[Sly Fox]

From Chris' blog ...

N&A: Despite the struggles on the field in football (VMI hasn’t had a winning season in 27 years), alumni donations are still pouring in. How does that make you feel about the standing of the program?

DW: It makes me that I’ve got a great obligation to that fan base to field successful teams in football. We’re making progress in the others, and I think they’re pretty happy with the progress we’re making. But we need to get over that hump in football. Last year, for example, we go 0-4 in the Big South. We lead three of those four games in the fourth quarter. Liberty, we weren’t in the game. In the others, we could have won all three of them, and should have won two of them for sure. But we didn’t. So we haven’t gotten over that hump.

We’ve got some good kids coming back this year, some young kids that were redshirted. With Sparky (Woods) keeping the offensive staff, that’s good. We had 500 yards of offense on probably four different occasions. We put a lot of points up, but we couldn’t stop anybody.

N&A: What does it take to make football successful at VMI?

DW: You’ve got to have a really good head coach, who can use VMI to help him build a program, and not run away from VMI. You can’t try to separate the football players from the rest of the corps. They need to be part of the corps, and you need a football coach who understands that. You need a guy who knows the Xs and Os, a guy who knows how to build a team. And you’ve got to retain. We’re running a system now offensively that is favorable. We’re putting pressure on the other team. We’re keeping the ball. We want to shorten the game and hopefully keep the ball out of the other team’s hands.

We have some good numbers there, but we gave the other team too many big plays. I think Sparky recognized that and he’s trying to get more speed on defense, to cut down on the big plays we give the other team. So you’ve got to hire a good guy. We’ve had some good coaches. Don’t get me wrong. But it hasn’t all fit together yet.

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[Cider Jim]

N&A: You’re five years into your membership in the Big South. How do you evaluate that move at this point?

DW: Good question. When we compare RPI numbers in all of our sports with other conferences, the Big South is a good fit for us, in how we match up in a number of sports. We haven’t gotten the job done football-wise. Basketball, we’re coming along. Baseball, we were 14-7 in the conference last year, so we’ve shown we can compete. And that’s a good baseball conference, as you know. We’ve had some new hires the last couple of years in soccer and lacrosse. So I’m very optimistic that we’re going to be in the upper half of the Big South in most of our sports.

N&A: And that wasn’t the case in the Southern Conference?

DW: The Southern Conference, it wasn’t a problem. But since about 1982, the Southern Conference required that we play all eight teams. Prior to that, we only played like six football games in the conference. Then it became eight, and of course, Richmond and William & Mary weren’t part of that league, and we’ve been playing them for 100 years. We wanted to keep that, and that gave us 10 required games. So we had one game to schedule. And we weren’t doing well in any of the 10.

The Big South had a football league starting with only four required games (now six with the addition of Presbyterian and Stony Brook), so that was essentially the rationale. Then we felt the Big South, in basketball and the other sports, was a lot different than the Southern. Like Army and Navy, we needed scheduling flexibility for football. Army gave it away, went to Conference USA, then realized they needed to get it back. So I think we did the right thing. We’ve got the scheduling flexibility, but we haven’t executed. It’s a lot like being on the golf course. We’ve got the shot there, we just didn’t execute it, you know. We haven’t done as well in football as I’m sure our people feel like we should have. That’s all true. I feel badly about it. But that’s behind us.