Virginia Tech, Boston College or Northwestern use the redshirt year to acclimate eighteen-year-old starstruck athletic prodigies to classroom routines, setting them on course to a diploma.
“A major-university football player gets five years in college instead of four, and all kinds of personal tutoring,” notes Bruce Garnes, deputy director of football operations at Virginia Tech. The Hokies have seven academic tutors who work exclusively with athletes, a resource that regular students at any university might long for. When potential recruits come to Blacksburg to visit, their first meeting is with an academic counselor. The Hokies’ graduation focus is laid out to recruits, and to their parents, before they get to see the NFL-like football facility, before they see the awards hall with jerseys of retired stars, before a coach shows them the majesty of Lane Stadium. Garnes continues, “With an extra year of college and extra academic support, there is just no excuse for not graduating.”
Some defenders of low graduation numbers for major-college programs say football players don’t perform notably worse, in terms of walking across the stage wearing gowns, than the student body as a whole at their schools. For example, the University of South Carolina, one of the SEC colleges that is synonymous with great football and lax academics, finished ninth in the football polls in 2011, while graduating just 45 percent of its African-American players. Since the university as a whole graduated 55 percent of black students, the apology goes, was the football team’s classroom performance really so bad?
It was—because Division I football players ought to graduate at a higher rate than the student body as a whole. Scholarship football players get an extra year of instruction, extra tutoring—and don’t pay for college. The latter is crucial. Running out of money is the primary reason university students fail to complete degrees. NCAA football players don’t run out of money.
In the five most recent years at Virginia Tech, an average of 77 percent of football players have graduated, versus an average of 75 percent of all students; an average of 73 percent of African American football players have graduated, versus an average of 61 percent of all African American students. This is what could happen at every big-money university, if thinking that education matters more than victories was not hopelessly naïve.
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ABOVE TWO THOUSAND FEET IN rolling mountains, Blacksburg is pleasant in the summertime—dry air, rarely hot. If one must run hills to prepare for a football season, few places are more welcoming.
Through the summer months, Hokies endure grueling conditioning sessions, plus supervised weight lifting, lifting to athletes. As recently as when Bart Starr and Fuzzy Thurston performed for the Green Bay Packers team that won the first Super Bowl, football players trained with push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks. The dreaded training-camp trial was the twelve-minute run: a generation ago, many linemen could not jog for twelve minutes without stopping.
Football has evolved to reward speed and endurance. Today even three-hundred-pound linemen run strapped into small parachutes to improve their quickness, while spending hours weekly on treadmills. Scientific use of barbells and dumbbells now entails timing of different types of lifts involving different body areas and types of muscle fibers, along with timing of protein consumption. “The game is won in the fourth quarter,” coaches say, when both teams are tired and the one that still possesses spark will prevail. Today the backups on the Virginia Tech roster, or the roster of any major-college program, are stronger and more fit than starters for the 1966 Packers. Conditioning and supervised lifting in the NFL have even more dramatic effects, since by the time they are professionals, players are in their midtwenties, the years of physical peak. “Today’s worst NFL team would defeat the 1966 Green Bay Packers by fifty points, based solely on size, strength and conditioning,” says Chris Sprow, a senior editor of the ESPN Insider scouting service.
When the academic year begins, Virginia Tech turns into a bustling small city, with crowded sidewalks and lines to board shuttle buses that ply the campus. The main bus-marshaling area fronts the school’s magnificent formal lawn—both Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia boast the sort of long lawns that Thomas Jefferson thought visually signaled the word academia—and is within view of the memorial to the thirty-two innocents murdered in the 2007 massacre.
The memorial is a semicircle with thirty-two blocks of dolomite limestone, each block bearing only a name, nothing more. Quarried nearby, the limestone is known locally as Hokie stone and is employed as facing on most of Virginia Tech’s classroom buildings. Norris Hall, where the worst occurred, was not torn down; renovated, it remains in use as the school’s Center for Peace Studies. Virginia Tech decided not to erase what happened, rather, to incorporate the memory into what the college is—though the event is invariably referred to as “April sixteenth,” not as “the murders” or “the massacre.” The ghoulish killer was Korean by birth. Five years later, I wandered through Norris Hall and saw many Asian faces, plus Korean names on classroom doors. No grudges are held; this is not in Virginia Tech’s nature.
