Tech Sports Blog

I’m not gonna lie. I’m not a big fan of predictions of events that more than a week or two away. It’s pretty much impossible to figure out how a team is going to play more than a few weeks down the road. I always find it funny how folks will tout their correct predictions as if they were Nostradamus, but they don’t mention that they’re wrong more often than they are right.

That said, I will attempt to predict the remainder of the basketball regular season for Virginia Tech, as well as next year’s football regular season. I fully admit that I am not a so-called expert, and these are just my gut feelings.

First off the remaining basketball games:

I know what you’re thinking: This guy is nuts! We’re going to lose to Miami at home and beat UVA on the road on their senior night?!?! I admit, that is a crazy prediction, but I have a method to my madness. I think Hokies are going to drop one at home that they should win, and they’re going to win one on the road that they should lose. I also think they have a shot at winning at BC on Saturday, but I just think we’ll be due to come back down to earth.

Now, the 2007 football season:

Again, you’re probably thinking that I’m smoking something. Yes, I’m predicting a win over LSU and a loss to UVA. I think we have a good chance at winning at LSU because most people are going expect us to lose that game. Anyone remember our trips to Clemson in 1998 and Texas A&M in 2002? Those were supposed to be road losses for us.

Also, I’ve got the feeling that two trends end next year: Our losing streak to FSU and our winning streak over UVA. No matter how good or bad our team is next year, Saturday, 10 November 2007, will be one of those days where the Hokie Nation wills the football team to victory. I cannot wait for the day the Seminoles come to Lane. And after we beat Florida State and Miami in consecutive weeks, the Hoos will bring us back down to earth. I hope I’m wrong on that one.

That said, who knows what’s going to happen in the next 7 months. These predictions are meaningless.

Most Hokies think Virginia Tech proved its worth to the ACC the first year the Hokies were in the conference. In 2004 and 2005, the football team won the conference and the basketball team finished a surprising 4th place in the regular season standings. Those Hokies who believe we proved our worth that year as members of the Atlanta Coast Conference wouldn’t be wrong. While we may have already proved our worth, I believe we have truly become a peer in the eyes of the rest of the ACC, thanks to the success the men’s basketball team has enjoyed thus far.

The men’s basketball team presently sits alone at the top of the standings at 6-1. They have beaten Duke in Cameron, previously #1 North Carolina, and Maryland on an icy night. Those teams have won 3 of the last 6 national championships. With Sunday afternoon’s win over Georgia Tech, the Hokies are now 3-1 on the road in the ACC. This team has the confidence that they can play with anyone in the nation, and that they can go to an opponent’s home court and bring home a win. That’s a very dangerous combination.

It is most unreal that 4 more wins should get us into the big dance. I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but we have 9 games remaining on our schedule, 5 of which are at home. Assuming the team keeps playing the way they are now, all 9 of the games are winnable. (Although @UNC might be stretch.) What is also impressive at this point is that the team doesn’t seem to be flying too high. I believe that Seth Greenberg has them playing one game at a time, which is very important in the perilous ACC schedule. Anyone can bring you down on any given night, so you must bring your A game every time you step out on the court. The Hokies have been doing that as of late, as well. Tech is 7-1 since the embarrassing loss at Marshall.

We’re almost halfway through the conference season, and Virginia Tech has beaten all of the traditional ACC powers. The team’s goal of getting a bid to the NCAA tournament is in sight. However, the fact of the matter is that we’re not playing for a tournament bid now – we’re playing for our seed in the tournament.

…

A few random thoughts to close out this post …

• Georgia Tech was held to 37% from the floor.
• The Hokies are allowing 62.4 points a game – that’s 2nd best in the ACC
• Zabian Dowdell scored 23 points against the Yellow Jackets. I think he deserves to be 1st team All-ACC at the end of the season.
• Lots of teams in the top 25 had a rough week. I bet the Hokies move up to 18th.
• According to RealTimeRPI.com, Tech’s RPI is now 20. That’s presently 3rd best in the ACC behind UNC (2) and Duke (5)

Per TheACC.com, here is VT’s schedule for next season:

1 Sep - East Carolina
8 Sep – at LSU
15 Sep – Ohio University
22 Sept – William & Mary
29 Sept – North Carolina
6 Oct – at Clemson
13 Oct – at Duke
20 Oct – Open
25 Oct – Boston College (Thursday)
1 Nov – at Georgia Tech (Thursday)
10 Nov – Florida State
17 Nov – Miami
24 Nov – at Virginia

Next November is gonna be rough.

