I’ve been getting requests by email and text from UVA Football fans who want me to weigh in on the odd “Hey, Michael” episode from Virginia Tech Football coach James Franklin from earlier in the week.
First instinct here is to say: “Hey, Michael” ain’t killing dogs for sport, so …
Second: sure, it makes him come across as a dick, but.
You know …
Sorry.
I’m trying here, but I can’t think of how coming across as a dick would endear him to Tech fans.
‘Hey, Michael’
James Franklin really wanted to know how my day was this morning.
Couldn’t see him on Zoom and thought the audio was glitching. My apologies, James. pic.twitter.com/tIAOGa4dzm
— Michael Howes (@Mikephowes) September 14, 2026
A league of his own?
UVA fans probably forget these guys now, but, oh yeah, we have experience with having had dicks as our coaches.
Dave Leitao, my gawd, he’s first-ballot Dick Hall of Fame, an all-time dick, the DOAT, as it were.
Leitao, in his postgame pressers, used to regularly call on a guy from a weekly in Central Virginia who would come armed with a list of questions from his editor about particular players, and the poor guy couldn’t pronounce any of the names.
I started to think, that editor is punking him, getting him to ask about Lars Mikalauskas, Tunji Soroye, Jerome Meyinsse, Mamadi Diane …
The writer, again, poor guy, never got close on any of the above.
(Why not just have him ask about Mike Scott?)
He’d start to spit a name out, and Leitao would stop him to correct him.
“It’s MOO-sta-fa FAIR-a-khan,” he’d say, as slowly and awkwardly as possible.
The guy would struggle, and Leitao would stop him again, and pronounce the name, even more slowly.
Nobody wanted to follow this guy, so the presser was pretty much over at this point.
No doubt, that was Leitao’s game there.
Football coach Al Groh was more subtle, in an almost comical way – not that he was intending to be comical.
He would dismiss questions about a guy having just had surgery with, “We consider a surgery to be successful if the patient survives.”
I mean, you can’t argue there.
One summer, there had been a rash of incidents in NFL and college training camps involving players collapsing due to dehydration.
Groh’s response was a dissertation on how dehydration is only an issue if you don’t pay proper attention to hydration.
Again, tell me he’s wrong.
This last one was direct to me. Going into the 2008 season, I asked Groh if he felt like he was on the hot seat, after a couple of subpar seasons.
He told me that he was only focused on the next game, and making sure that his team scored at least one more point in that game than the other team.
Point taken: score at least one more point than the other guys every time, and you’re not on any hot seat.
“Hey, Michael” is closer to Dave Leitao than Al Groh on the being a dick scale.
We all knew a guy in high school who would pull that stunt; everybody hated that guy.
Where it’s not a good sign, to me, that James Franklin is being a “Hey, Michael” guy is, he’s two games into a new job, with a 2-0 record.
The fan base down there thinks he’s the Second Coming of Frank Beamer and the Third Coming of Jesus Christ rolled into one.
My experience, with both Dave Leitao and Al Groh, was, you tolerated them being dicks when they were winning, but when they started losing, um, yeah.
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Chris Graham