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ONCE SCHOOL IS IN SESSION, a typical Virginia Tech player’s day would be like this:
6:00 a.m.—report to the football complex for treatment if rehabilitating an injury. By Halloween, half the team is rehabilitating. Sitting in an ice bath at 6:00 a.m. is loads of fun.
Morning—breakfast, attend class, lunch.
2:00 p.m.—individual meetings with coaches by position; press interviews.
3:00 p.m.—overall team meeting.
3:30 p.m.—tape up for practice.
4:00–6:00 p.m.—practice
Afterward dinner, study hall (sometimes mandatory), homework, snack, bed.
The NCAA limits the amount of time athletes may spend preparing for sports. Virginia Tech abides strictly to NCAA time limits; other colleges laugh at them. When Tim Tebow was the star quarterback at the University of Florida, he and his position coach, Dan Mullen—later head coach at Mississippi State—gave The New York Times an interview in which they described in detail the twenty hours per week Tebow spends reviewing film during the off-season. The relevant NCAA rule reads, “During the offseason, a student-athlete’s participation shall be limited to a maximum of eight hours per week, of which no more than two hours per week may be spent on the viewing of film.” Mullen knew the rule of course and also knew the NCAA never enforces rules like this. Even during the off-season, at many college programs, players spend more time on football than on classwork.
NCAA regulations limit colleges to ten football coaches, a number that itself seems high. This is another rule widely ignored. Clemson University’s 2011 football media guide listed ten regular coaches plus nine “strength and conditioning” coaches whose sole responsibility is football. Job description for one of the people the NCAA does not view as a football coach: “Works with the centers and offensive guards from a strength and conditioning standpoint.” Clemson further has a “director of football programs” and a “director of football player personnel,” plus two assistant athletic directors for football and an associate athletic director for football. That sounds awfully like twenty-four football coaches.
Clemson can publish this information in a media guide because it knows there is no chance the NCAA will take action. Other big-money programs go unchallenged with similar affronts. In 2011, Ole Miss listed eleven football coaches and seven men with coachlike titles such as “assistant athletic director for player development.” Virginia Tech has 14 football staffers with coach- or coach-like titles. Following the rules to the letter causes, for the Hokies, a competitive disadvantage.
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NO RESTRICTIONS APPLY TO THE time spent on football by coaches, who are in the football complex at all hours nearly year-round. In the off-season they pour over film of the hundreds of high school players to whom Virginia Tech might extend the maximum of twenty-five scholarship offers it can make annually. A coaches’ conference room, where they pass many hours, has a table suitable for King Arthur and his knights.
Football is in some ways a junior imitation of military life; coaches—the officers—exhibit military mannerisms. The assistants address or refer to each other as “Coach” under all circumstances. If one is speaking of a fellow coach not present, it isn’t “Curt said” or “Jim thinks,” it’s “Coach Newsome said” or “Coach Cavanaugh thinks,” in the same way an officer would not say “Rasheed thinks” but rather “Major Wright thinks.” Coach is a male-world honorific. Men volunteer to help with youth league programs in part for the satisfaction of being addressed as “Coach.”
Being in the military analogy the flag-rank officer, Beamer invariably is addressed as “sir,” including by his peers. At one meeting Beamer said to his defensive coordinator, “I need last week’s defensive statistics.” The fifty-three-year-old Bud Foster replied, “Yes sir!”—and jogged, rather than walked, to his office for the papers.
Because Virginia Tech has a stable program with a family atmosphere, assistants rarely depart. Foster has worked for Beamer since 1981. “A lot has changed in that time,” Foster says. “When I played college football, we were excited if the final score was listed in the newspaper. Now everything we do goes out on television and the Web. When we walk into a hotel lobby, if ESPN doesn’t have cameras there to film our arrival, the players think something is terribly wrong.” Beamer’s right-hand men Billy Hite and John Ballein have been with him since the late 1980s, essentially since he was handed the head coach’s whistle. Offensive assistant Bryan Stinespring has worked for Beamer in various capacities since 1993.
By football standards, this is remarkable little turnover. Going into the 2012 NFL season, the Oakland Raiders had their fifth head coach in eight years, including three consecutive seasons with a different head coach. The Miami Dolphins were on their tenth offensive coordinator in twelve years, the Denver Broncos on their ninth defensive coordinator in ten years. In 2010, the University of Maryland fired its coaches. One year later the new head coach fired his new offensive and defensive coordinators. Turmoil of this sort is the norm in college and NFL football. When a head coach wants to shift blame, his assistants are ready scapegoats. NFL owners cannot fire their teams, and athletic directors know it takes two to three years to turn over a college roster. So if a season goes poorly, firing coaches is something quick and dramatic that a pro owner or college administration can do to placate the fan base.
