Miami '04 (By Popular Demand)

ACC champions. Six years ago, had you told me I’d be celebrating our first Atlantic Coast Championship in the stands at the Orange Bowl, I’d have laughed at you. Four years ago, in the wake of the ACC’s failed 1999 expansion effort, I’d have laughed even harder. Last May, I might have either cried or punched you, as the conference claimed to want Syracuse rather than us. But all that’s past now.

First let’s look at the game action.

• I’ve already said all I really need to about Bryan Randall, but he earned more props from me in this game by his reaction to the early fumble. In previous years, he’d have gone into a shell, trying to play pocket passer and completely passing up his scrambling ability. Not this year, and not this game.
• OK, one more thing about Randall: in the last seven games of this season, he threw fourteen touchdown passes and ONE interception. That’s superhuman — that’s the ACC Player of the Year.
• Jimmy Martin’s injury the previous week against UVa hurt our running game badly — we could do almost nothing behind the left side of the offensive line. (Fortunately, both Martin and Mike Imoh will be back for the Sugar Bowl) In turn, I have to compliment Bryan Stinespring for calling and the whole offense for executing a game plan that let us make progress with a running game that everyone in the stadium knew was going right.
• The defense? Simply unbelievable. Complete domination of a very good offense.
• Special teams are starting to worry me.
• This game was unusually clean for a VT-UM matchup — not too much after-the-whistle action, and no outright thuggery. No complaints here.

And the non-field of play stuff: - jetBlue rules. Expand your routes out of Dulles, guys, and I’ll have a new favorite airline. 36 channels of DirecTV including 4 ESPNs, and XM on the way? The only possible improvement would be to allow passengers to listen to air traffic control radio, like United does on Channel 9. - Fans of the game: the VT students in our section of the pay parking lot under the 836 Expressway. They bought tickets Wednesday and Thursday, left Blacksburg in one guy’s Dodge Durango at 2 PM Friday, and arrived in the parking lot around 8 AM Saturday morning. - Losers of the game (joint award): the UM fan who ran over and lit a maroon shirt on fire in the middle of our all-Hokie tailgating area, and the Orange Bowl scoreboard operator who zeroed the score out as soon as time ran out so we couldn’t take pictures. Post-game, we decided the shirt had been sacrificed for a good cause. - Why didn’t we rush the field? Two reasons. #1, just under half of our fans were in the upper deck and couldn’t reach the field directly. #2, for us in the lower deck, the way the Orange Bowl is designed, the field-side railings rise from ~5 feet to ~20 feet above ground as you reach the end of the horseshoe. So no jumping. This left us with only two routes to the field: through the lowest corner where some of the players’ families were sitting (easily secured), and the ramp down from the end of the horseshoe, which would have required us to dodge a lot of cops in the open area at field level before reaching grass. And had we gotten there, there were mounted cops (on horses) guarding our goalpost. In Charlottesville or at Lane, we’d have gone, but at the OB we stood no chance.

Three weeks to New Orleans!