These are heady times to be a Hokie. Our football team is experiencing previously unheard of success. We have a truly dominating defense and an exciting offense spearheaded by the hottest freshman in the country. ESPN trucks are becoming a fixture on campus; all traditional media is taking notice. We have indeed arrived at our long held goal of fielding one of the country's top football teams. Hokies everywhere should be reveling in our football success. Instead, we are spending entirely too much time whining about our schedule.

Our schedule is our schedule is our schedule. I will grant that it is not the toughest in the land, but it is ours. I really don't put much stock in the 'Big East is lousy' argument; has anybody taken a long look at the PAC-10 recently, or the Big 12 for that matter? These are not exactly shining examples of college football excellence, either. The BE has a legitimate MNC contender in Tech, and Miami is only a couple of plays away against the very same brutal schedule that so many Hokies are calling for from joining us in the Top 10. Syracuse is a good team deserving of being ranked, despite the pitiful showing they put up against us. West Virginia has problems, to be sure, and who knows what causes Rutgers to experience just problem after problem and maintain a program that won the first college football game ever played and then go basically downhill ever since. There is little we can do about the rest of the BE, in any event. I doubt many would propose that Jim Cavanaugh or Bryan Stinespring steer a few of our recruits North or Northwest for the sake of conference RPI. Much of the moaning about Tech's schedule is our OOC. Again, it is not the best, but there are very good reasons we are playing it.

I don't have a lot of problems with Clemson, UAB, JMU and the hoos. My dream OOC would include Hoo U, another ACC team and a major fellow land-grant institution such as Texas A&M, Auburn, Penn State, etc., along with the obligatory dog. The country's other top land-grant schools are our peer universities, and I feel we have more in common with them than any of the 'U OFS'. And, some of these schools will indeed pop up on future schedules. For better or worse, we are in the same region as the ACC. We should be playing those schools and there are some benefits involved in playing us for the ACC. My guess is that the talks with North Carolina are revolving around how many Hokies will pile into Kenan Stadium at a time Carolina is probably going to really need the fannies in the seats. But, the future schedule is the future schedule. As for my dream OOC, we were only one game away from that this year, the UAB game. This series was a 2-for-1 deal that we made money on. Ah, yes, the money.

For all of our football success, we remain a middle-budget athletic program. I don't have the numbers handy, but I would guess we have the smallest total athletic budget of anybody in the Top Ten. The Tech athletic administration has made great strides over the last decade in providing the means to increase our athletic expenditures, but we still have a ways to go. For the time being and at least for the near future, the only means Tech has for generating huge sums of cash is the football program, and that still means Lane Stadium ticket sales. For all of the babble about television revenues, fans plunking down cash on the ticket window barrelhead provide much more money. ESPN shells out about $175k for a game on the mother ship; each of our sold out home games this year is pulling more than $1 mil into the coffers. It is not economically advisable to trade that UAB deal and others like it for comparable deals with what are now the other 'big names' and be on the short end. Our Title IX compliance is based largely on football revenues. Subtracting football revenue with 2-for-1 deals with Michigan or some such program means something somewhere has to be cut. I really doubt many of the athletes in our many fine women's programs would agree to give up their scholarships so the football team could go play Florida. In any event, the feds would certainly take a dim view of it. The policy of the Virginia Tech Athletic Department is to only schedule 1-for-1 football deals, and I wholeheartedly support that philosophy. Aside from the negative financial implications, we are no longer an East Carolina or Marshall that has to cut these kind of deals. Within that criteria, Jim Weaver can only schedule who will 1] agree to play us, and 2] agree to come to Blacksburg. This is not a long list.

Tennessee and Penn State, two schools in our region that would seem ideal candidates for games, won't give us the time of day. They have their reasons, and from their point of view, some pretty good ones. One involves stadium size. In the world of college football size does matter, and, by Top Ten standards, Lane Stadium is tiny. Even the proposed stadium addition that will bring it to around 65k still leaves our playground much smaller than those do in the football neighborhood we find ourselves occupying these days. Each of the above schools could easily bring 20,000 fans to Tech and we have no where to put them, and won't anytime soon. Given the continued growth and success of our football program, and there is little reason to believe it will not continue, we may in a decade or so be discussing an 80,000 Lane Stadium, but we ain't there right now.

The other major factor mitigating against major OOC games is television. Most big intersectional football games are negotiated in network executive suites, and again we have problems, as our options are limited. ESPN is making us a household name, but we are, in reality, getting all we can hope to from the guys in Bristol. There are indeed other schools around playing pretty good Division I-A football that also express from time to time a desire to appear on the Total Sports Network, and ESPN does seem inclined to spread the telecasts around. 2-3 games per year are what we can expect out of them, and that is what we are getting. Much has been said and written about our other network 'partner', CBS, but let's face it, from a purely business standpoint, most of us would recognize the greater appeal of those SEC clashes of titans that seemingly occur weekly than most anybody Tech is playing or could play. And, looking at my argument that the only real problem with our OOC was the UAB game, check the time of the year that game was played, September 11. CBS is committed to tennis that Saturday and does not acknowledge the opening of football season until the next weekend. ESPN that Saturday had a NASCAR race from Richmond in prime time. There were few television opportunities for a high profile Tech-high profile opponent on that date, a problem that will continue as long as television contracts remain as they are, and a high caliber OOC opponent is not coming to Tech without good exposure. That is life. Changes may be in store if a deal is cut between the BE and FOX. The 'Ally McBeal' network has a proven commitment to taking chances with programming, and a surging Virginia Tech program challenging the college football establishment might be very appealing to them. A FOX 'Big East Game of the Week' may be one day originating from Lane Stadium, and would greatly enhance our appeal to potential OOC foes. We shall see, and, in any event, that is up to Mikey and his gang in Providence.

Much of the problems with scheduling a tougher and more palatable OOC are beyond Jim Weaver's control, and all of them are beyond the control of most of us. Weaver has done pretty well for us so far, and my guess is he will do the best that can be done in regards to scheduling, too. Future OOCs look pretty good with Texas A&M, Auburn and Wisconsin on board. Let's look forward to those games, but for the here and now, let's remember that we are still developing as a football power and enjoy today. Getting there is proving, to me at least, a good part of the fun. Whom we play is whom we play. Rather than focusing on whom we are not playing or griping and complaining about what may happen, I am looking forward to the next game of this magical season. Let's enjoy the ride.

-- Jim Alderson