Week 13 Recap: That’s a Wrap ’til Bowl Season

Posted on by bigbeergame

It’s not often that taking a 10-0 lead early in the 3rd quarter feels like an insurmountable lead, but it sure felt that way on Friday night.  And as it turns out, that would be the way the game ended.  It was a gutsy, defensively dominant, and yes, boring effort from the Hokies.  And I loved every minute of it.

The Hokies were missing a ton of players, and many other key contributors were banged up.  On defense, three players (DE Emmanuel Belmar, DE Houshoun Gaines, FS Khalil Ladler) were making their first career starts, and a 4th (Whip Deon Newsome) was making just his second start.  On offense, VT got RB Peoples and WR Carroll back in limited roles, but WR Sean Savoy was unable to make the trip, and RB McMillian was once again very limited.  So lots of seldom used players had to step up, and they did.  Beleaguered LT Parker Osterloh was replaced at times by r-SO Deandre Plantin, who played very well.  That bodes well for the bowl game and for next season.  Ladler had a great game in his first start at FS.  Ditto for Gaines at DE.  and WR Hezekiah Grimsley, who had just 2 catches all year heading into this game, stepped into the starting role vacated by Savoy and led the team with 5 catches for 56 yards.  McClease and Peoples carried the load at RB, combining for 142 yards on the ground.  The Hokies did a great job of chewing up the clock after taking the aforementioned 10-0 lead, with the final result being that VT out time-of-possessioned uva in the 2nd half by an incredible 22:49 to 7:11 margin.  And that’s your BDG Sneaky Stat of the Week ™.

Also, I should point out that the Hokies went for it on 4th down twice in this game (both in borderline scoring range inside the uva 40), and I agreed with the decision both times (unlike most of the last 6 times).  I have witnesses.  They also converted both times, which makes it easier to not second guess haha.  And the second conversion got us our annual “feel shame, supposed 5-star Quin Blanding of uva, whom we treat as our own personal bitch every year” moment.  Eric Kumah not so politely asked Blanding to have a seat.  I could watch this all day.

As usual, Blanding acts like a dick after getting posterized.  He can go eat a bag of dicks.  Him and Andrew Brown as well.  Also, I love the fact that S&C coach Ben Hilgart is right in the forefront of both scrums, flexing his muscles and maintaining order.

Recap of our conference mates/season opponents in week 13

A solid 3-1 performance by the ACC out of conference this week, as all 3 favorites won their matchups (Clem 34-10 over USC-e, FSU 38-22 over UF, and Louisville 44-17 over Kentucky), and the lone underdog lost as expected (GT 7-38 against UGA).  That pushed the ACCs overall record to 38-15 OOC, 9-13 against P5.  One last OOC game this week, as FSU and ULM agreed to make up their game from earlier in the year once it became obvious that neither team was going to be participating in their conference championship games this week.  FSU needs the extra win to become bowl eligible.

Our regular season opponents went 4-7 on the week, to wrap up the season at a middling 75-66 overall.  The 4 OOC foes went 0-3 (Delaware missed the FSC playoffs, so their season is over), ending up with a cumulative record of 22-25.  Overall, VT played just 6 bowl eligible teams this year, and just 4 teams with winning records heading into bowl season.  Not exactly the cream of the crop on a week-by-week basis…though they DID, in fact, play the cream of the crop in Miami and Clemson.

Coming Up

 

A bowl game against somebody, somewhere.  There doesn’t seem to be much consensus as to where VT will end up, though it looks like it will be one of the ACC “tier 1” bowls.  The ACC’s bowl selection process is rather convoluted, and you can read more about it here, but basically it boils down to:

  1.  Playoffs
  2. Orange Bowl (in Miami)
  3. Citrus Bowl (Orlando) – conditional
  4. Camping World Bowl (Orlando)
  5. “Tier 1” bowls (Charlotte, El Paso, New York, Jacksonville/Nashville)
  6. “Tier 2” bowls (Annapolis, Shreveport, Detroit, Birmingham/Tampa) – VT cannot fall this low in the pecking order due to their record.

I had typed up lots of words last night about where the Hokies might end up, but then Andy Bitter of the Roanoke times posted this article, which outlines things very nicely.  The TL;DR version is that the most likely bowl destination is the TaxSlayer (formerly Gator) bowl in Jacksonville on Saturday December 30th at noon.  Likely opponents include aTm, Miss. State, South Carolina, and Kentucky.  Any of those would make me happy.  Playing in any of the other three “tier 1” bowls (Charlotte, El Paso, New York) would make me sad.  Nashville on Friday the 29th wouldn’t suck either.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

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