A new era for both Cavs and Hokies on the football field as new coaches take the reigns

As we charge towards a new college football season, expectations for Virginia’s two top tier programs are arguably at an all time low. The Virginia Cavaliers are coming off their seventh losing season in eight years, while the cross state rival Virginia Tech Hokies are coming off a fourth straight season where they failed to finish in the AP Top 25. As a result, both schools chose to hit the reset button on their respective programs this offseason and brought in new head coaches. Former BYU head coach Bronco Mendenhall heads to Charlottesville; former Memphis head coach Justin Fuente is coming to Blacksburg.

Mendenhall inherits a program that has seen a steady decline since the legend George Welsh left following the 2000 season. During Welsh’s nineteen year tenure, the Cavaliers reached a bowl game twelve times, and finished the year ranked in the AP Top 25 six times, the latter of which has only happened twice in the fifteen years since.

After Welsh, Al Groh piloted the Wahoos to five bowl games in nine seasons, but was let go following the 2009 season. In 2010, the reigns were then passed to Mike London, who had just won a national championship at the FCS level with the Richmond Spiders two years prior. Unfortunately for London–despite his success on the recruiting trail–the Cavaliers slid further down college football’s totem pole. During London’s six seasons, UVA played in just one bowl game.

In his eleven years at BYU, Mendenhall never had a losing season and reached a bowl game each year after inheriting a program that had come off three straight losing seasons. However, the optimism around Mendenhall extends past his track record on the field. Brigham Young has high academic expectations (a top 100 university nationally according to US News & World Report) along with a rigid religious component (affiliated with the Church of Latter Day Saints), making recruiting a more difficult task for a sport like football where there are 85 scholarships to fill. Mendenhall will face similar challenges from an academic standpoint at UVA, which is a member of the prominent Association of American Universities.

Meanwhile, Fuente will be trying to resurrect a program that once had eight consecutive double digit win seasons before falling to mediocrity over the last four years, averaging seven wins during that time frame. He will be replacing the man who put Hokie football on the national map, Frank Beamer.

Prior to Beamer’s arrival in 1987 Virginia Tech had finished in the AP Top 25 just twice in its history, a feat they would go on to do sixteen times in his 29 seasons to go along with 22 bowl appearances including a national runner up finish in 1999. As a result of his success on the field, the Hokies went from an Independent program to joining the Big East conference in 1991 and eventually joined the ACC in 2004. As the program gained more national exposure during these transitions, the caliber of recruits elevated–particularly at QB–throughout the 2000’s.

However, recruiting is a younger man’s game and the head coaches in the ACC, specifically at national powers Florida State and Clemson, have gotten younger over the past half decade and become more attractive options for recruits. As much as Hokie fans love Beamer it became hard to ignore the decline in recruiting over the final five years of his tenure.

At age 40, Fuente only brings four years of head coaching experience to Blacksburg, but in those four years he took a Memphis program that won three games in the two years prior to his arrival to ten wins by his third season. A big reason for that turnaround was being able to land QB Paxton Lynch, who was drafted in the first round by the Denver Broncos this past spring. During the high points of Beamer’s run, quarterback play was elite (I know we all think defense and special teams aka “Beamer Ball”, but hear me out on this one). During the two years he had Michael Vick as a starter the Hokies were 22-2, finishing 2nd and 6th in the final AP Poll. Two of Beamer’s other three top 10 finishes came in 2007 and 2010, with Tyrod Taylor at the helm (split time with Sean Glennon in 07) who compiled a 23-5 record as a starter during his career in Blacksburg.

The point here is Fuente, who is a former college QB himself, has shown he has an eye for spotting NFL caliber talent at the position where the Hokies have been below average during their decline the last few seasons.

While we all know change doesn’t happen overnight and Rome certainly wasn’t built in a day, you still have to lay the first brick. It appears as if these two schools have laid the right foundation for the future of their football programs, but will it translate to “Ws” on Saturday? Fortunately we don’t have much longer to wait.