Breaking Down The Hiring Of Wide Receivers Coach Aaron Moorehead

Wide Receivers Coach Aaron Moorehead

Again, Beamer has hired another young coach to add the mix, giving the Hokies coaching staff less of a geriatric feel and one more balanced between seasoned veterans and up-and-comers. In hiring Moorehead, the Hokies got their guy from Stanford...just not necessarily the guy from Stanford that they wanted. That's not to berate Moorehead before we've even started, just to say that if the Hokies truly wanted Pep Hamilton, landing a wide receivers coach from the school is a less than enthralling consolation prize. That is, unless the man you're talking about is a 32-year old former NFL player and Super Bowl champion, and in this case, he is.

Moorehead has the least coaching experience of the three hires, but has one of the most impressive résumés because of his NFL experience. Moorehead attended the University of Illinois, where he had a good-ish career, posting 53 receptions for 894 yards and 7 touchdowns in three years for the Illini, helping them to a Sugar Bowl bid and their first Big 10 Championship in over a decade in his senior year. A year later, Moorehead showed up on the Colts radar and was signed as an undrafted free agent. He spent five years with the Colts, finishing his professional career with a Super Bowl win in 2007 and becoming the first father-son tandem to win Super Bowls in the NFL. In his five years, often as the Colts' fifth receiver, Moorehead totaled 31 receptions for 330 yards and a touchdown in the regular season.

As I said, his coaching résumé is short. Here it goes: In 2009 Moorehead decided to join the University of New Mexico as a graduate assistant, helping coach the wide receivers. He spent one season there before moving to Stanford to serve in the same capacity for the last three years. So what if Moorehead doesn't have the longest coaching résumé in the history of sports? He has something that a lot of guys out there in his field don't have: practical application of playing the position he is coaching, much less at the NFL level. Because of this practical application, he can teach players techniques and secrets of the position that are not in his too distant past. And because of his accomplishments, players will listen. He also has something that almost none of his contemporaries do: a Super Bowl ring. Imagine going into a potential player's house (particularly a wide receiver) and saying, "hey, I won a Super Bowl doing the things that I'm going to teach you to do if you come to Virginia Tech." That's a trump card nobody else is going to be able to match. While Moorehead hasn't officially recruited anyone to date (at least as the recruiting sites track them), I think that will factor favorably for the Hokies as a pitch to on-the-fence recruits.

This concludes our series profiling Virginia Tech's new coaching hires, but we will continue to inform you about them and leading up to and during the season. Also check out the two previous profiles of Scot Loeffler and Jeff Grimes. You can also keep track of all the Hokies' coaching hires in this story stream. Just more evidence that for all of your major Hokie sports news, Gobbler Country is the place to be.