It wasn’t the most artistic of victories for Virginia Tech. But the Hokies’ 10-0 shutout of Virginia in Charlottesville the day after Thanksgiving gave VT its 14th straight win over the Cavaliers. It’s the longest winning streak for either school in the 120-year history of the rivalry. And it’s further validation that Justin Fuente, like Frank Beamer before him, has established himself as the superior coach in this local battle.
Virginia Tech has only lost once to Virginia this century – a 35-21 setback to Jim Grobe’s UVa squad back in 2003. One has to go all the way back to the Eisenhower administration to find a similarly dominant period for Virginia Tech in its football rivarly with UVa.
Looking back
Starting with 1953, the first year of Eisenhower’s presidency, the Hokies won 12 out of 14 matchups with Virginia through 1966. The run included six straight victories over UVa from 1958 to 1963.
It would take another decade before Virginia finally won back-to-back games over Virginia Tech, which happened in 1978 and 1979. After VT won four more in a row over the Wahoos from 1980 to 1983, the tide began to turn in the rivalry in 1984. That was the year that George Welsh, in leading UVa to its first bowl game in school history, stunned the Hokies, 26-23, in Blacksburg.
Starting with its epic win in ’84, Virginia won nine of 15 contests with Virginia Tech until the Hokies put together its undefeated regular season in 1999. Since then VT has owned Virginia, beating their in-state rival 18 out of 19 times.
Virginia won the first eight matchups between the two schools from 1895 to 1904, marking UVa’s longest all-time winning streak in the series. But one has to go back three decades – to the period from 1987 to 1989, just as Beamer was getting going in Blacksburg – to find Virginia winning even three straight games over the Hokies.
Lack of hype
From a historical standpoint, this rivalry hasn’t been particularly relevant outside the confines of the state of Virginia. Virginia Tech’s football program has long surpassed UVa’s in terms of national relevance. And in terms of ACC positioning, VT’s games with Miami and Clemson were much more important this fall.
In the past, the Hokies’ games with the likes of Georgia Tech and North Carolina have typically loomed larger in the Coastal Division standings. The UVa-VT game is often important only in its timing, as the annual win over UVa has propelled Virginia Tech into the ACC Championship Game on multiple occasions.
For UVa and Virginia Tech fans of a certain age, this rivalry has never really been a rivalry at all.
You’d have to be in your twenties at a minimum to have any memory at all of a Virginia win in the series. To have any recollection of a time when the Wahoos dominated the rivalry, you’d have to be in your thirties, if not older. For younger fans, this matchup has served more as UVa’s annual bloodletting to its noisy neighbors to the southwest than any meaningful rivalry battle.
It would be helpful not only to the ACC, but also the state of Virginia, to see both the Cavaliers and Hokies relevant at the same time. It would bust a historic norm, as neither the Wahoos nor the Hokies have been national powerhouses simultaneously, save possibly a brief period in the 1990s.
Bronco Mendenhall has a job ahead of him not only to recruit on a level commensurate with Virginia Tech, but to shake the perception that the UVa football program is destined to be inferior to the Hokies. Above all, Mendendall needs to find a way to win this game at some point to demonstrate, as George Welsh did in 1984, that things are changing.