Frank Beamer and the fight against twilight at Virginia Tech

Age is just a number, they say.

You’re only as old as you feel, they say.

In many ways, those statements will always be true, but in cutthroat professions, getting on in years will introduce its fair share of limitations.

Even the most accomplished head coaches in this era of college football (including one who was subsequently disgraced at the very end of his tenure) were not immune to the effects of Father Time.

Frank Beamer is now confronting those forces at Virginia Tech.

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It’s a time of change and turmoil in the ACC Coastal Division. Al Golden enters his most important month as Miami’s head coach, the month which will either save or sack him in Coral Gables. Mike London is a dead coach walking, his days as a college head coach winding down at the University of Virginia. Those two coaches are in immediate danger.

For Virginia Tech, the situation is not quite as urgent in a short-term context. When you’ve won the way Frank Beamer has and have accumulated his combination of goodwill and political leverage, a quick exit should not be expected (even though it’s certainly possible). That having been said, a dreary home-field loss to Pittsburgh this past Saturday — on a day when the Blacksburg weather matched the quality of the game and the mood inside the program — has only intensified the anxieties coursing through Hokie Nation.

It’s impossible to avoid the question: “Can 68-year-old Frank Beamer fix this situation?”

If he can’t, should a legend of the game have the right to step down when he chooses?

This ACC coaching situation is beginning to feel like another ACC coaching situation not too long ago… and there’s irony to be found in that.

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I cover major-tournament tennis here at the Bloguin network of sports blogs. In thinking about the arc of Beamer’s career, the tennis player I’d compare him to is Lleyton Hewitt. 

The essential point to make about Hewitt’s career is that it seized opportunities created by power vacuums in men’s professional tennis. Hewitt occupied the pocket of years when Pete Sampras was winding down the clock and only Andre Agassi was more successful at the majors. Hewitt won two major championships after the end of Sampras’s prime period, and before the arrival of Roger Federer as a dominant force in 2004. Persistent and prepared, Hewitt compensated for a lack of physical stature with a resourceful game marked by an inexhaustible supply of determination.

When you think about it, doesn’t that describe Beamer at Virginia Tech from the late 1990s through the next 10 to 15 years?

In the Hokies’ heyday, “Beamer Ball” — the knack for making a big play on special teams — embodied the program’s MacGyver-like ability to find game-changing plays in various shapes and sizes, and in all facets of competition. Virginia Tech did not own any stature at all in the college football world when Beamer came aboard in 1987 and endured a 5-17 start in his first two seasons on the job, followed by a 2-8-1 campaign in year six, in 1992. Yet, through patient building at a school which was more than willing to give him the time and space he needed, Beamer — albeit on a smaller scale — became a consistent winner in Blacksburg.

The greatness of Frank Beamer is most centrally represented on two levels: First, he turned a nobody in college football — Virginia Tech — into a somebody. That’s hard enough in itself.

The second feat is more impressive, however: Once Beamer got everyone’s attention at Virginia Tech and made the Hokies a target, he stayed on the mountaintop for a solid decade. He didn’t let go of success once he briefly tasted it. When the Hokies moved to the ACC from the Big East, along with (among others) Miami, most people thought that Florida State and Miami would play in almost every ACC Championship Game.

Instead, Virginia Tech became the team which played in almost every ACC title game.

It took a long time for the Hokies to cede center stage to other teams in the conference. Through 2011, the split-division ACC knew no better or more consistent team than Virginia Tech. From 1995 through 2011 — a span of 17 seasons — the Hokies won at least 10 games on 13 occasions. What Beamer and defensive coordinator Bud Foster have done is remarkable. It was helped along by a couple of realities, but it remains a top-tier accomplishment.

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There’s one other way in which Beamer’s career parallels Lleyton Hewitt’s tennis journey. Much as Hewitt found a spot between Sampras and Federer, Beamer and Virginia Tech managed to take full advantage of brief lulls in the existences of two high-profile programs the Hokies regularly competed against.

In the late-1990s Big East, the post-Dennis Erickson decline of the Hurricanes was filled in by Virginia Tech. Several years later, the Hokies’ ownership of the ACC was in many ways a product of a diminished Florida State program in the latter years of Bobby Bowden’s tenure at the school. Beamer was the coach, and Virginia Tech was the program, which maximized Miami’s and Florida State’s struggles in conference-specific situations more than any other from 1995 through 2010. (Florida and Urban Meyer exploited these Sunshine State declines more than any other program, but the SEC-affiliated Gators didn’t do so within a conference-specific context.)

It’s no idle coincidence that Bowden’s career arc should be brought into this conversation. What happened to Bowden and also Joe Paterno on the football field is something Beamer has surely thought about in his most private moments. Given the current state of Hokie football, it’s just about impossible for fans and pundits to avoid the same questions Beamer is contemplating deep within himself.

We mentioned Beamer’s run of 17 seasons in which he rarely won fewer than 10 games. This is a smaller-scale version of Bowden’s historic run from 1987 through 2000 at Florida State. In those 14 consecutive seasons, Florida State never finished outside the top four of the season-ending polls.