Beamer doesn’t operate this way. Following the 2-8-1 season of 1992, Beamer fired several assistants. Twenty-one years would pass, to 2013, before Beamer again dismissed more than one staff member; in January 2013, he fired three assistants after a 7-6 record. The ever-rising emphasis on win-win-win is shown by how, in 1992, it took a two-victory season to cause college boosters to demand a football housecleaning. By 2013, when Virginia Tech finished above .500 and won a bowl game, the season was viewed by the school’s supporters and donors as a calamity because Virginia Tech football failed to reach the Top 20! Beamer agonized for weeks over his 2013 decision to let go three assistants, plus demote Stinespring from offensive coordinator to tight-ends coach, a major step down in status.
Most coaches fire assistants without hesitation to shift blame for any season perceived as less than triumphant—hang the assistants out to dry in the press too. Beamer craves stability, and unlike coaches who preach loyalty then throw staff overboard, Beamer actually believes in loyalty. To avoid criticizing former assistants in public, Beamer spun the 2013 dismissals as a move to bring in younger coaches with a grasp of evolving football tactics and youth culture.
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COACHES’ MEETING INCLUDE A WEEKLY Bible-study session, often at the crack of dawn, run by team chaplain Johnny Shelton. The atmosphere is fundamentalist. A typical comment, from a coaches’ Bible-study session: “If you want to lead your wives as the Bible instructs, then you must first show your wives love.”
Before games Shelton leads players in prayers for strength, endurance, or safety, but never for victory. Few things can shake faith more than an unctuous clergyman offering a pregame prayer that boils down to “God, crush our opponents.” The divine, Shelton says, cares whether Virginia Tech players exhibit admirable behavior, but does not care who wins at football. In parts of the United States, the second half of that sentence is radical theology.
One of the coaches’ meetings is a weekly session in which academic advisers review, course by course, the classroom situations of each player. Each position coach—the wide-receivers coach is responsible for the wide receivers, and so on—gets a readout of what the players under his aegis must accomplish academically that week. If the list is not completed, the player does not practice; and every football player knows if you’re not allowed to practice, you’re not going to play. Those who are completing their coursework but have low grades are assigned Sunday study sessions, even on the Sundays following away games.
During one of the sessions the school’s chief tutor for football, Sarah Armstrong, informed the coaches several players were not taking seriously a class about gay and lesbian issues. From the course catalog: “2314, HUMAN SEXUALITY. Explores the diversity of human sexuality using global perspectives. Biological, historical, developmental, psychological and sociological approaches frame this interdisciplinary examination of the social constructions of sexuality.” A room full of old-school football coaches was being lectured by a young woman about “social constructions of sexuality.” The coaches listened respectfully, then Beamer told his assistants he did not want players cracking wise in the sex class. A good guess is that did not occur again.
Virginia Tech football academic reviews are so detailed and serious, I wondered if the one I attended as part of an itinerary was staged for my benefit. So later in the season I walked into the main conference room unannounced, on a day I’d said I would be absent, at the time normally employed for academic review. The same was happening when no observer was expected: an hour-long accounting of what every player needed to accomplish in the classroom that week. Graduation statistics don’t fall out of the sky.
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BEAMER HAS A REPUTATION FOR being low voltage in public; his private demeanor is the same. Strictly business, never upset. Mike Goforth, the Hokies’ athletic director for sports medicine—he runs the trainers’ room—says he has never seen Beamer lose his composure. “Once I forgot an assignment,” Goforth says. “He called me into his office and stared at me for a moment. Then he said, ‘Michael, this surprises me.’ I squirmed. I would have much rather been yelled at.” Though Beamer rarely jokes in public, he shows wit in private. During a coaches’ meeting discussion of a high school star who wasn’t performing well in college, Beamer quipped, “This kid’s light needs to come on, and I’m not sure he even has a switch.”
Prominent in the conference room is a depth chart, with magnetic tags representing each player. The starters know who they are, of course; the backups are nervous about whether they are second-, third- or fourth-string. Second-string is fine: you travel to away games, you’ll get in and get your jersey dirty when the starter—and football people still say this even in an era of rampant profanity—“needs a blow” (meaning needs to go to the sideline and breathe deeply). Third- or fourth-string is not good. Your jersey will not get dirty, so as you trot off from a home game after the double whistle, it will be obvious to your friends, family and girlfriend that you did not play. You won’t be on the travel squad—like most colleges, Virginia Tech dresses its full squad only for home games, not taking along for away dates players with no chance of entering the contest. Coaches post a travel-squad list in the locker room the day before each away-game departure; it varies a bit, depending on who’s injured and who practiced well that week. For the player who is poised between second- and third-string, checking the travel roster is an unpleasant moment.
