It has been over nine months since ESPN recruiting analyst Tom Lemming held one of his photo shoots on the Virginia Tech campus, and the question can now be answered: of the 48 players at Virginia Tech that day, where did they all end up, and how much did the photo shoot help Virginia Tech recruiting?

It was a beautiful, sunny day on Sunday, May 5th, 2002, when Lemming gathered 48 then-high-school-juniors, with all but seven of them coming from the state of Virginia, in Blacksburg for a photo shoot. The players were given a tour of the VT facilities, got to meet the Tech coaches, and had a group photo taken in front of the Merryman Center. It was a relatively short, one-day event.

The photo shoot brought closure to a series of events that started a year earlier, when Lemming conducted a similar photo shoot on the UVa campus in May of 2001, kicking off what turned out to be a great 2002 recruiting class for the Hoos, in a year in which they arguably won the state recruiting battle.

That 2001 Charlottesville photo shoot rankled Tech fans, who (to put it nicely) questioned Lemmings' involvement in the shoot and his constant hyping of Virginia's recruiting class throughout the ensuing fall and winter. Lemming wound up ranking UVa's 2002 recruiting class #5 in the country, and while others also gave their class a high rating, Lemming rated it higher than everyone else.

The whole process seemed sordid to Hokie fans and turned many of them against Lemming. But Lemming was quoted by the Richmond Times-Dispatch the day before the 2001 UVa shoot as saying, "I talked to [Virginia Tech coach] Frank Beamer today, because they were concerned it was all for Virginia. I told him, 'I'll do it at Virginia Tech next year.'"

Sure enough, led by new Tech QB Coach Kevin Rogers, who knew Lemming from Rogers' days at Notre Dame, Tech set up a photo shoot in Blacksburg with Lemming and held it May 5th, 2002, nearly one year after the UVa shoot.

The Hokies pulled out all the stops. Tech coach Frank Beamer and Tech President Charles Steger spoke to the recruits, and the VT coaching staff pulled aside approximately half of the assembled players (along with family members that were accompanying them) and spoke with them one-on-one.

The recruits got a tour of the Merryman Center (including Legends Hall and the weight room), the Tech practice fields, Lane Stadium, and the Virginia Tech campus.

We can now examine the questions: Of the 48 players who attended the photo shoot in Blacksburg, how many signed with Virginia Tech, and how many signed with Virginia? Were the results comparable to last year's UVa photo shoot? How much did the photo shoot benefit Virginia Tech's recruiting efforts, and to what extent did the VT coaches use the photo shoot as a recruiting opportunity?

Please note that the following discussion does not include recruited walk-ons, just signees.

Let's get straight to the list -- here are the 48 players who attended the photo shoot, and their college destinations (if known).

• Total players: 48
• In-state players: 41
• Out-of-state players: 7
• Players signed with Virginia Tech: 14
• Players signed with UVa: 6

The next small table shows how many players VT and UVa signed from the photo shoots in the last two years.

The numbers don't really tell the whole story, though. The fact that there were almost twice as many players at the VT photo shoot as there were at the UVa photo shoot affects any comparisons drastically, because many of the recruits at the VT photo shoot in 2002 were not offered by either Tech or UVa. It's a safe bet, though, that of the 25 players at the UVa photo shoot in 2001, both VT and UVa either offered scholarships or would have liked to have signed most of the players there.

In short, probably all of the 25 players at the 2001 shoot had Division 1-A talent, but that's not even close to true for the 48 players at the 2002 shoot.

UVa signing 12 of 25 players from 2001 is an impressive feat, but no less impressive is Tech's signing of 14 of the 48 players from 2002, because a quick scan of the 2002 list reveals about 24 players that Tech didn't even offer a scholarship to. That means that of approximately 24 players at the photo shoot that the Hokies wanted, they got 14 of them, or 58%.

What do you see if you narrow the list down to just the in-state players, looking at how many each school signed that did or didn't attend the shoot?

That's a very interesting table. Each school "cleaned up" amongst the in-state players who attended their photo shoot and later signed with UVa or VT. UVa went 10-for-15 (67%) in-state in 2001, and VT went 13-for-18 (72%) in-state in 2002.

Of the 13 high-schoolers Tech signed from in-state in 2003, every one of them attended the 2002 photo shoot. (Note that VT signed 16 in-state players, but three of them -- Corey Gordon, Michael Hinton, and Josh Hyman -- were from Hargrave or Fork Union, not high school.) The Hokies didn't sign a single in-state high school player who didn't attend the photo shoot.

