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David Hale
BLACKSBURG, Va. — A year before Virginia Tech came as close as it ever has to winning a national championship, it installed an empty trophy case in its football facility. The idea, the program’s leadership believed, was that the case would eventually be filled. Frank Beamer had built the Hokies into a power, Michael Vick turned the program into a national brand, and championships were sure to follow.
As the years passed, the empty case instead became something of a punchline to mark Virginia Tech’s slow fall from the upper echelon of college football to a middle-tier ACC team to an afterthought. The case was removed in 2014, and things have only gotten worse, culminating with this year’s 3-7 campaign in which the school fired head coach Brent Pry after just three games.
On Wednesday, Virginia Tech took what AD Whit Babcock and others said is the first major step back up the mountain, announcing the hiring of James Franklin as the Hokies’ new head coach.
Penn State on the doorstep of the national championship game. By October, after a three-game losing streak, he’d been fired. He largely avoided discussion of his 12-year stint at Penn State aside from acknowledging his dismissal came as a surprise, but he said the lessons taken from building the Nittany Lions into a consistent power will inform his approach at Virginia Tech.
That’s part of what led him here, he said.
Former Virginia Tech defensive coordinator Bud Foster had reached out to Franklin the day after he was fired at Penn State to offer consolation but also, Foster said, «to remind him we had a job opening.»
Foster and other Virginia Tech personnel gave Franklin a hard sell that included a detailed vision for the future of the program, including a new plan approved in September by the school’s board of visitors that would add $229 million to athletics funding.
«They already had a really good plan put together of what it looks like to be successful in today’s college football,» Franklin said. «Not only in the ACC. That’s a mistake people make. Sometimes they benchmark only on their conference. The reality is we should benchmark nationally. If we truly have the expectations and the standards of where we want to go, then our commitment must match those expectations.»
Franklin’s inability to win a national championship at Penn State is ultimately what cost him the job. He won 104 games with the Nittany Lions and gone to six New Year’s Six bowls or playoff games since 2016, but he was just 4-21 against top-10 opponents and 1-18 against top-five foes as a head coach.
For Virginia Tech, the longterm goal might be to topple those powers, but the immediate need is to rebuild a program that has gone from perennial 10-win team to one that has played for just one ACC title in the last 15 years and is 30-33 in ACC games since 2018.
In the early days after Pry was fired, Hokies alum Bruce Arians and others involved in the coaching search had preached a plan to «modernize» the athletics department, including hiring a strong general manager in the mold of Andrew Luck at Stanford, but on Wednesday, athletics director Whit Babcock appeared to acknowledge the road map for the program’s future was entirely in the hands of Franklin.
«A lot will depend on who Coach Franklin brings with him,» said Babcock, whose own future appeared on more shaky ground at Virginia Tech before the Franklin hire. «If he has in mind someone who he’d like to be the general manager, that’s up to him. If he brings in a number of people who are great at player evaluation, and maybe we add some data analytics or rev share people. It’s really taking what we already do as a football staff and enhancing it.»
Franklin repeatedly said he appreciated the school’s alignment on its commitment to football and gushed over a close relationship he’d developed with Babcock over the last month as the two discussed the job opening.
Franklin also said he arrives clear-eyed about the challenge ahead. Pry, who went 16-24 in parts of four years at Virginia Tech, was a Franklin protege who worked as an assistant coach on Franklin’s staffs at both Vanderbilt and Penn State before coming to Blacksburg. Franklin was emotional discussing his relationship with Pry, but said he had frank conversations with him about the job.
«I didn’t really want anybody to sugarcoat it because none of these places are perfect,» Franklin said. «I’m not perfect. Let’s just talk about what are the strengths, what are the advantages, what are the challenges. And Brent was very, very transparent.»
Still, the ultimate vision for the program is in Franklin’s hands, a point he emphasized Wednesday.
«My job is to hold the standard for everybody,» Franklin said. «The players, the coaches, the administration, and be willing to have some tough conversations when necessary.»