The locker room is wood-paneled, with a dozen flatscreen TVs set to ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and ESPN Classic. The joke in the 2004 movie DodgeBall about a sports event airing on “ESPN8” may not be a punch line much longer. Each player has a large locker with a personal nameplate, stocked with freshly washed gear and a range of Nike apparel—tracksuits, hoodies, T’s, shorts, casual wear. Virginia Tech’s apparel-marketing arrangement is with the company, which competes with Under Armour and Reebok to be exclusive supplier for high-profile teams in football and basketball. “Everything I wear is Nike. I try to feel grateful and not take this for granted when I meet friends who are only wearing Hanes,” says Kyle Fuller, a defensive back.
Virginia Tech renovated the football locker room in 2006, seeking conspicuous stylishness. High schoolers on recruiting visits are impressed by fancy locker rooms. Other schools that Virginia Tech jockeys with for recruits were renovating their locker rooms, so in arms-race style, the Hokies had to, as well. Locker rooms that resemble exclusive health clubs have spread broadly across college athletics, including to women’s sports.
Beyond the offices and coaches’ conference area are an extensive weight floor just for football players; and a training area shared by all Virginia Tech varsity members, where it is standard for male and female athletes to mingle in shorts and T’s. Young men and young women with fantastic physiques, nearly naked in close proximity to each other, would have shocked polite society a generation ago. Today this is common in collegiate athletics and almost never leads to issues because acting blasé under these circumstances is important to athletes of both genders. There is also a football players’ lounge, where the walls display large headshots not of stars but of the team members with the highest GPAs, and a study hall adjacent to the lounge, with forty computer workstations and a tutor always on duty.
Next is the football hall, itself a sizable building. An exhibit area displays memorabilia of famed Virginia Tech players and of great victories. Nearby is a theater that seats 150, named for Michael Vick, used when everyone watches game film together. Each position has a classroom all its own—a quarterbacks’ room, a tight ends’ room, a linebackers’ room and so on. A long mural shows the names of Virginia Tech players who achieved all-American status or performed in the NFL.
One memento on display in the Hokies’ exhibit hall is a quarterback wristband from 1964. Written on the wristband are two formations and fourteen plays—a game plan for that era. Today the offensive coaches’ conference room at Virginia Tech has an entire wall devoted to whiteboard diagrams of the team’s twenty-six formations, from which hundreds of plays are possible.
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PLAYERS ENDLESSLY REVIEW THE FORMATIONS, calls, checks and audibles of modern football. Terminology ingrained during summer months must be reinforced to prevent mistakes under game pressure, especially since the no-huddle fad that swept football beginning around the year 2005 can mean a player gets only a few seconds between hearing the call and the snap of the ball.
One day in the quarterbacks’ classroom, coach Mike O’Cain was reviewing the “sims”—decoy signals intended to confuse the defense—that Virginia Tech’s six quarterbacks were expected to know by heart. Over in the defensive-line classroom, coach Charley Wiles was reviewing the “fronts,” or alignments. A defense of the 1960s had two fronts, one for short-yardage downs and one for long-yardage. The contemporary Virginia Tech defense has a dozen fronts, each with multiple variations. “Guys, if the call is Gun Weak Trey Dallas, what do you do?” Wiles asked the defensive linemen. Obviously the correct answer was “Double eagle.”
A generation ago, a rushing call sounded like 65 Toss Power Trap, the play the Kansas City Chiefs used to score the decisive touchdown in their 1970 Super Bowl victory over the Minnesota Vikings. Chiefs head coach Hank Stram called 65 Toss Power Trap although the team had not practiced it in months. The nomenclature was simple enough that in the huddle, players told quarterback Len Dawson they remembered what to do. A passing call a generation ago sounded like Red Right Tight Sprint Right Option, the play the San Francisco 49ers used to stage “The Catch,” defeating the Dallas Cowboys in the 1982 NFC championship, one of the memorable upsets of sports lore.
