Misbehave in the Big Easy? Hokies coach Frank Beamer won’t hesitate to send a player home … by bus
Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer doesn’t mess around when players violate team rules on a bowl trip. If it’s a serious enough breach, you’re looking at a Greyhound bus ride home.
“The first page of our manual for our bowl game has how many miles, how many stops, how many days it takes you to get back to Blacksburg by Greyhound bus,” Beamer said. “It’s worked fairly well.”
Beamer doled out the punishment for the first time during the Hokies’ trip to the Sugar Bowl in 1995. Redshirt freshman offensive lineman Keith Short got sent home to Richmond via bus after missing the team’s 2 a.m. curfew.
It’s an 833-mile ride back to Blacksburg from New Orleans, which Google maps lists as a 13-hour, 11-minute trip by car. According to this, Short said his ride home to Richmond lasted 26 hours with all the stops.
Last year, six Hokies earned a bus trip back from the Orange Bowl in Miami for various violations of team rules, which Beamer wouldn’t divulge but said were not ”real serious.” Director of Football Operations John Ballein handles the arrangements.
“He’s got the experience in that area,” Beamer said.
The team takes necessary measures to prevent having to send anyone home, something especially important this year with New Orleans’ famed Bourbon Street and its late-night festivities within walking distance of the team hotel.
“The first day you’re there, we have a team meeting and we’ll talk about the rules and being smart and making good decisions,” running backs coach Shane Beamer said. “I’m sure we’ll have somebody from the Sugar Bowl or the New Orleans police department or whoever come in and talk to our guys about the distractions and being safe.”
Senior receiver Danny Coale said the team will prepare for the game the way it does every time it goes on the road.
“I think we all will approach it as a business trip,” he said. “That’s kind of been the saying in past years and I think everybody knows that. There will be moments to have fun and to enjoy New Orleans.”
Asked if he plans to go to Bourbon Street at all, safety Eddie Whitley just smiled and said, “After the game.”
There are lesser violations that won’t earn you a bus ticket home. Last year in Miami, running back David Wilson and safety Antone Exum missed a 1 a.m. bed check on New Year’s Eve. They had to sit out the first quarter of the Stanford game, in addition to giving up a portion of their bowl travel stipend and not getting to attend the Miami-Golden State NBA game with their teammates.
“I was in the hotel,” Wilson said. “I was just out of my room. You’ve got to be in your room. … It wasn’t like I was down in South Beach on the strip and got caught. I was in the hotel. Live and learn.”
Coale is trying to make sure everyone understands that even a curfew violation is a detriment to the team.
“We have a goal to win a football game and we need everybody,” he said. “We don’t need anybody sitting out a quarter or two or even being sent home on a Greyhound. I think that’s a point we need to get across.”
December 20, 2011 - 12:06 PM
Yeah, those guys last year were in the hotel, but they were probably at Dennis Rodman’s New Years Eve party. I think they’d have been better off in South Beach.
That Keith Short story has gotten a lot of mileage over the years, maybe too much. What if it had been Jim Druckenmiller? Would he have been “thrown under the bus?” I doubt it.
I’m curious – where did they get the bowl travel “stipend” and tickets to the basketball game from? How is that not in violation of “impermissible” benefits per the NCAA?
The NCAA allows things like that (within certain limits) for bowl trips. It’s like the bowl gifts each player receives, which are no more than $550 in value I believe.
Ok, for argument sake, how’s that any different from booster giving gift valued at $550? If the NCAA is going to enforce the impermissible benefits, they need to make it clear to the bowl games those “gifts” are not acceptable, otherwise they are contradicting themselves.
Here is an interesting link to the bowl gifts this year. I would love to take a shopping trip in the “gift suite” at these places!
http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2011/12/05/In-Depth/Bowl-Gifts-List.aspx
I rode a bus for 8 hours one time and thought I’d go bonkers. My mom’s cousin once went on a charter bus from here to Alaska. I suggested we put her in the nervous hospital when she got back. You’d have to be nuts to do that.
The longest bus ride I’ve taken in years was a tour bus from Nashville to Lynchburg Tennessee for a tour of the Jack Daniels Distillary. That was worth the hour and a half both ways. Took two days for the smell of Tennessee Whiskey to get out of my head.
Sure Beamer is going to send players home for violations in the Big Easy. If anyone is sent home, you can rest assured that it is a nobody player with little or no impact on the game. He is not about to send Wilson, Coale, Hosely or Thomas home. None of this matters anyway because the Hokies are going to get taken to the woodshed again, just like against Clemson. I just hope the Hokies can make it look somewhat respectable.
