Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer this week demonstrated zero tolerance for a troublemaking recruit. We don't know what this new Beamer did with the old one, but we'll accept blissful ignorance if it means cleaning up a football program known as much for thugs as wins.
Hokie recruit Peter Rose had everything going for him. He was a star athlete at Amherst County High School and the prom king. Tech offered him a scholarship, a chance to pursue an education at an excellent school and hone his football skills on a Division I team.
He might have thrown it all away. The Amherst County Sheriff's Office arrested him last week on felony drug charges after a 10-month investigation. The young football star allegedly sold drugs to an undercover deputy near a school.
The new Beamer responded promptly. He revoked Rose's scholarship rather than embroil his team in another criminal fiasco sparked by a player. If the courts find Rose not guilty, we wish him well and hope he will consider reapplying to Tech, but for now, the Hokies do not need his sideline spectacle.
The old Beamer might have looked the other way.
In 2006, for example, police found drugs in the car of Hokie running back Branden Ore. He was never charged, but the incident lingered as Ore's friend, who had been in the car too, faced prosecution. It took Beamer two years to cut Ore, and then mostly because the player's production had dropped and he had shown up for practice late.
And who can forget Hokie star Marcus Vick? That prize recruit was arrested and ultimately convicted of providing alcohol to three underage girls in 2004. He was temporarily suspended from the team. Then he gave the finger to the crowd at a West Virginia University game in 2005 and faced new charges in Hampton. Beamer took him along to the Gator Bowl anyway, where he violently stomped on a Louisville player's leg. Finally, the coach cut him.
There are graduates of Beamer's program, too. Michael Vick, Jimmy Williams and DeAngelo Hall all went to the NFL and promptly demonstrated they had not learned how to be responsible adults at Tech.
Perhaps the new Beamer, the Beamer who revoked Rose's scholarship, hopes to build a football program that prizes the character of its young men as much as their prowess on the field. The Hokie Nation will be watching.