Clark Ruhland, Associate Sports Editor at the Collegiate Times wrote an open letter to Jim Weaver regarding the attendance of men’s basketball games. It is well written, and he makes some great points. Check it out here: CollegiateTimes.com – An open letter to Tech Director of Athletics, Jim Weaver.

I just sent in a response to the sports editor email address at the Collegiate Times. I agree with much of what Mr. Ruhland says, but I think before the floodgates are opened up to the students, I think other members of the Hokie Club should be taken care of first. There are many alumni who give enough for tickets to football, but not enough for basketball, who would love to get season tickets to basketball. I am one of these alumni. I had to get my season tickets for this year through a friend who has a very high priority in the Hokie Club.

At any rate, here is my response:

In response to Mr. Ruhland’s letter to Athletic Director Jim Weaver, I wanted to give the CT an alum’s view. I was a freshman in the fall of 1997, and I graduated in 2003 in Computer Engineering. The last few years I was in Blacksburg I worked for the school full time while taking classes part time. I bleed Orange & Maroon.

Sunday afternoon I made the trek from Charlottesville (yes, I presently live in Hoo’ville) to Blacksburg in the snow, sleet, and freezing rain. It took me nearly 4 hours. I thought the decision to open up the games to students was absolutely brilliant, and the showing made by the students made the drive worth it – the fact that we won in OT made it even better.

I agree that something must be done with all of the no shows by season ticket holders. However, before we start opening the doors to the students, the Athletic Department and the Ticket Office need to take care of more of the Hokie Club. I am a member of the Hokie Club, and I am a season ticket holder for football. However, I have too low a priority to get season tickets for basketball. I had to buy this year’s season tickets from a Hokie Club member who was higher up on the totem pole.

The fact of the matter is that many Hokie Club members buy basketball season tickets so they can go to a few of the good ACC games, and so that they have these season tickets when they retire. It’s basically a placeholder for them. The ticket office needs to give the option to those folks to retain the right to buy season tickets in the future while allowing the members of the Hokie Club who will actually show up for games the ability to buy those tickets in the present.

That said, I would also love to see more students at the games. They bring so much energy. However, the students need to prove that Sunday night was not a fluke. Other than the UNC game, I have yet to see the student sections full to the brim. (I admit, I have yet to see Cassell full to the brim this season.)

Also, everyone needs to keep in mind that this is new territory for the Athletic Department. During my years in Blacksburg there was very little interest in basketball. The good thing is that Seth Greenberg is actively working with the Athletic Department to maximize attendance.***

Finally, I would like to say Thank You to all of the students who attended Sunday night’s game. I had an absolute blast, and I hope that kind of environment will be experienced again at Cassell. You made Sunday afternoon’s treacherous drive, as well as Monday’s pre-dawn return trip, worth every minute.

Regards,

Vince

*** See TSL’s Hokie Hotline notes:
http://subscr.techsideline.com/news_archive/showArticle-2631.php

“The administration is having some conversations about student attendance. Greenberg thinks he has a plan that makes sense, and he will present it to Jim Weaver later in the week.”

I noticed a couple of interesting tidbits over at FanBlogs.com.

First off, according to this Florida Times-Union article, the ACC is considering its options for the ACC Championship Game. They can either renew the current contract for another two years, tweak the contract to renew it for only one year, or they can bail out of Jacksonville altogether. Based on the article, I get the vibe that the ACC is going to go with the 1-year option and reassess after next season. Personally, I hope they bail out of Jacksonville. The fact that the loser of the ACCCG has ended up in the Gator Bowl in each of the first two seasons the game has existed really hurts both the championship game and the Gator Bowl. Nobody wants a return trip to Jacksonville after losing the conference championship game. I would love to see the game in Charlotte, purely for geographic reasons. Plus the bowl game in Charlotte is a lower tier bowl, so the loser of the ACCCG will never end up there.

We’re still waiting for the ACC to release it’s schedule for the 2007 football season. Apparently there’s an issue with the schedule of one of the schools, and they are waiting for that to get straightened out so everyone’s schedule will be made public at the same time. However, if you checkout the bottom of this independentmail.com article, Clemson will not be playing any Thursday night games this year. According to Jim Weaver, on a previous Hokie Hotline, Tech is likely to play two games on Thursday night – one at home and one on the road – with Boston College, Georgia Tech, and Clemson as likely candidates. BC is the only home game of the bunch, so that’s got to be one Thursday night game. With Clemson out of the mix, Georgia Tech has to be the other.

As a side note, my airfare and hotel accommodations have been booked for Baton Rouge, the weekend of September 8th. All I’ll need is tickets to the LSU game!

