It’s way too early to start weighing in on who Virginia Tech is going to be targeting for its now-open football coach job.
The focus in Blacksburg at this stage, 11 weeks out from Sunday, Nov. 30 – the Sunday after the end of the 2025 regular season – is on getting the necessary ducks in a row.
Whit Babcock, the AD, almost certainly already had a working wish list – he didn’t go into the 2025 football cycle thinking he would need to fire Brent Pry three games into Pry’s fourth season, but it’s not like the move was entirely out of left field, after Pry’s first three teams were a cumulative 16-21.
I had Sunday, Oct. 12, circled on my schedule – that’s when the football program is set to go into its first bye week of the 2025 season, seven games in – as the line of demarcation on Pry’s fate.
As it turns out, the 0-3 start, and the back-to-back home beatdowns at the hands of Vanderbilt and ODU, might have been a blessing for Tech Athletics, in that the Tech administration gets basically a four-week head start on what seemed to be the inevitable end here.
Now whatever kind of search committee the school puts together get an extra month to reach out to coaches’ agents to gauge possible interest in the Tech job, have friends of the football program set up discreet meetings to feel things out, start making formal requests for interviews, and on the other side of the search, get the stakeholders to come up with a budget for a new coach and his support staff.
We’ve seen quick-turnaround searches work out – at UVA, for instance, Carla Williams was able to poach Chris Pollard away from Duke to replace baseball coach Brian O’Connor days after O’Connor bolted for Mississippi State, though, gotta say there, that search wasn’t as short-term as it seemed.
We know from flight logs that O’Connor would have met with Mississippi State in early May, so Williams had at least a month’s advance warning to get her ducks in a row.
Flip side, Williams was able to use the entirety of the 2024-2025 basketball season to find a successor to Tony Bennett, who stepped down two weeks before the start of the season, and used the extra time to zero in on a short list that included Marquette coach Shaka Smart before landing Ryan Odom, who has had success at stops including UMBC, Utah State and VCU, and has deep UVA ties, as the son of former basketball assistant coach Dave Odom, who worked on the staff of Terry Holland in the 1980s.
Reality check: Virginia Tech isn’t going to be able to land the guy that the message boards would love to have come back home, Shane Beamer, Frank’s son, now the head coach at South Carolina, which is paying the younger Beamer $8.15 million this year – Tech was paying Pry $4.75 million this year – and where the athletics department has $44 million more per year to spend on athletics than they do at Virginia Tech.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a long list of good coaches who would love to have the opportunity to try to rebuild Virginia Tech Football into what it was in the 1990s, 2000s and into the early 2010s.
Realistic names I’m seeing associated with the job include Bob Chesney, the latest guy at JMU – the VCU of the Group of 5 football world; Jon Sumrall, who was 23-4 in two seasons at Troy, and is 12-5 three games into Year 2 at Tulane; Charles Huff, who was 10-3 at Marshall last year, and is in Year 1 at Southern Miss; and Ryan Silverfield, who is 45-21 in his sixth season at Memphis, with a 21-5 record in the past two seasons.
I’m not trying to say that this is the working list, that there aren’t other names that should be considered – not trying to say anything, really.
Other than, Tech has plenty of time to get the right guy.
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Chris Graham
