![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/vt_clemson_2026.jpg\")
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Yesterday was one of those satisfying days of sports where it felt like I was happy with a lot of the results of the games that were happening throughout the sporting world.\u00a0 I don\u2019t really have a horse in the World Series, but I\u2019m inclined to lean toward the Milwaukee Brewers, and it was exciting to see them overcome an early 0-4 deficit and win game 2, to take a pretty optimistic 2-0 series lead before going on the road.<\/span><\/p>\n The one result that wasn\u2019t quite what I had hoped for was the WNBA Finals game between Golden State and Atlanta and yes I am lowkey following the WNBA Finals for reasons beyond that it\u2019s an Atlanta team vying for a championship, and it\u2019s now a 2-2 series in a best of 7, that I am still hoping the Dream can pull off.<\/span><\/p>\n But the real meat of the day feast is still obvious college football, and objectively speaking, I have to say that this has been one of the most entertaining seasons ever, in the sense that it feels like every single weekend after the very uneventful week 1, has been riddled with upsets, there is no true team that seems like the obvious world-beating odds-on favorite to win the National Championship, and it seems like multiple top-5 or 10 schools are eating losses and the rankings are shuffling faster than item boxes in Mario Kart<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n This is probably the level of parity that the NCAA really was hoping would be the case with the NIL era where talent can transfer and shift at a more rapid pace and help level playing fields across the spectrum.\u00a0 In the few games that I do watch or catch a little bit of here and there, every time some player makes impact, commentators always seem to be pointing out where a guy used to play, and we\u2019re getting to a point where the majority of active players on teams good enough to be televised all have a history of having played for someone else prior to landing where they currently are.<\/span><\/p>\n As for this week\u2019s bloodbath, #2 Brigham Young, #7 Ole Miss, #8 Texas Tech, #11 Tennessee, #15 Iowa and #16 Southern California all took losses, with all of them except Ole Miss dropping to unranked opponents.\u00a0 Pretty shortly the CFB rankings will assume control over the AP top-25 like it does every year, but there\u2019s little reason to believe that things are going to change much, and that there\u2019s still going to be a notable shuffle in the top-10 much less the top-25 teams in the nation.<\/span><\/p>\n Adding to the sweetness on top, is #11 Tennessee\u2019s loss came against South Carolina, and having married into a South Carolina family, this is satisfying to watch for me as well, in addition to the fact that son of Frank, Shane Beamer is their coach, and frankly I just always enjoy seeing whenever Tennessee loses at anything because that\u2019s the power of hate<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n But the real reason of this post coming to fruition, and why the sports day was as glorious to me as it was, was because of the game of two unranked scrub schools, resulting in a victory that I\u2019d been hoping for, for nearly 20 years, with Virginia Tech defeating Clemson, 20-16<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n To most people, this was a background noise tier game between two schools that used to be noteworthy, but to me, this was the one game of the year that I had earmarked, and was basically my National Championship.\u00a0 More than the Commonwealth Cup against Virginia, more than the game against Georgia Tech that I always love to smear in the faces of the locals here in Atlanta.<\/span><\/p>\n Prior to yesterday, Virginia Tech hadn\u2019t beaten Clemson since 2007<\/a>, when Tyrod Taylor was a freshman quarterback.\u00a0 Tyrod Taylor has basically wrapped up a full-ass NFL career at this point, and his alma mater hadn\u2019t beaten the Tigers throughout that entire time.\u00a0 Dabo Swinney took the helm, and they\u2019ve had a revolving door of outstanding quarterbacks since then, with guys like Tajh Boyd, Deshaun Watson, and Trevor Lawrence to name a few, and they\u2019d been beating Tech like plantation owners.<\/span><\/p>\n It didn\u2019t matter if Tech had one of their uprising years like in 2011<\/a> or 2016<\/a>.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter if Tech had the supposed magic of College GameDay on their side, like they did in 2017<\/a>.\u00a0 Clemson would beat Tech in the regular season, as well as in the ACC Championships, and there was no team in the ACC that invoked more dread and a pit in the stomach than Clemson did.<\/span><\/p>\n I knew that this was a year in which the teams would collide again, but something did feel different.\u00a0 Clemson\u2019s football program was clearly on the decline, due to the rise of the NIL era starting to pick away at their talent pool, and the slow simmering of angst between their athletic program and Dabo Swinney.