These designations had simple meanings. Red Right Tight meant the Red formation with the tight end on the right and “backs in a divide,” the standard NFL set of the period. Blue, Green and Brown were the other basic formations of the West Coast Offense under head coach Bill Walsh. Sprint Right Option meant quarterback Joe Montana would take off right with the option to pass or run, getting outside the “tackle box” before looking downfield. (That makes it a sprint-out rather than a rollout; on a rollout, the quarterback looks downfield the entire time.) The play was called in the huddle, as nearly all plays were then. Montana actually said only “Sprint Right Option” because the 49ers used Red Right Tight so often the formation was assumed.
By 2008, when I was an assistant coach at Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland, a call would sound like Lobo Roll 25 Wheel. High school kids would need to remember what that meant. They would need to remember the meaning of all the codes such as Rodeo 23 Omaha or Wing Left 34 Boot or Blast Green 88 Cross Seam. Churchill’s playbook was a little much, but not out of step with the complexity ascending at all levels of football. By the twenty-first century, even at a high school, Sprint Right Option would have sounded too simple.
By 2011, a Virginia Tech play would sound like Pro Flip Sail Louie Y Choice. The operative part of the call is Y Choice, which means the tight end does not decide what pass pattern to run until he starts down the field. If a linebacker covers him, then he chooses a deep seam, because a tight end should outrun a linebacker. If a defensive back covers him, then he chooses a dig, going ten yards and slamming to a halt, because a tight end cannot outrun a defensive back, but is stronger and so should make the catch despite the defensive back’s slamming into him as the pass arrives.
Not only must the Virginia Tech players remember the codes for twenty-six formations, a hundred or so actions and multiple variations—many big-college and NFL teams now employ similarly complex play-calling—but they don’t get much time to think about assignments because most play calls are not given in the huddle. They’re called at a line of scrimmage, as part of the fad for no-huddle tactics.
In the no-huddle systems used by Virginia Tech, to signal in the call, three players on the sideline—three backup quarterbacks—make elaborate, rhythmic hand motions that resemble poorly performed dancing at a rave concert. Only one is the live signaler; the other two are dummies, so that even if the opposing team watches the signals, it won’t know which signal to take seriously and which to ignore. Before each quarter, coaches tell the offensive players which signaler is live.
As the hurry-up offense was changing from a rare tactic to common, “at first we tried to send the plays in by substituting a player, who told the call to the quarterback,” O’Cain says. But sending in signals by substitution didn’t work as it once did. “Some of the calls have become so long, inevitably the guys forget one of the words.” A player rushing onto the field could remember 65 Toss Power Trap. Now calls sound like Rip Frostee 28 Cross Hummer Box. O’Cain explains, “If the player forgot one word, and said Rip Frostee 28 Cross Box, everyone on the field would go ‘Huh?’”
Like many coaches experimenting with quick-snap tactics, O’Cain found visual signals worked better than verbal ones. “Ours is a visual society,” he says. “Today’s young people grow up spending more time looking at images than reading words. It turned out even complex play calls could be sent in accurately if we used visuals.” By 2010, the University of Oregon would be signaling plays by holding up, on the sideline, large poster boards, each of which had four bright images: whimsical choices like Big Bird, Jennifer Aniston, a Lamborghini. Players knew which image to check—say, the lower right—ignoring the rest. The images corresponded to a wristband code.
By the time the University of Oregon reached the 2011 BCS title game with very-quick-snap tactics dubbed the Blur Offense, the Ducks needed just sixteen seconds between downs. Virginia Tech couldn’t quite reach that pace. But like everything else in our world, college football was speeding up.
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BEYOND THE PRACTICE FIELDS IS the tunnel that leads into Lane Stadium. The moment of emerging from the tunnel to seventy thousand roaring spectators tingles the spines of all but the jaded. A piece of limestone from the Virginia Tech quarry is above the tunnel exit. Players reach high to tap the stone as they run into the stadium.
Lining the length of the tunnel are the names, from all past years, of football players who graduated. Not who were stars—who graduated. DeAngelo Hall, a Virginia Tech star who was the eighth choice of the 2004 NFL draft, years later was back at school taking courses, seeking his diploma. Otherwise, even as the Hokies’ highest NFL draft choice in a decade, his name would not be inscribed in the tunnel.
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BEAMER IS A CREATURE OF habit, so most regular days follow a script—if you know what day of the week it is, you know what the Hokies are doing. On game weekends, the pace of team life changes.
