Give @MattZemek a twitter follow and check out his musings on college sports at https://www.patreon.com/Zemek.
Bud Foster announced earlier this week that the 2019 season will be his last as the Virginia Tech Hokies’ defensive coordinator. The Frank Beamer era technically ended in 2015, but when Foster hangs up the whistle at the end of this season, the Beamer era will end in a larger and more profound sense.
Remember this: Beamer brought Foster onto his staff as a graduate assistant at Murray State in 1981. Foster spent two seasons as a GA… and then TWELVE seasons (!) as a position coach, before beginning his career as a defensive coordinator. Foster spent four seasons at Murray State (1983-1986), then eight at Virginia Tech (1987-1994), before he finally became Beamer’s defensive coordinator at Virginia Tech in 1995. For 21 seasons, Beamer and Foster was the head coach-defensive coordinator combination in Blacksburg. Foster then stayed on four seasons (2016-2019) to help Justin Fuente carry the program forward.
In sum, Foster will wind up spending 33 seasons at Virginia Tech, 25 as a defensive coordinator. Foster spent 35 seasons with Beamer. Foster will have spent a quarter of a century as a defensive coordinator when this final season ends. Yet, that quarter-century is a smaller period of time than the length of his football life with both Virginia Tech and Beamer himself.
This is a remarkable display of loyalty, longevity and consistency in a profession — football coaching — known for its churn, instability, and ruthlessness.
Yet, that doesn’t begin to touch on the measure of Bud Foster’s quality… which provides a sense of the enormity of his legacy in Blacksburg.
Bud Foster will be remembered by Virginia Tech fans for many reasons. One is “The Streak” against Virginia. It was and is a testament to Foster that in the game the Hokies yearned to win the most every year, Foster reliably had his defenses ready to play their best.
Foster will be remembered as the man who, upon taking over as defensive coordinator in 1995, promptly helped Virginia Tech to rise to the top tier of the college football landscape. The 1995-2000 period marked one of two separate sequences of six or more years in which Hokie football resided in the top tier of the college football power structure (the lower end of the top tier, but the top tier nonetheless).
From 1995-2000, Virginia Tech made three elite New Year’s Day bowls (formerly called Bowl Alliance games, then Bowl Championship Series games, now New Year’s Six bowls), one of them the BCS National Championship Game. From 1995-2000, Virginia Tech produced pairs of seasons with two or fewer losses TWICE. The program had not done that since 1918.
From 1995-2000, Virginia Tech produced back-to-back one-loss seasons (in 1999 and 2000). The program had NEVER done that before.
Then came the next long sequence of glory under Foster and Beamer: 2004 through 2011.
In those eight seasons, Virginia Tech never won fewer than 10 games. The Hokies won four ACC championships (2004, 2007, 2008, 2010) and six ACC Coastal Division titles (2005, 2011). They made three Orange Bowls and two Sugar Bowls.
When one considers not just the quality of Bud Foster’s work but his longevity as well, one is brought to a very hard-to-refute conclusion: Foster is the second-greatest defensive coordinator in ACC history, even when realizing that his ACC career didn’t begin until 2004.
Brent Venables of Clemson and one of his Clemson predecessors, Tom Harper — who coached under Danny Ford in the 1980s — are/were both brilliant defensive coordinators at Clemson. Yet, their tenures are/were shorter than a full decade. Specific ACC teams — think of North Carolina in 1980 with Lawrence Taylor, or Miami’s 2017 turnover machine defense, or some of the best teams Bobby Ross coached at both Maryland and then Georgia Tech — had memorably great defenses, but they didn’t have defensive dynasties which spanned a decade or more.
There are only two names which stand out as dynastic defensive coordinators in the history of the ACC, men who were excellent for 15 or more years:
One is Bud Foster.
The other is Mickey Andrews of Florida State.
Andrews is the greatest defensive coordinator in ACC history. Foster is second. The impressive nature of Foster’s legacy isn’t just that he IS the second-best ACC defensive coordinator who has ever lived; it’s that the matter seems relatively clear-cut.
Yes, if Venables spends another decade at Clemson, we can revisit this, but when you also consider the level of recruiting at Clemson and Virginia Tech, the conversation relative to Foster changes. Moreover, the conversation takes on even more dimensions when you appreciate the Tigers’ and Hokies’ respective levels of standing at the time when both men began their tenures as defensive coordinators at those schools. Foster faced a bigger uphill climb than Venables did when he came to Clemson in 2012. Clemson had won the ACC title in 2011, and Dabo Swinney was beginning to figure out how to recruit and develop players. Virginia Tech had quality material to work with in 1995, but the program had not yet turned the corner. It also had a lot less of a football tradition than Clemson.
Bud Foster is the second-best defensive coordinator in ACC history — and not in a football-juggernaut state such as Florida or at a football-mad school such as Clemson.
We all know how great Bud Foster is and has been. Yet, that sentence above is needed to remind people just how remarkable Bud Foster’s career became… and how gleaming it will remain 50 years from now, when we remember the story of early 21st-century ACC football.
Make you follow the All Sports Discussion Twitter account at @AllSportsDACC and please like our Facebook Page
Leave a Reply