VT-WVU Preview

As I noted Wednesday afternoon, Saturday’s game between #3 Virginia Tech (4-0, 3-0 ACC) and West Virginia (4-0, 1-0 Big East) is the last scheduled in this long-contested rivalry (12 noon EDT, ESPN/XM 191). That article took care of the fans; let’s focus on the football here. (BTN folks, head over to the Fanblogs version of the rivalry article for some high-quality entertainment from whiny Eerfan.)

Make no mistake, this game will be a challenge for the Hokies. The 2003 matchup is a singularly nasty omen: when Tech crushed moderately heralded Syracuse 51-7 ten days before traveling to WVU for the first serious road test of their year, the Hokies came out on the back end of a 28-7 beating. That game exposed serious holes in the VT defense and began a 1-5 slide to end the year. Since then, a lot has changed, though: the Hokie offense has matured and diversified, WVU has lost longtime field general Rasheed Marshall to graduation, and of course, the Hokies made the jump to (and promptly won) the ACC. This year, Tech had a nailbiter on the road against N.C. State to break in Marcus Vick, which ‘03 and the Big East scheduling philosophy didn’t offer.

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VT-WVU: A Rivalry's Meltdown

WVU commenter EER14 had a couple of good thoughts on the upcoming Tech-WVU matchup in a WVU-ECU postgame thread on Fanblogs Big East Tuesday morning, and the Roanoke Times followed up Wednesday morning with a good article on the Hokie players’ perspective. EER14 is right that this rivalry has become huge, and that it’s disappointing it must end.

But Mountaineer fans wondering why need only look in the mirror. A rivalry that had once been intense but mostly-civil got grossly out of control following the rise of WVU’s riot culture in the past 5-6 years, and Virginia Tech’s escape to the ACC tossed gasoline on the burning Morgantown couches. To be honest, WVU would have been an outside hope anyway for the ACC’s twelfth spot, but their fan base ended discussions before they ever started. Rumor was that Jim Weaver and WVU AD Ed Pastilong discussed continuing the rivalry at a neutral site like FedEx Field, but adding in-stadium beer sales to this matchup would have been asking for a disaster.

Hokie fans will travel just about anywhere, but I’d be surprised to see more than a thousand of us at Mountaineer Field on Saturday. Between my usual traveling group of friends, we’ve done Charlottesville three times, Pittsburgh twice, Miami twice, New Orleans twice, FedEx Field (P.G. County), Nashville, Jacksonville, Phoenix, Durham, and we’ll get College Park (P.G. again!) later in October, but none of us will touch Morgantown. It isn’t safe there, and that’s no way to enjoy a football game.

The Hokie Week, Backward and Forward

The Virginia Tech Hokies completed the early cupcake segment of their schedule in fine style Saturday, thrashing the Ohio Bobcats for a 45-0 win in Blacksburg after doing the same to Duke at Durham the previous week.

Ohio posed a more serious threat to the Hokies than the completely overmatched Blue Devils; Tech didn’t put the game away until superior team speed, personnel and halftime adjustments wore the MAC visitors down in the third quarter. Evidence of the N.C. State game plan was clearly present in the first half, as Bobcats QB Austen Everson went directly at short routes, both outside and over the middle where overpursuit by the Hokie linebacking corps could be punished. Other teams are going to do this all year; reading the offensive alignment and changing the defense at the line could mitigate this threat, but after losing defensive signal-caller Vinnie Fuller to graduation, the Hokies’ read-and-react capability is limited in the early going. Better tackling would at least limit the damage, but like last year, our players seem to have forgotten their fundamentals over the summer.

Randoms On My Mind

Virginia Tech ripped us off on football ticket shipping this year. For the past two seasons, tickets had been delivered FedEx 2-Day Air: quick to arrive, and easy to pick up after hours for those of us with jobs. This year, they charged us the same $15 for shipping, but chose UPS Ground instead and took a profit on the remainder of the money we paid. Result: tickets arrive 4 days later, and after their driver misses you at 11 AM, you have to throw a small tantrum over the phone to get them to take it off the truck at the depot so you can pick it up that night. If you think I’ve got experience with this, you’re right!

Disappointing news of the day: [Daryl][http://d103.com/] is calling it quits at D103.com as of the end of this month. I understand completely his not having the time to make it as good as he wants it to, as I’ve felt that way about BTN several times in the past year. A big complication for him is that, as a professional writer, a half-heartedly written blog could damage his professional reputation. For me, it’s simply a reflection of my priorities moving elsewhere; unless I do something deliberately stupid to poison my name on a Google search or start talking about work, the embarrassment of a poor effort is confined to the five or six of you that read regularly despite my slacking.

Speaking of other priorities, of the ten Nationals games I’ve attended since the beginning of June, the mediocre-at-best Tony Armas Jr. started 5 of them, including four in a row. Guess who’s starting tomorrow night?

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New Orleans Notes

Before we move into a long, cold winter without football or hockey, a few final notes on the Sugar Bowl and the city.

• My distaste with their team’s final drive aside, the Auburn fans I met on our flights down and in New Orleans were uniformly quality people — knowledgeable, dedicated and fired-up. And, like I’ve said, until the 1:57 mark I had no problem at all with their team’s play.
• That said, it’s curious how that sequence changed Hokie fans’ postgame mood for the better. Until then, I think we would have left the Dome in low spirits, quietly acknowledging Auburn’s superiority and wishing we could have just hit a few more passes earlier in the game. Instead, our heads were held high, and we were chanting “LET’S GO HOKIES!” down the square-spiral ramps, out onto the entrance plaza and on the way to the French Quarter.
• And yes, I’m with Coach Beamer: if in the preseason, you’d have offered me a 10-3 year, with a loss to an undefeated SEC team in a BCS bowl, I’d have taken it in a second. It was a magical year — maybe more so than 1999 because of how it happened.
• It’s easy to say this after last night’s beatdown, but I was saying it yesterday morning too: USC is a better team than Auburn, based on both the season as a whole and my observations from the games we played against both teams. USC played us tougher and faced a legitimate non-conference schedule pre-bowl, as opposed to the Tigers.
• Speaking of said Tigers’ out-of-conference schedules, they’re so terrible because Auburn decided recently it had to have seven home games every year and no OOC road games. No self-respecting I-A program will offer a visit or two without at least one return, not even most MAC schools, so they wind up with WAC, Sun Belt and I-AAers on the schedule. One effect of that decision was the cancellation of a 2010-11 home-and-home contract (see 8/11/03 comment) with… Virginia Tech. How much do we Hokies wish those games were still on now? Quite a lot.

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