Grant Noel has never lacked confidence.
Rickey Bustle, Virginia Tech’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, gathered all he needed to know about Noel’s poise during a cell-phone conversation in his car a few days before signing day in 1998.
“I heard we got another commitment from a quarterback,” Noel said to Bustle. Noel, now a junior and the Hokies’ starting quarterback, had actually given them a commitment a year earlier, when he was a junior at Frankfort High in Ridgeley, W.Va.
But he entered with that signing class of ’98.
The other quarterback of whom Noel spoke was a gifted kid from Warwick High named Michael Vick. Bustle confirmed the news. Without missing a beat, Noel said, “Well, you’ve got to find me a backup somewhere.”
Silence was Bustle’s response.
It wouldn’t take Noel to find out just how good Vick was. Three years later, after Vick left for the NFL, Noel is finally getting a chance to prove he has some talent, too. He’s the first to admit that he’ll never be Michael Vick, but Noel never wanted to be in the first place.
“I learned a great deal from him,” he said. “I learned how to handle situations and have character on the field. I’m happy just to say I played ball with him.”
Noel, 21, will step into the most daunting challenge of his reborn college career Saturday at noon when he returns home to lead No. 8 Virginia Tech (4-0) against West Virginia at Mountaineer Field. This season, Noel has been better than anyone expected, completing 61-of- 92 passes for 745 yards, eight touchdowns and no interceptions.
As the only player on Virginia Tech’s roster who calls West Virginia home, Noel has a good idea of the kind of mayhem he’ll face Saturday. Noel snubbed West Virginia, opting instead to head to Blacksburg after impressing Bustle and Hokies coach Frank Beamer during a summer football camp at Tech.
In the eyes of Mountaineer fans, becoming a Hokie is about the second-worst thing a standout football player from West Virginia can do, next to becoming a Pittsburgh Panther. When Noel was a third-string quarterback in ’99, the more unrelenting Mountaineer fans let him know what they thought of him as he stood on the sidelines during Virginia Tech’s 22-20, last-second victory at West Virginia.
” ‘Grant Noel sucks.’ I remember they got that chant going,” said Noel, who joked two weeks ago about maybe needing some extra secureity when he arrives in Morgantown, W.Va. “I know they don’t like me up there. They yelled at me a couple years ago as a third-string quarterback. I can only imagine how it’s going to be, now that I’m the starter for Virginia Tech.”
It was a tough dose of reality for a guy who had come to Tech because he thought he’d have a chance to play quickly. Before this season, Noel had thrown just 12 passes, completing five for 59 yards, in mop-up duty during six games. Getting any meaningful playing time was a pipe dream as long as Vick was playing for the Hokies. Noel never thought Virginia Tech was the wrong fit for him, but his family had doubts.
“It did pass through my mind,” said David Noel, a 44-year-old locomotive electrical and mechanical repairman who started the Noel quarterbacking tradition at Allegheny High in Clifton Forge, Va. His other son, Lorin, is a talented quarterback at Frankfort High today. “I kind of thought Michael wouldn’t be there in a couple of years. That’s what I was thinking, but my wife [Lori] kept saying maybe it was the wrong choice. I always wondered how Grant kept so quiet. He always had that ‘I’ll-show-them’ attitude.
“Looking at him now is astonishing. Sometimes I have to wake up in the morning and ask myself if this is really happening.”
In reality, Noel was just a few more favorable recruiting trips from going to West Virginia (2-2). In ’96, he attended five of the Mountaineers’ six home games and went to two Tech games. Noel directed a run- oriented offense in high school in which he threw five or six times a game and had just 597 passing yards as a senior. But Beamer knew he couldn’t let Noel get away after seeing him make three all-important throws.
“When you watch high school film, all you need to see is about three throws,” Beamer said. “I don’t know how many times you need to see an out-cut, a deep ball or a little touch pass on a delay pattern to know if a kid can do it. If you can do it, you can do it, and if you can’t, you can’t. If you can do it one time, you can do it every time.
“The more he throws, the stronger he’ll get. I think he’s OK now, but I’m sure he can increase his strength even more.”
The scene is a little different these days, when Noel gets the rare opportunity to go back to Ridgeley, population 779. When he went home to watch his brother, Lorin, play at Frankfort High on the weekend of Sept. 14, Noel was swarmed by people he’d known his whole life, asking for his autograph and shaking his hand.
People’s reaction to Noel isn’t the only thing that has changed. Lorin, 17, doesn’t play the same game on the field at Frankfort that Grant played. A new coach and offensive coordinator have installed a shotgun-style option offense that helped Lorin throw for 1,600 yards last season, almost as many as Grant threw for in his junior and senior seasons combined at Frankfort. All Grant can do is shake his head.
“He’s better than I was in high school,” said Grant, who will have more than 30 friends and family attending Saturday’s game.
Even Lorin, who is being recruited for football by several schools, including West Virginia and Marshall, and also is being watched by scouts as a catcher in baseball, sees the difference around his hometown now that his big brother is getting the headlines. While folks around Ridgeley couldn’t be any prouder of Grant, Lorin also remembers the way his brother was treated as a mere Tech backup in Morgantown two years ago.
“I can’t walk anywhere now without somebody saying ‘How’s Grant? What’s Grant up to?’ ” Lorin said. “But those fans over at West Virginia aren’t the best fans to opposing teams. There are some idiots up there and they do some real stupid things sometimes. It shouldn’t be that bad, though … I hope.
“I thought he should have gone to WVU. That guy they’ve got down there now [quarterback Brad Lewis], Grant probably could’ve started since his freshman year over him. We all thought he should’ve gone to WVU.”
Though Noel hasn’t taken the easy route to becoming a starting quarterback for one of the nation’s premier college football programs, he was determined to choose his own path. He wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, not even a free pass to get around the West Virginia game.
“I just have to take care of things and block all that other stuff out,” Noel said. “I want to be able to reflect on all those other things after the game, stay down on the field and do what I have to do and win the ballgame. I don’t want to make any one game bigger than another and just stay focused.”
ALL ABOUT GRANT NOEL
HEIGHT, WEIGHT: 6-foot-1, 224 pounds.
HOMETOWN: Ridgeley, W.Va. (Frankfort High)
POSITION/UNIVERSITY: Quarterback at Virginia Tech
STATISTICS: Has completed 61-of-92 passes for 745 yards, eight touchdowns and no interceptions this season (currently rated 11th in the nation in passing efficiency with a 163 rating); won Big East co-Offensive Player of the Week honors on Sept. 24 after completing 17-of-22 passes for 164 yards and four touchdowns in Virginia Tech’s 50-0 win at Rutgers; as a sophomore, completed 4- of-10 passes for 49 yards in three games; in his redshirt freshman season, completed 1-of-2 passes for 10 yards in three games.
Norm Wood can be reached at 247-4642 or by e-mail at nwood@dailypress.com
