Last week, those who follow Hokie men’s basketball were surprised by what seemed like a flood of player defections, with three athletes notifying the press that they would be transferring away from Tech: freshman guard Tony Dobbins, sophomore forward Rodrigo Viegas, and redshirt junior forward David Whaley:

There was a lot of concern expressed on the message board about the transfers, as posters wondered just who in the world was going to actually suit up for Tech next year, or if the defections were some sort of indication that the team was unhappy with Coach Stokes.

Indeed, with Dobbins, Viegas, and Whaley all leaving, the Hokies are suddenly thin on numbers. A look at the team roster from HokieSports.com reveals that it has been all but gutted by graduations and transfers. The following table shows the status of the 12 players on the team at the end of the year, with players lost appearing in italics

Note that the list doesn’t include freshman Brian Felts and redshirt sophomore Clint McPherson, both of whom left the team shortly after practice started this past fall. It also doesn’t include Keith Willis, who played sparingly before quitting the team to concentrate on football.

That’s over 50% (7 of 12) players gone from this year’s roster, and if you include Felts and McPherson, it’s 9 of 14 since the beginning of last season (9 of 13, really, because Drew Smith wouldn’t be on the team if Tech had a full complement of 13 players).

And that’s all we know at this point. It’s only early April, and anything could happen between now and next year, but at this point, it looks like Chase, Mims, Roberts, and Jon and Drew Smith will be the only five players back next year.

I don’t think there’s anything sinister or particularly remarkable going on here. I think you’re just seeing the natural housecleaning that a new coach does. It’s just that in Stokes’s case, he had to wait a year before he could clear the bench of some of the players Bobby Hussey had recruited that Stokes didn’t want to keep around.

I think most people thought that when Felts and McPherson left, that was the extent of Stokes’s actions with regards to the players he had inherited, but it turns out that it wasn’t. It was only just the beginning. When he was hired, Stokes didn’t have much time to work with and couldn’t recruit his own players for his first year, so he probably kept around the ones he felt fit the best and that could help in his first season.

But now it’s "out with the old, in with the new," and with a full year of recruiting under his belt, Coach Stokes is quickly moving to fashion a team of his own players. And to be honest, Whaley and Viegas, who barely played against A-10 competition, would have been little more than practice players from here on out, after Tech enters the Big East starting next year.

The loss of Dobbins raises a few more eyebrows. Dobbins started 16 games and scored in double figures 5 times. At times, he impressed me with his aggressiveness down low when rebounding, but offensively, he looked like he still needed one or two more seasons of major college ball before he would even begin to be effective. And listed at 6-4, 180 pounds, he looked awfully skinny, although I’m not sure that matters a lot at the guard spot.

In any event, Dobbins didn’t feel like Tech was the right situation for him, and that’s that. He may have developed into a good player here at Tech, but we’ll never know.

Next year, the Hokies will add at least five more players:

*not eligible to play for Tech until December 2000

The late signing period opens Wednesday, and Tech may sign 1 or 2 more players, bringing the total to 6 or 7 coming in next yer. The Hokies almost need to sign more players, to give them more than 10 bodies to practice with.

So help is on the way to fill out the roster, and I don’t think last week’s transfer announcements are any cause to ring the alarm. But they do point out that the Hokies are a few years away from being competitive in the Big East, probably more years than anyone around here wants to admit. I know one thing: my own personal opinion is that the end of the tunnel is not in sight.

I thought that Tech basketball had hit its low point with Bobby Hussey’s last season, in which the team logged a losing record and only put 4000 fans in the seats per game (a generous number, given that attendance at Tech is based on tickets purchased, not fans in the seats, which often leads to inflated attendance figures, as Tech’s season ticket base of roughly 2000 fans mostly stays at home).

But then came Ricky Stokes’s first year as head coach, and it was eerily similar to Hussey’s last, with the only difference being that Stokes’s first team eked out a winning record as lame-duck Atlantic 10 Conference members. The attendance figures were almost exactly the same in Cassell Coliseum, but it seemed as if there was even less interest in the program, something I didn’t think was possible.

So we’re all looking for some sign of hope and improvement, but that will be a long time coming. Tech is getting ready to enter the Big East with a roster packed with freshmen and sophomores, a single senior (Roberts) and one player of impact caliber (Mims).

It’s possible that the Hokies hit rock bottom the past two seasons, and that things will only improve from here. But it’s also possible that Tech has one or two more downward dips to take before things start picking up in the Cassell again.