If you look at that table above, it looks as if the photo shoots were advantageous for the two schools, at least with regards to in-state recruiting. But of course, you can't draw that conclusion, because there are too many variables. Perhaps each school only invited prospects they thought they had a good shot at, skewing the results. Or maybe there were other factors. In 2001, for instance, Marcus Vick and Brenden Hill didn't attend, because their coach at Warwick, Tommy Reamon, cancelled. That would have given VT seven photo shoot signees from 2001, instead of just five.

What about out-of-state players? In 2001, UVa snagged two photo shoot attendees from outside the state: Willie Davis from Wilmington, NC and D.J. Bell from Camden, DE. This past year, the Hokies got one, Joey Razzano from Milford, OH, and UVa got one, Vince Redd from Elizabethton, TN. That result of a 3-to-1 out-of-state advantage for Virginia is representative of the fact that Virginia recruiting has more of an out-of-state flavor than VT recruiting.

We interviewed three of the players who attended the Blacksburg photo shoot to get a feel for whether or not VT got a recruiting advantage from it. Our three interviewees were VT signees Kory Robertson and Matt Welsh, and UVa signee Vince Redd.

Robertson, a defensive tackle from Magna Vista, had been in contact with Tech's coaches but had never met them in person and had not seen Virginia Tech's campus and facilities in person until the day of the photo shoot. Ten days after the photo shoot, on May 15th, he received a VT scholarship offer, and he accepted it right away.

Before the photo shoot, Robertson was getting interest -- but no offers -- from a nice group of schools. "There was Tech, East Carolina, Carolina, Maryland � and I can't remember the other school," he said.

(Tech fans will find it funny that Robertson can't remember the other school, because a peek into the TSLMail archives reveals that the other school was Virginia.)

There's no doubt that meeting the coaches for the first time face-to-face at the photo shoot triggered the early scholarship offer and Robertson's acceptance, but it's not as if the Hokies and Robertson never would have gotten together otherwise. Had they not seen him in May of 2002, they would have likely seen him soon after that.

"I wanted to go to Tech [for a visit]," Robertson said. "I was hoping to go in the summer time, and I was hoping that I would be good enough to go [and play there]."

So the photo shoot affected the timing of VT's offer and Robertson's commitment, but you have to figure it would have happened later, anyway, particularly with the way VT recruits in-state. When asked how his recruitment would have gone had he not attended the photo shoot and gotten the early VT offer, Robertson paused, then finally answered, "I really don't know. I don't know how it would have gone if I hadn't been up there for that shoot."

He remembers touring the Merryman Center, but Robertson doesn't remember any sort of organized pitch from the Tech coaches to marshal the in-state recruits together and sell them on the idea of attending VT en masse.

"Mostly that's all it was, was a tour," Robertson recalled. "I didn't really get to talk with any of the other players. I mostly kept to myself and my coach. We [the players at the photo shoot] were pretty busy, and we saw each other and got to ask a few questions, but we never got into deep conversation."

Vince Redd is from Elizabethton, Tennessee, the home town and same high school as former VT wideout Shawn Witten and former University of Tennessee tight end Jason Witten. But Redd chose to blaze his own trail and surprised many when he signed with the University of Virginia.

Redd was one of just seven out-of-state players at the Lemming photo shoot in Blacksburg, with the other big names -- as far as VT fans were concerned -- being national top-100 defensive tackle John Shaw (who signed with Penn State) and Milford, Ohio fullback Joey Razzano (the only out-of-stater at the photo shoot to sign with VT).

Talking with Vince Redd gives you the impression he was pretty mellow about the whole recruiting process. He was complimentary of Tech, saying, "They were a place I could have like to gone. It was nice."

He had never been to Virginia Tech and wasn't being recruited by the Hokies prior to the photo shoot, but, "Once I started talking to them, I started enjoying the coaches."

That kicked off VT's recruitment of Redd, and the Hokies' effort was good enough to get them one of Redd's five official visits, but in the end, he chose Virginia over Tennessee. And when asked if VT was #3 or #4, Redd answers flatly, "No," implying that VT finished pretty far from the top, behind not just UVa and UT, but perhaps Arkansas and South Carolina, as well.

So the photo shoot got VT's foot in the door with Redd, but that was about it.