If the game is away, the Hokies leave the afternoon before, so players can be in class the morning the trip begins. Some big colleges leave two days before an away game, to give players’ bodies time to recover from travel weariness. That means skipping class, which is okay at many colleges—and not just for football, also for women’s sports—but not okay at Virginia Tech. The Hokies travel early only to bowl games, which occur when school is not in session.
Most home games are on Saturdays. On the Friday night before, the team has dinner at a steak house, then stays in the best hotel in Roanoke, half an hour from school, to get away from campus distractions. The Friday-night feast, at the Farmhouse, in the perfectly named Christiansburg, Virginia, follows a strict routine. Ballein calls the players up to a buffet table in order of their GPAs. Star players may sit feeling hungry as they watch third-stringers who are doing well in the classroom get first choice of the steaks and prime rib. Simply by observing the order in which players walk up, everyone knows who is excelling academically and who is bringing up the rear.
A police escort accompanies team buses to the steak house, to the hotel, then back to campus the next morning. Police cruisers flank the buses; motorcycle officers race ahead to close intersections so the convoy can pass without stopping for lights.
The absurd touch of police escorts for football is common. NFL teams at the Super Bowl always have police escorts, including when shuttling to practices and meals; most NFL teams have police escorts for regular-season games. The buses bearing the LSU football squad were surrounded by state-police cruisers with flashing lights as they traveled to New Orleans for the 2012 college championship; by the time the Tigers’ buses arrived at their hotel, eighteen police cars and motorcycles were accompanying them. CBS, ESPN, Fox and NBC broadcasters sometimes get police escorts to games, allowing them to roar past gridlocked traffic as if they were a summit-meeting delegation. When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell attended the 2011 Pittsburgh-at-Baltimore contest, he had a police escort bracketing his car front and back.
College teams don’t need police escorts; that they get them is a measure of the over-the-top nature of contemporary football. Football broadcasters or the NFL commissioner are private businessmen. Why should they receive special treatment?
Of Goodell’s traffic-stopping police escort, the Baltimore Sun quoted a police official as saying, “The National Football League had security concerns given Goodell’s rank.” The notion that hooded assassins were shadowing Goodell is beyond parody. President George W. Bush’s National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States concluded that no specific American individual had ever been targeted by terrorists. Nevertheless, if the NFL had “security concerns” regarding Goodell, it could have hired private bodyguards at its own expense. Later the Sun reported a Baltimore police official admitted the “terrorism” claim was always nonsense—the escort was for Goodell’s convenience, so he could cut through game-day traffic, rather than wait his turn like the riffraff.
Waste of taxpayer money on police escorts for football—coupled to inconvenience for average people, who must pull over while the football royalty passes—is a minor issue, low on the list of skewed priorities associated with today’s athletics. But if society cannot think clearly about a minor question such as whether people involved in football should get special treatment, how can society think clearly about the big issues of football, such as health and education? As for the Hokies, voters around Blacksburg probably approve of the police escorts, which add a feel of excitement to a quiet area.
* * *
TEAM BUSES ARRIVING AT LANE Stadium for a home game do not disappear into a cordoned-off access area, as with buses bringing an NFL team to a contest. Instead the buses park at the formal arched entrance of the stadium, where await thousands of spectators, the cheerleaders, the dance squad and the regimental marching band, a cadets’ organization. The team then stages a slow walk to the entrance to the athletic complex where they will dress. As this happens, cheerleaders somersault, brass instruments oompah a few familiar ostinatos, and adoring supporters clap while calling out players’ names.
Many college programs stage some variation of The Walk prior to football home games. Those who look carefully at the throng present for The Walk at Virginia Tech will notice most of those cheering are at least middle-aged—long since graduated from the institution, if they ever attended. This is broadly true across collegiate athletics. At a USC football game, a Duke basketball game, there are students in the stands, but the majority of the paying customers are older, either boosters or simply enthusiasts of the sport being played.
In autumn of 2011, I watched from the Hokies’ sideline as Virginia Tech lost in Lane Stadium to Clemson, ending hopes of an undefeated season. Star defender James Gayle twisted an ankle early and had to leave the game; quarterback Logan Thomas had an off day; the normally stout Hokie defense was confounded by Clemson’s Sammy Watkins, an eighteen-year-old phenom. In the locker room immediately afterward, Virginia Tech tailback David Wilson, soon to be named ACC Player of the Year, rhythmically pounded his fist against a table repeating, “No, no, no, no.”
Beamer stood on a chair to address the team. Everyone is gracious in victory—well, almost everyone. You learn more about a person’s character when he loses than when he wins.