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Virginia Tech seemed to be brimming with optimism, with the arrival of coach James Franklin from Penn State, and the litany of talent that transferred to Blacksburg to follow him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Whereas the NIL era was designed to liberate talent hoarded at schools like Clemson, ironically the once-talent rich Virginia Tech was the kind of school meant to benefit from such migrations, and going into the season, a more casual supporter like me didn\u2019t know what to expect from the injection of new names and faces, as well as a new coach and whatever system he was trying to implement.<\/span><\/p>\n Obviously, the season started off with a bang, with Tech going 4-0, hanging 117 points on VMI and Old Dominion, before ramping up their difficulty with games against Maryland and Boston College.\u00a0 But then shades of old Tech began emerging, with their complete failure against Pitt, and perplexing loss to Cal, with their defense glaring as the program\u2019s biggest weakness.\u00a0 And after a win against Georgia Tech that was mildly satisfying to me, I didn\u2019t like that the box score revealed how hard they tried to throw the game.<\/span><\/p>\n So I had no idea what to expect this weekend going into Clemson.\u00a0 Clemson was clearly vulnerable and not dominating like they used to, and their lack of ranking was appropriate to their performance, but they were still Clemson and I still had a complex built over nearly two decades of losses to lead me to feel dread and apprehension about this game, even if this really were a truly different Virginia Tech team, that had shown some flashes of brilliances.<\/span><\/p>\n Naturally, as is the case with any game I truly care about, I didn\u2019t watch<\/a> a single second of the game.\u00a0 I actually went so far as to peace the fuck out as soon as South Carolina hit their game winning field goal against Tennessee, since ESPN switched to Tech\/Clemson pretty much immediately afterward, opting to get on the treadmill and watch Landman<\/em> instead of daring risk jinxing the Hokies with my accursed eyes.<\/span><\/p>\n I resisted temptation to check the score or even open the ESPN app to check other scores, because I have a favorite tag on Virginia Tech sports, it would inevitably flash up top, and I\u2019d have ruined it for sure, and opted to watch AAA wrestling and any other television to distract me from what I was really caring about.<\/span><\/p>\n And at around 11:10 pm, did I finally open the ESPN app, dreading seeing something like Clemson 34, Virginia Tech 24, and much to my surprise, Tech was not the name and logo in the light gray.\u00a0 20-16 Hokies; my eyes went wide, and I showed the phone to mythical wife.<\/span><\/p>\n Next came the box score; and it was typical Virginia Tech \u2013 lead early, the weak defense gives it all back and then some.\u00a0 But then came James Franklin\u2019s-led Virginia Tech, where the offense that isn\u2019t complete trash fights back, and with 1:44 left in the game, scores a go-ahead touchdown, with just little enough time left for them to actually be able to hold on and preserve the first Tech win against Clemson since 2000 fucking seven.<\/span><\/p>\n Needless to say, I was elated.\u00a0 I don\u2019t care that people may argue that this is on a downward swing for Clemson, and\/or that it\u2019s on an upward swing for Virginia Tech.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t seen this result since three cars ago, three jobs and a freelance career ago, and when I was still in my 20\u2019s.\u00a0 Fewer teams in CFB have given me a final boss feeling than Clemson has over my lifetime, and I\u2019ll take any win against them and treat it like a bowl victory any season.<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t care if they lose to Miami or Duke or Virginia later this season, this was the one game this season that I had earmarked as the one I wanted to see a W in more than any other, and with that succeeded, it really doesn\u2019t matter what else happens this season.\u00a0 Hopefully, it continues to grow the aura of the James Franklin era, but the season is already a success as far as I\u2019m concerned.<\/span><\/p>\n Best season ever.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday was one of those satisfying days of sports where it felt like I was happy with a lot of the results of the games that were happening throughout the sporting world.\u00a0 I don\u2019t really have a horse in the World Series, but I\u2019m inclined to lean toward the Milwaukee Brewers, and it was exciting … Continue reading Pretty much the greatest day in sports of the year<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,59,100,106,155,60,129,83,143,99,58,27],"class_list":["post-51622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-baseball","tag-basketball","tag-comparison","tag-football","tag-hokies","tag-ncaa","tag-nostalgia","tag-observations","tag-ohatlanta","tag-reminiscing","tag-sports","tag-virginia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51622"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51624,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51622\/revisions\/51624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}