Photos: ESPN College GameDay for VT-UM

BTN readers who haven’t had the opportunity to see ESPN College GameDay live in person may be interested in some of my photos from today’s show in Blacksburg before tonight’s Virginia Tech-Miami showdown.

For the record, Kirk Herbstreit picked the Hokies and Lee Corso donned the Miami ibis head for the first time in Blacksburg.

VT-Miami Preview

The eyes of the college football world are focused on Blacksburg, Virginia this weekend as the #3 Virginia Tech Hokies (8-0, 5-0 ACC) host the #5 Miami Hurricanes (6-1, 3-1 ACC) at 7:45 PM Saturday night (ESPN/XM 192). ESPN has brought the full might of its media machine to town, broadcasting ESPN2’s Cold Pizza morning show from Blacksburg on Friday morning, College Gameday on Saturday morning, the radio GameDay all day long on Saturday, and even running a game-long feed from the quarterback’s-view Skycam (paired with the regular commentators’ audio) on ESPNU.

Hype aside, this is the most-anticipated game of the year short of the Rose Bowl, as pre-season commentators pointed to it as a potential national championship semifinal. Many Hokie fans point to Tech’s first-ever win over Miami, in 1995, as the true launch of this program to its current national status. That game began a 5-year Hokie winning streak, aided by Miami’s probation handed down later in that 1995 season. Conversely, Miami capped its resurgence in 2000 with a resounding win over the Hokies with Michael Vick hobbled by a Pittsburgh ankle twist, and then knocked out two more consecutive wins: 26-24 in 2001 with the Hokies giving them their best challenge of the year despite a 4-for-20 from QB Grant Noel, then a 56-45 shootout in 2002. The Hokies turned it around 31-7 in 2003 with one of the most electric wins in Virginia Tech history, then knocked the Hurricanes off last year 16-10 in a de facto ACC championship game. Since 1995, the Hokies have never feared Miami, and Tech’s refusal to give Miami what the Canes view as their due deference has created one of the truly nasty rivalries of the past decade.

Let’s break this one down. Read More »

Church, religion, and a whipping Post

I’ve got a brief philosophical foray to spin out of a sports/religion story, so bear with me if you will. (Or you could just click away somewhere else — after all, it’s not like I’ll know.)

Washington Nationals OF Ryan Church has gotten into hot water following a remark quoted in a Washington Post story Sunday on the role of chaplains in Major League Baseball. Nats chaplain Jon Moeller (who himself has been suspended from his part-time duties) is quoted secondhand by Church as stating that non-Christians will go to hell, with Church expressing his shock that, according to Moeller, his Jewish ex-girlfriend would be heading south after death.

To get the theology out of the way: yes, Jesus said that he is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and that no man would go to the Father but by him (John 14:5-6). This can be read to support Moeller. I hesitate to make statements like Moeller’s, though, because we as sinners are not supposed to judge lest we also be judged (Matthew 7:1). Using the first citation to state conclusively that someone is going to hell reads as judgment of that someone to me. Yes, that’s a fine distinction; that’s why theologians have been in business for two thousand years. (And we haven’t even discussed where God’s continuing covenant with the Jewish people plays into this.)

Random Thoughts: Oddballs at the TOP

One of the constants of life in the Washington area, along with death, taxes, and traffic, is WTOP radio. From its “glass-enclosed nerve center” near Capitol Hill, WTOP broadcasts its all-news/talk format on four radio frequencies and the Internet; it’s best-known for its traffic reports every ten minutes on the 8s, around the clock.

Compared to your average American news/talk station, though, WTOP is a bit odd. One of the first jarring features is the commercial distribution. Sure, you get the usual car dealers and department stores. But solidly in third place year-round (and occasionally moving up to second) are political-interest commercials targeted specifically at members of Congress. Yes, you read that right: the number-one radio station in the Washington area, with advertising rates that match its huge, high-end listenership, is a lobbying tool. From defense contractors ostentatiously mentioning how many jobs the latest fighter project will offer in Utah, Kansas or Georgia, to teachers’ unions sponsoring anti-No Child Left Behind ads, WTOP delivers enough politics on a day-to-day basis to, as Everything2.com writer Roninspoon once described his Army orders, “make a libertarian choke on his civil rights.” If Washington is really just a big company town, WTOP is the newsletter distributed on racks outside the office door, editorially independent, yet omnipresent and sometimes even officially acknowledged.

The second facet, which you only catch after listening to it regularly for weeks (as I have since I was reassigned to a project in Alexandria, requiring me to drive the Beltway every day), is the subtly bizarre/geeky — and sometimes off-color — humor. James Lileks once called Washington the Hollywood of the high-school debate set, and nowhere have I seen this characteristic more clearly than in the off-topic banter between the morning hosts on WTOP. All-news radio is usually a sharp, serious counterpoint to the scripted wackiness of the average mid-’00s FM morning show; WTOP takes that somber tone on first listen, until a few weeks later you’re driving along the Beltway, the anchors segue from one story to the next, and your jaw drops in wonder at what they just said in passing. Then you start noticing those happenings more regularly.

Washington is a curious place, something I’m noticing much more as I get better-experienced in the area. I suppose it only makes sense that its top radio station would reflect that quirkiness.

Media Market Mythology: A Look Back

While surfing in the wake of Virginia Tech’s men’s basketball wins over Miami and Duke last week, I came across a late January article by Dave of Dave Sez, noting that Boston College’s 29 January game against Villanova was only BC’s second men’s basketball sellout of the year — despite being undefeated at the time — and only its second televised game as well.

Their second sellout of the season in an arena that holds just 8,606? In a city the size of Boston (over 5 million people)? That’s disgraceful.

The ACC suits fell in love with the idea of getting the Boston TV market, but they failed to recognize that no one there cares about BC.

Exactly right. This is why Virginia Tech fans used to go absolutely bonkers hearing about ACC expansion plans, based on media markets, that didn’t include the Hokies — whether they involved BC, Syracuse, or anybody else in the Northeast corridor. We’d been to those cities, played those teams, and knew full well how much people in the Northeast, outside of Connecticut and western Pennsylvania¹, cared about college sports anyway: not bloody much.

The Big East was built on televsion markets: New York, Boston, Philadelphia. The SEC is located in such media strongholds as Gainesville-Ocala, Knoxville, and Birmingham-Tuscaloosa. Yet somehow the SEC is the most profitable conference in the NCAA, while the Big East couldn’t defend itself against the raiding of its two top football schools and a founding member of the conference over the summer of 2003.

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