Nice article about VT for anyone interested:
The hills have eyes . . . on No. 1
By GARY SHELTON
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 14, 1999
BLACKSBURG, Va. -- If you joined the story in progress, you found
the hero in trouble. There was pressure to his left, pain to his
right. Michael Vick stood in the pocket, his feet pumping in place.
The pocket was collapsing, so he floated to his right, where he
promptly dropped the ball. Whatever brand of trouble you can identify,
Vick seemed to have caught his limit. But the ball bounded upward
again, because this year, the ball alwaysbounds upward for Virginia
Tech, and Vick caught it. He made a U-turn and circled to his left,
deep behind the line. Halfway across the field, he threw the ball to
tight end Browning Wynn for a 15-yard gain. It was a magnificent play,
one that blended fortune and ability and turned a train wreck into a
first down. Again. Right then, in the middle of the third quarter of a
still-close game, you knew. The best story in college football was
going to continue for another chapter.
Nine games in, and Virginia Tech is still standing. And what, I ask
you, is wrong with that? The problem with those who say college
football has gone straight to the dickens, and that there is no
excellence to be found, is this: Those people are looking in the wrong
places. Here is your Team to Save the Season. Here are the eminently
likable Virginia Tech Hokies. What more do you want in a good story? A
team from nowhere. An old coach. A young quarterback. Underdogs and
overachievers. Mountains in the background. A cannon called Skipper. A
mascot in a turkey suit, for goodness' sake!
The trouble with all of this is that, when it comes to college
football,we don't want to believe in storybook champions. We look for
this season's great teams by sorting through a list of last season's
great teams, which were handed down from the season before.
Anyone else is considered a pretender. And so when excellence abandons
Knoxville and South Bend, State College and Tuscaloosa, we don't know
quite what to make of it. When it comes only sporadically to
Tallahassee, when it hasn't been spotted in weeks in Gainesville, the
temptation is to pronounce this a subpar season and forget about it.
But if you want excellence from this season, you have to look a
little harder to find it. You leave Troutville and go 40 miles south,
then you hang a left at Christianburg. You travel to the New River
Valley,past rolling hills and foliage so brightly purple and gold you
want to check the trees for extension cords. You go to a plateau
between the Allegheny and the Blue Ridge Mountains, to this jewel of a
college justup the hill from the cow pasture, just a few miles from
the Gobblestown Tavern, and there you are.
So why not Virginia Tech?
And why not now? If ever there were a reason to consider the Hokies,
you can find it today in the echoes of their 43-10 victory over Miami.
Virginia Tech spotted the Hurricanes a 10-point lead, then spent the
rest of the night running wind sprints toward the end zone. Granted,
the Hurricanes are another program where excellence has moved on, and
they seem as self-destructive as they do talented, but Miami maintains
enough of a rep to allow you to believe the Hokies have finally beaten
a team worth talking about. After all, both Penn State and FSU
struggled mightily to beat Miami.
Who is the BCS going to try to vault over Virginia Tech now that
Tennessee and Penn State have lost again? Nebraska? The winner
and loser of this week's Florida-FSU game? Who? And furthermore, why?
It isn't as if Virginia Tech hasn't earned your respect. For one
thing, Blacksburg doesn't even have a Dillard's.
This is the team nobody knows, but one everybody should. How can
America help but fall in love with this team? Did you see Vick,
darting between the Hurricanes, making big plays, limping off, coming
back and making big plays again? Did you see Corey Moore and his
friends keep knockingdown UM quarterback Kenny Kelly? This team plays
on a high wire, always pushing for big plays with its blitzes on
defense, with the way it spreads the ball around on offense. They're
fun. They're fresh. And they're new. Aren't those supposed to be good
things? Answer: Not usually. The polls are such creatures of
reputations, it is a slow process for a program to shed its
second-citizen status. We still tend to think of Blacksburg as halfway
between Mayberry and Pleasantville, and of Virginia Tech as halfway
between a legit powerand, say, Marshall.
If heaven had wanted Virginia Tech to be a power, wouldn't it have
placed it in Florida with the rest of them? It is partly because of
its lack of past excellence and partly because of its schedule that
Virginia Tech has been slow to gain acceptance in the polls.
And most years, they'd have a point. It isn't as if Virginia Tech
scheduled itself into a championship debate, not with James
Madison and Alabama-Birmingham as opponents. (Poor Virginia Tech, it
should be noted, has never gotten the hang of this scheduling stuff.
Consider that when the school started football, 106 years ago, four of
its first eight opponents were St. Albans College. One imagines the
rivalry was staggering.)But this isn't most years. We haven't had a
team proclaim itself as something special. Why keep looking around
the Hokies to find one? Why not buy into the idea of someone
different making a run? How good is Virginia Tech? To be honest, we
still don't know. But we also don't know if anyone is any better.
The best part of this season will be finding out. |