It's the same story with Spring Grove, Pennsylvania's John Shaw, whom Lemming named as one of his top 100 players in the nation. Shaw narrowed his top three down to Penn State, Virginia Tech, and West Virginia in early June of 2002, but just a few weeks later, he committed to PSU. So, while the photo shoot may have helped the Hokies with Shaw, it didn't result in VT reeling him in.

Welsh committed to VT just two days after the photo shoot, on Tuesday, May 7th, to become the first commitment of the 2003 recruiting class for VT. The Hokies had been recruiting Welsh and had offered him a scholarship well before the shoot, and he was familiar with the program.

"That might have been my third time down in Blacksburg," Welsh said. "I went to a practice once, and I went to the Spring game. I had been down there before and had done the whole tour [of the facilities] and all that before."

Welsh said there was nothing about the photo shoot that pushed him over the edge into committing. It was something else.

"I was really leaning towards there, but I found out they were only taking a few linemen, and they didn't have many scholarships. So I got a little bit of pressure, and they needed an answer, and that's pretty much why I was so early, because they needed an answer."

Welsh echoed something that both Robertson and Redd said -- there wasn't a lot of time for the players at the photo shoot to get together and talk. If you had visions of recruits gathering and plotting in hushed tones where they were going to school together, forget it. It didn't happen.

Like Robertson and Redd, Welsh didn't know most of the players there and didn't have the time to meet them, either. "A couple of guys were together talking. I guess they knew each other. I didn't really know who anybody was. I knew a couple of the linemen that I had seen on unofficial visits to different places, but I didn't really know who any of the top players were, because I didn't know anybody."

All three recruits also said that the Hokie coaches didn't make a "group pitch" to the recruits to sell them on the idea of attending VT together. When asked if he recalls the Tech coaches speaking to the players as a group and selling them on the idea of attending Virginia Tech, Welsh said, "No, I really don't think so. They [Tech coaches] kind of stood off to the side, and after the photos were done, they would pull some guys aside and talk to them and their families. But I didn't see anything like a group pitch."

While there's no doubt that the Lemming photo shoot was a benefit to Virginia Tech, I don't think it was a big boon to Hokie football recruiting.

Among the seven out of state players, Joey Razzano already knew about Tech and was familiar with the Hokies, because his father played linebacker at VT in the mid-70's. And the photo shoot got things going with both Vince Redd and John Shaw, but it was to no avail, because they went elsewhere.

The Hokies signed a lot of in-state players from the photo shoot, but Virginia Tech has always recruited the state hard, and you have to figure, photo shoot or not, they would have been all over the in-state players they eventually signed.

And according to the players we interviewed, the Tech coaching staff approached the day as a chance to get some one-on-one face time with players and families, not to make a group "everybody come here and dominate college football on the way to a national championship" spiel.

One last note: going to Google.com and doing a search on the terms "Tom Lemming" and "photo shoot" turns up 17 matches. Of those 17 matches, 14 come from sources discussing the Charlottesville and Blacksburg photo shoots: TechSideline.com, TheSabre.com, the Roanoke Times, HokieSports.com, and others.

Of the other three matches, two of them are links that happen to randomly contain the terms "Tom Lemming" and "photo shoot," without talking about a Tom Lemming photo shoot, per se.

The final match is a link to the NC State Rivals site, and it's an article from last August about NC State recruit Mario Williams. It says that Williams participated in a Lemming photo shoot in April at the University of South Carolina, propelling him to "national status" as a recruit.

Point being, no one appears to be talking about Tom Lemming's photo shoots, other than Virginia Tech and UVa-related sources. The photo shoots aren't a big deal to anyone but Hokies and Hoos.

Researching the Charlottesville and Blacksburg photo shoots leads me to think that maybe this has all been much ado about nothing. VT didn't appear to get much "juice" from their photo shoot. If you ask Vince Hall, for example, why he committed to Virginia Tech, the fact that four Hokie defensive coaches visited him in the last week of recruiting plays a bigger part than some photo shoot on Tech's campus nine months before signing day.

When you get right down to it, it's what the coaches do during the dog days of late January and early February that matters, not a rushed group photo shoot that is over in just a few hours and doesn't really allow the players and coaches to talk to each other very much, anyway.

Everyone likes to talk about recruiting analysts, and whether or not the things they do sway recruits, but for the most part, I think the large majority of recruiting success comes down to how hard the coaches work and the relationships they establish with the players, coaches, and families.

We all knew that already, anyway.

References:

Roanoke Times Notebook Plus, May 11, 2001

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