Virginia finally broke its long losing streak to Virginia Tech in 2019. It had almost come to an end a year earlier because of Joey Blount.
Blount stripped the ball from Steven Peoples at the end of a 19-yard red zone run inside of two minutes to go, Virginia up a touchdown, and for a moment in time, the ball was on the turf, in the Hokies end zone, surrounded by Cavaliers.
Hezekiah Grimsley ended up with the ball, giving Tech a TD, sending the game to OT, where the Hokies would win after a field goal and a Bryce Perkins fumble.
The loss may have been the most painful for either side in the 102 meetings in the series, though the 2020 loss for UVA, a 33-15 beatdown in Blacksburg, was painful in its own way.
Virginia is a seven-point favorite heading into the 2021 matchup, but the old saying has it that you can throw the records, betting lines, the rest, out the door when two rivals get together.
The challenge on both sides: just playing your game.
“The advice I would give the younger guys would be, it’s very emotional, an emotion-filled game, but it’s going to be, who’s disciplined?” said Blount, a super senior, who will be playing his last game in Scott Stadium on Saturday. “Everyone’s going to be fired up. The fans are going to be fired up, the whole stadium is going to be fired up. But we’ve got to stay disciplined within our scheme. Special teams has got to be better. We’ve got to do all those things right. Because when we have matchups like these, it’s going to come down to a few key plays, those critical moments.
“We talk about three to five plays a game. We want to make sure that whenever those plays come, either it’s the beginning, middle or end, that we’re giving ourselves the best opportunity. So, emotion, emotional penalties, you know, unnecessary roughness, late hits, jumping off sides, little things like that, we can really fix ourselves, controlling the controllables.”
Both teams are coming in a bit wounded. Virginia got out to a 6-2 start, but has lost three straight, including last weekend’s 48-38 loss at Pitt that eliminated the ‘Hoos from the ACC Coastal Division race.
Tech, 5-6 this season lost 38-26 at Miami on Saturday, four days after coach Justin Fuente and the athletics department at Virginia Tech mutually agreed that it was best that he move on.
Even with the teams hovering on either side of the .500 mark, there’s obviously a lot to play for – Virginia, a second win in three years over its rival, after snapping the 15-game losing streak in the series; Virginia Tech, another win over the rival, a .500 season, a jumpstart into the future, whatever that future will be.
And then there’s this: Bronco Mendenhall has been referring to the game as the “state championship.”
“Winning in the Coastal certainly matters,” Mendenhall told reporters on Monday. “The conference is regional, and so just like we want to be very good at home, and then you kind of expand from there, the next step, and we’ve played really well at home at least over my time here at UVA, you want to expand that to the next circle out, which would be the state. You want to expand that to the next circle out, which was the Coastal. You want to expand that to the next circle out, which is the ACC, and that’s how programs are built and sustained and move forward. I like to just look at it broad term, with a broad lens, and I think that’s where the relevance is.”
Yeah, a lot of words there.
For Blount, he had to learn the importance of the rivalry game upon arriving on Grounds.
“You know, coming as a first-year, I didn’t really know much about it. Since I’m from Georgia, I really didn’t understand the rivalry. But being a part of the program now for five years, and, you know, seeing the growth, where we started off, and what we’ve done so far, in this five-year matchup that I’ve been a part of, it just really has become part of my journey here at UVA, and one thing that, you know, I want to make sure that I leave a good legacy behind,” Blount said.
It helps that the Virginia side finally got the monkey off its back in 2019. It had been so long that there weren’t many people around even on the periphery of the football program that knew what it felt like to beat Virginia Tech.
“Once you set a goal to do something, there’s that feeling that once you accomplish it that you can, you know, be content in your heart, like, I did that, like, we did that, that was a goal we set, we went and followed through with it, and doing that in 2019, that was our goal all year, like, beat Tech, beat Tech. And to go ahead and do that just meant a lot going forward for like the program, like I keep saying, but just kind of proving that to yourself as possible,” Blount said. “For so long, that was kind of in the mindset of a lot of, like, UVA players or fans, coaches, that like, how are you going to be Virginia Tech? And I mean, doing it, like, it proves to everyone that it’s possible, like, they’ve got a crown on their head, you can take the crown off whenever you want. And it just kind of really depends on how we, you know, attacked this week.
“I played in a game where we went into the week super prepared, and we won the game. I’ve also been on a team where we’ve been haven’t been as prepared and lost the game, so, really, figuring out what we need to do and holding everyone to a high expectation,” Blount said.
Story by Chris Graham
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