“Clemson won because they played better than we did, so they deserve the credit,” Beamer said. “Tonight was just one day in your life. There will be better days. We will work to improve. The important thing is that you stay together and not point fingers.” Then Beamer called on Ballein, who read the list of players required to report to study hall on Sunday morning—mere hours after a nationally televised game—because their GPAs weren’t satisfactory.
Beamer wasn’t angry or red-faced, didn’t criticize or embarrass any player, and did not use profanity. Many football coaches talk such a blue streak that their language looks like cartoon swear words: “#@&!!@#+!” Many football coaches are lividly angry in the locker room after a loss, screaming denunciation at the opponent, the officials, their own players.
In a season with Beamer, I observed him:
• Teach freshmen how to rush a punt by aiming not for the punter but for a spot in front of him and exactly nine yards past the line of scrimmage—where the kick would be as it left the punter’s foot.
• Read to kindergarteners.
• Say in a postgame interview that a false-start penalty that cost Virginia Tech a first-and-goal on the opponents’ 1 was caused by the student band’s beginning to play as the Hokies called signals. When videotape showed the student band had been silent, Beamer apologized profusely. Students bands at big-college programs pride themselves on knowing when to play and when not to.
• Fail to notice the clock advancing with Virginia Tech in goal-to-go with a few seconds remaining in the first half, a mistake that forced the Hokies to use their final time-out and settle for a field goal. “That was my fault,” Beamer said immediately to his assistants along the sideline.
• Often tell his players, “Go, man, go,” a phrase not much uttered since maybe 1975.
Though I observed Beamer do these and many other things, I never heard him use profanity in public and only once heard him mutter “damn” during a private meeting.
Much more important, I never saw Beamer lose his temper or denigrate a player, assistant or staffer. Far too many coaches are unable to control their anger, or think that screaming is motivating. Iron law of athletics: a coach who screams is wasting everyone’s time, including his own. When an NFL coach screams at a millionaire professional, that may be poor form, but a professional can look after himself. When a youth-league or high school coach screams at a quaking child, this is another matter.
Beamer is among the small number of NCAA and NFL coaches to practice “positive coaching,” whose mantra is simple: never demean, only challenge others to improve. In 2009, TCU head coach Gary Patterson told National Public Radio that he had caught himself screaming at a player, felt ashamed, and resolved to become a better person by switching to positive coaching. If only society’s leaders would take a look into the mirror and resolve to become better people! Many from the football old school would say that treating players with kindness and respect would backfire. Two years after Patterson’s conversion to positive coaching, TCU won the Rose Bowl.
* * *
THE WEEK FOLLOWING THE CLEMSON loss, Virginia Tech trailed the University of Miami in the fourth quarter, at home. The faithful were restless and even booed, which does not happen much during big-college home games. On fourth down with seconds remaining, Thomas faked a handoff to Wilson, kept the ball, and bulled forward for a 19-yard touchdown and the win. Quarterback Tyrod Taylor of the Baltimore Ravens, a former Hokie, was on the Virginia Tech sideline shouting, “This is where the Logan Thomas legend begins!” That night the sports press was thick with Thomas’s name.
Because of the dramatic win, the stadium did not clear as usual—Hokie supporters were still rollicking long after the comeback concluded. On his chair in the locker room, Beamer praised the University of Miami and then said to his own players, “This is the kind of night that turns a team into a family. We are going to be behind again. When that happens, remember what this felt like.” Wilson asked if he could stand on the chair and said to his jubilant teammates, “Guys, the whole campus is going to be a big party. Don’t do anything stupid tonight.” Everyone knew what he meant. Then Ballein stood on the chair and, saying nothing about the game, recited the names of players due in study hall Sunday morning.
A few months later, Wilson would leave Virginia Tech as a junior, declaring early for the NFL draft. Even at college programs such as Notre Dame, Stanford or Virginia Tech, where there is genuine emphasis on education, if a football player is likely to be “first or second day” in the NFL draft—meaning a high selection—there is wide support for a decision to go pro. Beamer accompanied Wilson to the press conference at which he announced he was leaving early and wished him well: the defending Super Bowl champion New York Giants would chose Wilson in the first round. There was nothing but good vibrations for Wilson, though his leaving deprived the school of the senior year of a talented player in whom the Hokies had a substantial investment.
