UVA Athletics, for the 12th straight year, finished in the Top 25 of the Directors’ Cup, the measure of across-the-board athletics success.
Good news.
But here’s the, for UVA sports fans, scary news. Look who’s nipping at your heels.
Virginia Tech was a program-best 28th this year.
For perspective, Tech was 90th in the first-ever Directors’ Cup rankings, way back in 1994, and fell to 129th in 1995.
Since joining the ACC, Virginia Tech has not finished lower than 58th, and that was in the school’s first year in the conference, in 2004-2005.
The Tech athletics program’s best years before this year had been 2011-2012 and 2014-2015, with 35th-place finishes.
And now, 28th.
More perspective: UVA hasn’t finished outside the top 30, with a program-best third-place finish in 2009-2010, and a fourth-place finish in 2013-2014.
But after three straight years in the top 10, the program dropped to 19th in 2016-2017 and then the 21st-place finish in 2017-2018.
For all the talk with respect to football about using Virginia Tech as a measuring stick, since Tech football has been so good for so long, Virginia Tech is clearly using UVA as a measuring stick for across-the-board success.
Tech AD Whit Babcock has set the sights higher and wider than his predecessors, building in men’s basketball (hiring Buzz Williams), women’s basketball (stealing Kenny Brooks from JMU), baseball (hiring John Szefc away from Maryland), and not doing a bad job in replacing Frank Beamer (Justin Fuente has gone 19-8 in his first two seasons in Blacksburg).
UVA sports fans console themselves after the annual loss in the football game with the well, you win football, but we win everything else old saw.
That sound you hear is your angst, amplified.
Column by Chris Graham
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