Well, I was dumb on Sunday afternoon. With a Winter Weather Advisory posted for Charlottesville (yes, I live in Hoo’ville) and the surrounding area, as well as an Ice Storm Warning for the New River and Roanoke Valleys, I drove to Blacksburg Sunday afternoon in the middle of a winter storm. It wasn’t a blizzard, and it turned out not to be a major ice event, but it still took me about 3 and a half hours to make what is normally a 2 hour drive. I-81 near Roanoke was an absolute mess. There’s nothing like barely doing 40mph in 4WD on the interstate and having tractor trailers and SUVs blow by you as if you were standing still. I caravaned with my friend Kevin (with whom I go to games) and his wife, except they started near Newport News and met me in Charlottesville. I think they were on the road for 8 hours. The prudent action would have been to not go to Blacksburg for Sunday night’s game versus the University of Maryland. In fact, I was regretting the decision to head down when I arrived at Kevin’s house with less than one hour until tip-off.

However, that feeling of regret began to wash away as we walked in to Cassell’s west entrance and heard the starting lineup. We began to hear the crowd, and it sounded pretty good. Then, as if they waited for us to take our seats, Enter Sandman was blaring over the PA system as we walked out of the Section 16 tunnel, and we got a taste of what was in store for the night. Cassell, while maybe 85% full, was rocking! Because of the inclement weather and the likelihood of many no-shows, the Athletic Department decided earlier in the day to allow students in for free, even if they didn’t have a ticket. It was a brilliant move. My guess is that there were 7000 students in the crowd, and every one of them were yelling and bouncing prior to tip-off. Kevin and I took our seats just moments before tip-off, and I was already glad I made the trek to Blacksburg.

With the exception of the last 6 minutes of regulation, when Tech’s offense went stagnant, the game went fairly well. Maryland played much better than they did at Virginia last week, but the Hokies played hard the entire game with the hordes of screaming students willing them on. I have never experienced an environment for a basketball game like that before Sunday night. It was a home court advantage like I have never seen. Good thing I’m like the postal service, otherwise I would’ve missed it.

So, I picked up a Nintento Wii last week, and it instantly turned me into a slacker. I’m not much into gaming anymore – I used to enjoy first person shooters on my PC when I was at Tech, but I never got into console gaming. However, Nintendo definitely got it right with the Wii. It is very innovative, and I think it’s something people of all ages would enjoy playing. The Wii already has me hooked.

Ok, enough about the Wii. I wanted to do a quick braindump after the layoff.

• Last Wednesday’s loss to Florida State shouldn’t have been a surprise to fans of Hokie basketball. The team had came off the biggest week of the program’s history, and Florida State was winless in the ACC going into the game. Couple those facts with the fact that it was a road game for us, the outlook for victory was not good. I had a bad feeling going into that game, and the result was not surprising. The statistic of the game: Florida State made 31 of 34 free throws.
• Uhm, what the heck is going on with Michael Vick? First they say he was carrying drugs in a fake Aquafina bottle at security at the Miami airport, and no doubt he gets an earful from the Falcons owner. Then SNL does an amusing skit about it. Now, they say there’s no evidence the bottle contained drugs.
• Major props to the Virginia Tech athletic department for letting in students for free to yesterday’s Maryland game (more on the game later). That was the best basketball environment I have ever experienced. Last night, the best home court advantage in the nation was Cassell Coliseum. Thank you, students, for showing up. That was awesome.
• Jamon Gordon’s post-game interview with Mike Burnop was hysterical. His nose got busted up in the game, and he said he looks like Doug from Nic@Nite. He said he needs to get it fixed, or all of his ladies are going to leave him. He also guaranteed a win at Miami on Tuesday. I wasn’t very keen on that, as that is bulletin board material for the other team, but I know he was just caught up in the moment.

That’s it for now. I hope to have something about the Maryland game up soon.

I am not a fan of Facebook or MySpace. People put way too much information in their profiles, and then they forget that they made their profiles publicly available. I think they should just rename MySpace to MyStalker. That said, I will admit it, I have a MySpace profile and Facebook profile. (However, if you find them, you’ll find very little information.) Why? A few friends dig those social networking sites, so I just gave in and “joined the club”.

This afternoon I had a few friends added to Facebook. Since I hadn’t been on Facebook in awhile, I started poking around and being generally nosy. I noticed that someone created a profile for Lane Stadium in Facebook. I was immediately amused. Then I do some more poking around. No one created a profile for Cassell Coliseum!!! This clearly had to be rectified.

So now there’s a Facebook profile for the Cassell. Just search for cassell coliseum in the Virginia Tech network and add it as a friend!