Being a high NFL draft choice means cashing an enormous bonus check. Any college player who can grab that brass ring should do so, whether or not it means leaving college too soon. Who knows what the future holds? Perhaps a disabling injury. Players who will be high NFL draft choices don’t urgently need diplomas—nice if they get them, but not urgent. It’s the NCAA players who will never take a snap in the NFL who must graduate. And that describes nearly all NCAA players.
* * *
VIRGINIA TECH FINISHED THE 2011 regular season 11-1, ranked tenth in the nation. The next step was the ACC title game, played on a neutral field in Charlotte, North Carolina. Once again the opponent was Clemson, once again on national television.
There was a lot of downtime in the hotel before the 8:00 p.m. kickoff—players and coaches sitting around in tracksuits, feeling bored or anxious. Most players and coaches prefer the early-afternoon kickoff: waiting around all day is nerve-racking. For high school games played on Friday nights, school takes your mind off things. For a college away game on Saturday night, there’s nothing but waiting.
The team hotel was across from First Presbyterian Church, built two centuries ago, after Europeans settled in what is now Charlotte. Outside the church was the ever-changing clamor of contemporary life—Internet, helicopters, rap, fashion, national obsession with football. Inside the church, in two hundred years hardly anything had changed.
Virginia Tech and Clemson played even in the first half, but after intermission Watkins ran wild again, and again the Hokies lost. That dropped the team to 11-2 and out of contention for BCS bowls, the high-prestige events for which invitations would be announced the following day. Though an 11-2 record is impressive—many megabucks, win-at-all-costs programs only dream of going 11-2—BCS invites never are extended to colleges that just lost. Bowl committees want teams that enter on a winning streak.
The ACC title contest was played at the stadium where the Carolina Panthers perform, and after the loss, Beamer needed no chair to stand on in the Panthers’ expansive locker room. Virginia Tech had just lost on national television, yet the head coach said nothing about that. Nor did he criticize the defense, which again had no answer for Watkins, or the offensive linemen, who had their worst outing of the season. Here is the entirety of what Beamer said to the team:
“I was very unhappy that some of you did not shake hands at midfield after the game. That’s not who were are. Clemson earned the win, so we should have shaken their hands. I do not ever want to see poor sportsmanship on our part again.” Beamer stopped speaking, and there was a long silence as players looked at their feet. Then he continued, “Now we are unlikely to get a BCS invitation. But we have won more than ten games and will go to a bowl, and tonight only a handful of teams in college football can say those words. So no sour faces. Back to work.”
That was it. There was no yelling by Beamer or by any of his assistants. The team showered and boarded its five buses, each person in the travel party handed a box of chicken at midnight. Just try figuring out what to do with your elbows when eating a chicken dinner on a bus next to a six-foot-four-inch, 320-pound football player. En route back to Blacksburg, one of the buses broke down; passengers from that bus crow-barred into the others, making for an uncomfortable ride. The four operating carriages were back on the Virginia Tech campus at 4:00 a.m. Sunday, wheeling up to the stadium gate with all else silent. Players with low GPAs were required to be in study hall after breakfast.
Through that Sunday, the coaches were at the football facility, awaiting the bowl-invitation announcements. Beamer was hoping for a consolation-prize event with status, such as the Chick-fil-A Bowl in Atlanta, a city with a reputation for hosting events well. Virginia Tech’s sports-media personnel were practicing their spin in case the Hokies found themselves invited to one of the games that are butts of late-night comedians’ jokes, such as the Meineke Car Care Bowl or the Beef ‘O’Brady’s Bowl.
Beamer was unperturbed, saying, “We will still go to a bowl game, and a bowl week in a nice hotel is a great reward for the players and for spouses of the staff, a pleasant way to conclude the season. Something they’ll always remember.”
At 7:00 p.m., war whoops went up throughout the Virginia Tech football facility. The phone had rung—and Virginia Tech was invited to face Michigan in the Sugar Bowl, one of the max-prestige BCS events. Despite losing the ACC title contest, Virginia Tech would make its second consecutive BCS appearance and once again play on prime-time national television.
The invitation was an indicator of respect for what Beamer and his straitlaced, old-fashioned program has accomplished. The penultimate chapter will describe the Sugar Bowl game in detail.
Now the book changes course from Virginia Tech to the questions of football in American society. Virginia Tech’s program is in many respects an ideal—run about as well as can be imagined. Many aspects of football fall far short of ideal. America’s favorite sport causes health harm, interferes with education, relies on public subsidies and has other defects that must be fixed. The next series of chapters addresses these issues.