Virginia Tech is kind of an enigma....
They have a massive inferiority complex that extends all the way back to their days in the Metro Conference....
They positively dominate their media market....Christiansburg, Blacksburg, and all the way up the road to Roanoke, and all of the New River Valley....
And while folks often quack about how they are in this backwater, and it is impossible to recruit into that void....Somehow their football team manages to overcome that deficit....
In a practical sense, they are a team in a high profile conference....despite the geographic location of the school, they get media exposure as a function of their conference.
This strikes me as not a whole lot different than the problem a new coach might have had trying to draft talented players to come play for a doormat team in a big name D-1 conference, in some backwater town in Tolland County, Connecticut....