Now, of course, Virginia Tech has entered the period following the salad days, the same period Bowden encountered after his incredible 14-year winning spree. The Bowden endgame at Florida State became protracted and messy. Beamer used that period of chaos in Tallahassee to sustain his empire at Virginia Tech while establishing the Hokies in the ACC, following their fruitful period in the Big East.

That Beamer is now tasting the bitter herbs of his career in much the same way Bowden had to do is no small irony at all.

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When old coaches start to lose more often than they did in their primes, many will say of a specific coach, “The game has passed him by.” I don’t like that expression.

Football’s greatest thinkers can spend two decades making contributions to the game, but much as athletes have their prime periods; musicians have only so many top hits in them; and artists have only so many masterpiece-level paintings in their imaginations, football coaches don’t own a limitless supply of ideas.

We’ve seen Steve Spurrier run out of answers this year with South Carolina. His career seems to have run its course. Mack Brown presided over a juggernaut at Texas, but as soon as the lengthy period knitted together by Vince Young and Colt McCoy finally came to an end, the Longhorns were up a creek without a paddle, and remain so today under new management.

It’s a cliche, but cliches are cliches because they’re true: Nothing lasts forever. Football doesn’t pass by the great coaches; they innovate, motivate and teach with distinction for a long time, but sports — like any other human endeavors — are marked by imperfection.

They’re also the province of the young.

People don’t retire in their mid-sixties because they possess less wisdom or understanding. Wisdom, in fact, accumulates with age and the passage of time. Not all people follow the same paths (some by choice, others without choice), but retirement in one’s sixties is both a product and an acknowledgment of the reality that our prime productive period in life comes earlier rather than later. This reality, it should be said, manifests itself in very subtle ways as well as in the more obvious forms and fashions.

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Why is it hard to win big when you get into your late sixties or early seventies as a coach? Energy might be a part of it, but energy is something passionate coaches don’t really lose. What in many ways cuts against the aging coach is the reality of repetition. Here’s what that concept means:

When you’ve done just about everything in your sport; when you’ve climbed the mountaintop and remained there for many years, fending off the opposition time and again; when you’ve proved your worth — as a coach and leader, as the icon of a program (in both the present tense and over the course of nearly 30 years) — to the point that your reputation and legacy are secure…

… what’s left?

What’s left to show to yourself and others? Football hasn’t passed you by, and you’re still quite driven and energetic, two of the qualities which made you so fabulously successful in the first place. However — and this is where the effects of aging come into play — that 45-year-old coach at the other program in your conference is MORE energetic and MORE driven than you are right now. He’s building a reputation and therefore has so much more to prove than you do.

We’re talking, of course, about Dabo Swinney of Clemson.

If Beamer filled in the ACC power vacuum left by Florida State in the first decade of this century, Swinney is filling in the vacuum left by Beamer in the second decade of the century. (Jimbo Fisher and Florida State exist on their own separate superpower island.)

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What also accompanies aging as a coach? You almost inevitably have to delegate more responsibilities to assistants. When you were a lot younger, you could tend to at least a few extra details yourself. Now, that’s not as workable. Moreover, when one of your current assistants is someone such as Scot Loeffler, whose (hashtag alert!) #LOEFFENSE still hasn’t been able to put the pieces together in several years on the job, you have a “half-a-loaf” team, one which is competent on only one side of the ball instead of two.

Another reality of aging as a coach — something very much at play with Steve Spurrier as well — is that recruits can’t shake the feeling in the back of the mind that there’s no longer an endless supply of years left for you. They can’t be 100-percent sure they’ll play four years for you and receive coaching from you. Coaches in their forties and fifties might go through lulls, but they don’t have to worry about recruits due to questions of age or vitality. The aging coach does.

When you realize how much of a problem it’s been for Virginia Tech to field top-quality offensive line talent over the past several years — knowing that it’s been issue number one for the program, but still failing to make needed improvements in that area — it’s hard to shake the sense that the Hokies are in a downward spiral from which they’ll never recover.

This brings us to one more essential insight about the aging coach: Can Beamer really come up with one more great season before he steps down? Joe Paterno delivered a Big Ten championship and a Rose Bowl to Penn State in the 2008 season, at age 81. Paterno — viewed strictly in football terms (that extra phrase will always be attached to him, given the non-football taint his name will never lose…) — was exceptional in that regard.

It’s quite the romantic notion to hope that Beamer has a “Penn State 2008 season” left in him. However, is it realistic?

Unlike the two periods Virginia Tech (masterfully) exploited in the Beamer era — Miami’s Big East slip in the late 1990s; Florida State’s Bowden-led decline in the 2000s — the Hokies now exist in an ACC with a once-again-powerful Florida State and an ascendant Clemson. It outwardly seems like a situation made for a reboot with a younger coach ready to make his mark and inject his own style into the program, ushering in a new era.

Frank Beamer needs compelling answers — better recruiting on the offensive line, and a much better coordinator than Scot Loeffler — in order to give Virginia Tech a resurrection and one more taste of ultimate glory before he hangs up the whistle for good.

Is Beamer willing to give those answers?

One can only wonder what he — and Bobby Bowden — think about that question at this point in time.

About Matt Zemek

Editor, @TrojansWire | CFB writer since 2001 |

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