Michael Vick became the latest NFL legend to dip his toe into college football coaching when Norfolk State hired him to lead its program.
The news, first reported by The Virginian-Pilot, was confirmed by Vick Tuesday night via a post on his verified Facebook page.
And for most of us who are not particularly invested in Norfolk State football, that means just one thing: Better watch your back, Brent Pry!
Who’s Brent Pry? He’s the largely unremarkable coach at Virginia Tech who has gone 3-8, 7-6 and 6-6 in three seasons and would probably not be recognized at any grocery store or airplane terminal in America beyond a 30-mile radius from Blacksburg.
That’s not intended to be a knock on Pry, who made his name as James Franklin’s defensive coordinator at Vanderbilt and Penn State and parlayed that into a contract making $4.75 million a year. Nice work if you can get it.
But let’s be real for a second. Vick is a star. A cultural icon, even, despite misdeeds in his past that he’s worked hard to atone for. And he’s especially a star at Virginia Tech, the school he put on the map by taking the Hokies to the brink of a national title in 1999.
Do we really need to put two and two together here?
If Vick shows even a hint of competence as a head coach this coming year, and Virginia Tech continues on its current mediocre path, athletics director Whit Babcock (or whoever replaces him) will have no choice. Vick is coming for this job, and good luck being the guy who tells the Hokies’ fan base the most important player in school history needs to pay his dues for a few more years.
That’s not how this stuff works anymore (see Sanders, Deion), and that’s probably a good thing.
Coaching competence, development and experience matter in college football, but this is now a game of paid-for player acquisition and roster building through the transfer portal, which require a different set of skills than the traditional model.
Will Vick know what he’s doing on the sidelines? Impossible to say. He’s never coached.
But ideas that were once laughed at are now part of the mainstream thought in college football. And anyway, what does Virginia Tech have to lose? Since Frank Beamer retired at the end of the 2015 season, the program’s record is 60-53. Its identity as a scrappy little powerhouse in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains has been replaced by complete irrelevance. As we’ve come to learn over the last decade, Beamer — and Vick, too — made that job look a whole lot easier than it actually is.
That’s why this scenario is going to be fascinating to follow over the next 12 months.
Virginia Tech has a great fan base that hungers for a winner, if not an outright return to the Beamer era when they were regularly competing for conference championships. Vick has the star power to reignite interest in Virginia Tech, and don’t think for a second that other athletics directors and school presidents haven’t noticed how Sanders has transformed Colorado’s national image — and not just as a football program.
For people of a certain age — OK, my age — Vick was like something we had never seen before in football. Now, we are used to quarterbacks who can dominate games with their speed in addition to their passing. But when Vick showed up at Virginia Tech, and then later with the Atlanta Falcons as the first Black quarterback to be drafted No. 1 overall, he was one of one. For a lot of reasons, he’s truly one of the landmark players in the history of the sport.
The next phase of Vick’s life wasn’t a picnic. He spent 21 months in prison over the dogfighting ring he was part of, and dealt with significant financial troubles and lawsuits. But since then, Vick has put his life back together and worked in television with Fox Sports since the end of his NFL career.
Vick’s college coaching candidacy seemingly came out of nowhere, but it makes sense in this era. As schools navigate a new financial reality of paying players, a lot of schools are looking outside the box or are more willing to take chances on unproven coaches that they don’t have to pay $8 million a year.
Norfolk State, which plays at the FCS level, just fired Dawson Odums after he went 15-31 in four seasons. They have nothing to lose here. And when Vick shows up on the sidelines next fall, coaching just a few miles from where he grew up, it’s going to be pandemonium.
Maybe he gets a couple players. Maybe he wins a few games. It’s unlikely Vick will ever say this publicly, but the next move from there is obvious.
Will it happen? Will Vick get that fairytale return in a year or two to rescue his alma mater from its long-running misery?
That’s largely up to him. If he is good at the job, that is going to happen. If you’re Brent Pry — the guy who has the Virginia Tech job, in case you forgot — you’re on notice. The countdown to your assumed successor has begun.