The Duke of Wellington, when asked about the Napoleonic wars of the early 1800s, supposedly said: “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” He never actually said that about the tony British boarding school he attended, but let’s not get hung up on those details. Let’s get hung up on others.
For Virginia Tech fans wondering today why their football team is off to its first 0-3 start since some of them were born (and why the coach got fired Sunday) the answer might be: Virginia Tech lost those games in the living rooms of Hampton Roads.
Lots of things have changed since Tech was a football powerhouse that played for a national championship in 2000, following the 1999 season where it went 11-0. The two most dramatic are the advent of the transfer portal (which allows players to transfer more easily to other schools) and the rise of NIL — “name, image and likeness,” the shorthand for the fact that many Division I football players now get paid. Combine those two and what you have is a free market where richer schools can essentially raid less-affluent ones for their best players.
There’s been another big change, though, one that isn’t as dramatic but may still play a significant role in Virginia Tech’s football fortunes. Over the past three decades, fewer of the state’s top football recruits sign with the Hokies. Indeed, fewer sign with any in-state team.
When Frank Beamer was coaching the Hokies in that national championship game (which the team lost to Florida State), there were only two schools in Virginia playing football at the NCAA’s highest level: Virginia Tech and Virginia. Now there are five, the new additions being James Madison University, Liberty University and Old Dominion University, whose Monarchs smoked the Hokies 45-26 on Saturday and pushed Tech coach Brent Pry into the unemployment line.
That means there are more Virginia schools competing for the state’s top recruits — and, collectively, they’re all losing to out-of-state schools.
I’ve analyzed lists of the state’s top football recruits going back to the mid-1990s. These lists might be more subjective than a true data scientist would like, but they’re what we have; the early ones were compiled by Doug Doughty, then a sportswriter for The Roanoke Times; the more recent ones by 24/7 Sports. Some list the top 25 recruits each year, some the top 50, some up to 93. Because of that, I’ve converted most of these numbers to percentages to be able to more easily compare things over time. When we do, the story line is clear:
In the 1990s, most of Virginia’s top high school football players stayed in state and half of them went to Virginia Tech, almost half to the University of Virginia with only a few exceptions to other state schools.
Now, most of those top recruits go out of state.
Here’s the math:
In the 10 seasons from 1997 to 2006 (which covers Tech’s national championship run), 62.1% of the high school players in Virginia identified as top recruits went to in-state schools, and almost all of those chose either Virginia Tech or Virginia. In all, 31.5% of the state’s top recruits chose Virginia Tech while 26.9% picked Virginia.
In the 10 most recent seasons, from 2005 to 2024, only 29.9% of the top football recruits in Virginia went to in-state schools — and those who remained were spread more broadly over more schools. In all, only 11.2% of the state’s top recruits chose Virginia Tech, only about one-third of what the figure had been.
Virginia Tech still gets more in-state recruits than any other Virginia school, but the share going to Blacksburg and Charlottesville is going down while the share going elsewhere is going up — especially those choosing Old Dominion in Norfolk. Over the past decade, 7.2% of the state’s top recruits chose Virginia, almost one-quarter of its share two decades earlier. Meanwhile, 6.7% are picking ODU, which didn’t field its team until 2009. ODU is clearly a rising recruiting power in the state, so we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s a rising power on the field, as well. However, even if ODU’s football team didn’t exist, and all the top recruits that the Monarchs have signed were Hokies instead, Virginia Tech’s percentage of signing top in-state recruits would still be far below what it had been in “the glory days.” Tech fans can’t blame their entire recruiting decline on the rise of ODU, or even most of it.
Nonetheless, Virginia Tech’s recruiting decline is most notable in Hampton Roads, ODU’s home base. I first heard the phrase “the 757” — a reference to the area code for that part of the state — in a football context. As in: “We’ve got to do well in the 757.”
In an earlier era, Tech dominated football recruiting out of “the 757.” The years 1999 and 2004 were particularly good ones for Tech: Half of the top recruits from Hampton Roads those years went to Virginia Tech. In other years from those days, it wasn’t uncommon for one-third to 40% of the football recruits from “the 757” to choose Blacksburg.
Now they rarely do.
In 2023, none of the top Hampton Roads recruits on the 24/7 Sports list of top recruits picked Virginia Tech. Only one of those 10 stayed in state — in Charlottesville. All the others went out of state.
That was an unusual year where Tech got skunked but not that unusual. In 2022 and 2024, only two of the 12 top recruits in Hampton Roads picked Tech. Over the past three years, when Pry was in charge, he signed only four of the 34 players identified as top recruits. Where Tech’s recruiting percentage of top players in Hampton Roads was once around 40% to 50%, it’s now 11.7% (about the same as what it is statewide).
Even when Tech was dominating in-state recruiting, it was noticeably weak in Northern Virginia. In many years, in the 1990s and early 2000s, none of the top recruits from Northern Virginia chose Tech — but it didn’t seem to matter. Virginia Tech is still weak in recruiting top players from Northern Virginia. Maybe that’s not surprising. It’s the most cosmopolitan part of the state and players may have family ties to a lot of out-of-state schools. In any case, the big change for Tech has come in Hampton Roads. That means Virginia Tech is now losing the top recruits from the state’s two biggest metro areas.
There’s no one clear team that’s beating Tech in Hampton Roads; players are going to lots of different schools.
However, in 2021, Pitt, Virginia and Louisiana-Monroe all signed more of the top recruits out of Hampton Roads than Tech did (four for Pitt, two for the other schools, just one for the Hokies, which tied them with Air Force, Army, Central Florida, Coastal Carolina, Elon, Georgetown, Liberty, North Carolina, North Carolina State and ODU).
In 2022, both ODU and North Carolina signed more of the top recruits out of Hampton Roads than Tech did.
In 2023, when Tech didn’t sign any of the top Hampton Roads recruits on the 24/7 Sports list, four signed with Duke and one apiece signed with Kent State, Michigan, North Carolina, Pitt and West Virginia. Only one of the top Hampton Roads recruits that year stayed in-state, and he went to Virginia.
In 2024, James Madison signed just as many of the top Hampton Roads recruits as Tech did (two out of 12 overall, when once upon a time that might have been as many as six).
If a team loses the home-field advantage in recruiting, maybe fans shouldn’t be surprised when the team loses that home-field advantage in the actual game, as well.
Yes, normally I write about politics, but there are plenty of politics in sports, just a different kind. For those who want more of the conventional kind of politics, sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter.