A look at the Virginia Tech basketball roster and the recruiting classes that the Hokies have put together for 2005 and 2006 leads one to quickly realize that the shallow bench that plagued the Hokies in their ACC debut this past year will quickly be a thing of the past. By the 2006-07 season two years from now, VT will go ten deep and will be able not just to rotate players in, but rotate players in who can score and contribute.

This fall, thanks to a four-man 2005 recruiting class that yesterday added AD Vassallo, the Hokies will have 13 scholarship players for the first time since 2002-03, Ricky Stokes' last season as the head coach. Stokes over-recruited and actually had 14 players on the roster that year, one of whom played as a walk-on. That player's identity was a closely guarded secret, though I think Roanoke Times reporter Mark Berman figured it out. (I don't recall who it was.)

After Stokes was fired in March of 2003 and Seth Greenberg was hired, the team went through significant player attrition in the transition. The Hokies lost three players (Eric Branham, Brian Chase, and Terry Taylor) to graduation, and in the offseason, a wave of little-used reserves walked for various reasons: Harding Nana, Deonte Smith, Dimari Thompkins, and Luke Minor.

That knocked the scholarship player count down to seven, and when three freshmen entered in the fall of 2003 (Zabian Dowdell, Jamon Gordon, and Coleman Collins), that bumped the Hokies up to ten scholarship players, the number they suited up in both 2003-04 and 2004-05.

VT lost one player (Carlos Dixon) to graduation after last season, and the four-man recruiting class of Hyman Taylor, Terrance Vinson, Cheick Diakate, and AD Vassallo coming in this fall will boost the scholarship count back up to 13.

Not only will the Hokies be back up to 13 scholarship players next year, but the quality of players available for Seth Greenberg next year and beyond is rapidly increasing and approaching ACC levels.

This past season, VT played the starting lineup significant minutes, to say the least: Zabian Dowdell (32.6 minutes per game), Coleman Collins (29.8), Jamon Gordon (33.9), Deron Washington (24.1), and Carlos Dixon (31.3 minutes) averaged 151.7 out of 200 player minutes per game. In ACC play, that number went up to 158.4 minutes per game. At 24.5 minutes per game in ACC play, Washington was the only starter who didn't average 32+ minutes in league play – and if he wasn't such a foul-prone freshman, he probably would have played more.

The Hokies had, truth be told, no scoring options off the bench, and no quality post backups. The reserves entered the game just to spell the starters, not to allow Greenberg to experiment with lineups and find out what was working on any given night. He played walk-ons Jeff King and Chris Tucker significant minutes as he waited for Robert Krabbendam to develop and for more post players to arrive in subsequent recruiting classes.

In the future, that will change.

Whether you think next year's lineup will be significantly different depends on how you look at it. In one respect, Vassallo's shooting ability (if he lives up to his reputation) will replace Carlos Dixon's. And while Krabbendam will be improved, the Hokies still won't be able to bring post scoring punch off the bench, because Taylor, Vinson, and Diakate will be freshmen and will need seasoning offensively.

But on the other hand, instead of bringing in walk-ons like King and Tucker, Greenberg will be able to reach down onto his bench and select a post backup from the Taylor/Vinson/Diakate trio. King had no future with the VT hoops team, and Tucker (while a solid walk-on) isn't a long-term solution either, but in the three freshman post players, Greenberg will have the luxury of throwing them out there in the water and seeing who floats.

Where the real excitement starts to happen is in 2006-07, when point guard Nigel Munson arrives, along with one more recruit (since the Hokies have one scholarship left for the 2006 recruiting class). At that point, barring attrition, the team will look like this:

The distribution of players by class is about as good as one could hope. The success of the 2006-07 Hokies, the question of whether or not they'll be truly "ACC worthy," will be answered by the development of five players: Krabbendam, Witherspoon, Taylor, Vinson, and Diakate.

For 2006-07, let's assume:

• Dowdell, Gordon, Collins, Washington, and Vassallo will all be very good ACC players/scorers.
• Sailes will be a solid role player: defender, ball-handler, but not scorer.
• Munson and whoever enters with him in 2006 will be competent ACC freshmen.

That's eight players who we'll project can hold their own in the ACC, to varying degrees depending upon experience. The success of that 2006-07 team, and the depth of its bench, will then depend upon how Krabbendam, Witherspoon, Taylor, Vinson, and Diakate develop. If two of them develop, VT's bench will be ten deep, including the freshmen. If more than two of them develop to where they can contribute, that will allow the Hokies to bring their two '06-07 freshmen along more slowly – and keeping freshmen on the bench is a big key to being successful in the ACC, unless you're Duke or UNC.

Projecting just two years down the road, the 2006-07 Hokies will have advanced light years beyond their outmanned 2004-05 counterparts. There will be more scholarship players (13 versus 10), more scoring options off the bench (we hope), more post options, and a near-perfect spread of players across classes. They'll be led by seniors and juniors and will be spelled by younger players off the bench, the perfect setup.

Not to mention that the players on that 2006-07 roster, at this early stage, appear to be players of solid backgrounds and character, players who are less risky off the court and are more likely to stay in the program. Previous rosters (under the Stokes regime, plus Greenberg's first recruiting class, which has already lost two players) not only took chances on players from a talent standpoint, but from an off-the-court standpoint, leading to extreme attrition, the type of attrition that can't be tolerated if you want to be competitive in the ACC. (For more on the evolution of hoops recruiting at VT in just the last two years, check out our TSLMail #174 from May 6th.)