Pardner, I can tell you that Virginia Tick is going to be very careful about who they schedule during the regular season. They finally scheduled a few decent teams at the beginning of the season over the past several years (lost to all of them, of course) but this year they went back to putting the cupcakes at the beginning of the season to bolster their record for a number 5 ranking (ridiculous). And then came Clemson (hello V Tick, welcome to real football!) Then they struggled and lucked their way to some more wins against mediocre ACC teams and here comes Clemson again (hello V Tick, welcome to real football!) Now they have EARNED a spot in the Sugar Bowl. Le us all see if we can guess what happens next.
Bubba, you like to be critical of VT. What team do you support?
I rode a bus from Ft Polk, La. to Roanoke back in my army days. 24 hours because we stopped in every crawdad selling hamlet we got to. I don`t think the bus station in Roanoke where we ended up is still there but it was right where I wanted to be. After seeing the halftime “adjustments” made against Stanford, I think Beamer sent the wrong people home.
Is it possible to say “Hello V Tick, welcome to real football” about a team that lost to the Wolfcrack, the Bees and the Cocks? Pardner? Now that’s what I call loosin’ to some mediocre teams, pardner.
Cupcakes, everybody plays cupcakes at one time or another.
Ask Michigan about cupcakes, how did their cupcake game with Appalachian State work out for the Wolverines?
JMU was a cupcake game for VT, and the same result.
Something is out of whack, you have to watch those cupcakes, that crowd will really get after you.
Some complain when we didn’t win, now a few complain when we do win.
I believe some would complain if hung with a new rope.
I am a Hokie for life.
Interesting that Beamer fosters this new found image as being ‘tough’ on discipline. Sure he sent home Keith Short back in the 95 Sugar Bowl. But for years before that and at least ten years after that, Frank Beamer liked to tell the press how a bowl trip was a reward to the players and coaches, and that they should enjoy their time spent there. Several players missed curfews without getting a bus ride home. They were starters, Short was not. Beamer was well known to be soft on player discipline at bowls. That would explain his record in bowls – usually winning when favored, never when not favored. That ‘tough’ facade was nowhere to be found regarding one Marcus Vick et.al., especially in bowl games.
How is it that so many posters here aren’t Division 1 head football coaches? I mean… you guys obviously have all of the answers to ensure a 100% bowl win percentage and a fail-safe college kid behavior plan!
Have you ever heard of a coach suspending an impact player from a bowl game?? Jim Tressel didn’t do it and it ended up costing him his job. Bowden didn’t send Janakowski home from the NC game in 1999. He said he might need him to win the ballgame. At least Bobby was honest. Why criticize Coach Beamer when all are doing and saying the same thing everyone else is. I admit two wrongs don’t make a right, but jump on everyone else too.
H24, I’ve been saying the same thing for a long time. No one ever responds. I’d like to see their resumes. I think college coaches ought to go to their jobs and criticize them while they’re mowing, bagging fries or filling out a spread sheet. I can hear coaches screaming, “That’s a debit you moron, get with the plan. Where’d you get your accounting degree, K-Mart?”
I just hope they play good football, but with Stinespring still around I doubt it will happen. I think the defense will have their hands full with Robinson. I love VT but lets be honest they do not do well aganist top 20 teams. They have the talent so it just comes down to coaching, preparing for what the other team will do. It seems the longer Tech has to prepare the worse they play. I hope Michigan players all miss their curfew and have huge hangovers!! GO TECH
Does anyone do “well” against ranked teams, without being a highly ranked team themselves?
That’s kinda the whole idea behind ranking a team in the first place… other teams aren’t supposed to do well against them.
I have no problem with Beamer calling the bowl games a reward. I think few of us fans stop to think how hard these kids have to work year round to play at this level, both physically and mentally and all the while try to get passing grades in the class room. When these kids get to college, especially the ones on scholarship I’m sure it’s a shock to their system when they go from being a spoiled, pampered BMOC in high school to what amounts to a full time job with the ‘Boss’ screaming in the ear hole of your helmet about what a slack-ass you are and you’re never gonna make it here. And the whole time wondering what happened to that nice,polite mild mannered coach that sat down with you and your parents at the kitchen table a few months back and signed those scholarship papers! I say they do deserve a bit of a reward, but at the same time, as a fan I want them to show up and represent their school well and give us a game worth watching. If the Hokies pull this one off against Big Blue it would have to rank up there as one of the biggest bowl victories ever for Tech, especially considering their record in these type of games.