About midway through the second half of Virginia Tech’s win over North Carolina on Saturday, I turned to my buddy Kevin and said something to the effect, “If we pull this off, this game will make our season tickets worth it.” Before the season started Kevin and I bought a pair of season tickets from my brother-in-law’s aunt and uncle. They are big time Hokie Club donors, and they were able to get extra season tickets. We were a little hesitant to pull the trigger, because it’s pretty easy to get tickets to most games. However, we probably would have paid through the nose for 2 tickets to the UNC game on Saturday.

Even though it made sense monetarily to purchase those season tickets in light of the UNC, I wasn’t really referring to that when I made the comment to Kevin. I was referring to the fact that the UNC win will be one of those games that everyone who was there will proudly remember their attendance. For older fans of Hokie basketball, they will remember this win along with our win in 1983 over #1 Memphis State, as well as our 1973 NIT Championship. For younger fans of Hokie hoops, this is the marquee win of our generation. Presently 27 years old – I was a freshmen in the fall of 1997 – I am too young a Hokie to know anything about men’s basketball prior to football’s reign over Blacksburg, so I am included in the latter group. That said, I firmly believe this win is the greatest in VT basketball history. There is one simple reason I believe this: the victory over then #5 Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium the week before. Duke and North Carolina are considered to be two of the most elite programs in Division I basketball. They are ACC basketball.

Who would’ve thunk it? Beating Duke and UNC, both ranked in the top 5, within 8 days of each other. These are the kinds of wins that programs build on. In the right hands, these wins are used to take programs to the next level. Will Seth Greenburg build this program into a perennial tournament team? I don’t know, but the future certainly seems bright.

Regardless of what happens down the road, I can now amend my “I was there” list:

• The overtime win over Miami in football in 1998.
• The 1998 homecoming loss that didn’t happen.
• Almost every home football game in 1999 – notable wins: Syracuse, Miami, Boston College
• The 2000 Sugar Bowl loss to Florida State.
• The Ernest Wilford 2-point conversion drop in the loss to #1 Miami in 2001.
• The downtown “riot” the night before the LSU game in 2002, as well as the our win over LSU at Lane Stadium the day after.
• The win in 2003 over then #2 Miami.
• Our loss to #1 Southern California at FedEx field in 2004, the win at Lane over then #6 West Virginia, the crazy 4th quarter comeback at Georgia Tech, and the loss to #3 Auburn in the 2005 Sugar Bowl.
• And finally, I can add a basketball game to this list: our win over then #1 North Carolina in Cassell Coliseum in 2007.

• There’s an excellent recap of Saturday’s win over Duke over at HokiesFullCourt.com. Read it during your next coffee break.
• At the time of this writing, the Hokies are ranked 34 according to RealTimeRPI.com. This means that the win over Duke has nullified the loss to Marshall.
• Which VT basketball team will show up in Greensboro on Wednesday? The one that played Marshall? Or the one that played Duke? Smashed between Duke & UNC, this has all of the markings of a trap game.
• My bowl picks for this year are not very good. 17-14 with one game left. At least I’m over .500.
• I can’t make up my mind on what’s going to happen in tonight’s BCS championship game between Ohio State and Florida. After the regular season, I thought Ohio State would destroy Florida. Recently I began thinking that Ohio State would win, but Florida would keep it close. I think I’ve been letting the media get in my head. I’m going back to my initial feelings – Ohio State will win by at least 10 points.
• Regardless of your feelings about Ohio State, you have to respect Jim Tressel. The man won a number of national championships at Youngstown State, and he’s 4-0 in bowl games at Ohio State. Three of those bowls were BCS bowls. Tressel is a great big-game coach.
• By now I’m sure you’ve heard that Louisville’s Bobby Petrino is going to be the next head coach of the Atlanta Falcons. Petrino is certainly an interesting hire. He is an offensive-minded coach who has built up Louisville’s program into a BCS contender. I’ve heard there is still a question of whether or not the Falcons will keep Michael Vick. In my opinion, they keep him. I think Petrino is looking forward to building an offense around Vick (rather than making Vick run his offense).
• Will Bobby Petrino buck the current trend of college coaches who bust in the NFL? (eg: Steve Spurrier, Butch Davis, Nick Saban)

Update: Here are some YouTube videos of highlights of some of the recent VT-Duke basketball games:

• ESPN highlights of Virginia Tech’s win over Duke in 2004: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb52JSGReHM
• Dockery’s miracle 3-pointer to beat Tech in 2005: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuQ-dlhyfNc
• ESPN’s College GameDay highlights of VT’s recent win over Duke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPTSyI11U30
• Deron Washington hurdles Greg Paulus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSWimbJ0OY