I think this one comes down to are you an 80s or a 90s Hoo. My friends who came in the 80’s to early 90s see UNC as the bigger game, but for those of us born in the 80’s and came of football fandom in the 90s the VT game is real and means a lot. I think @haney hit it. I’ve been a fan of the program since 89/90 ish and the Tech game has always been massive for me. Growing up in Nelson County is like being on the boarder of where the tide shifts away from UVa to Tech fans and there were plenty of bragging rights at stake.
I do think the rivalry has taken a massive hit from the UVa side due to it being non-competitive for the last 20 years. But look back at all of us storming the field in 03 under Groh and damn Bronco built his whole program and reputation around beating VT and arguably lost his reputation for blowing a game against them. Same for London.
If it’s not the biggest rivalry for the team I’m not sure what it is. UNC may be the oldest, but it’s never hit the same.
All of this comports with the narrative that the rivalry grew after Welsh made us good in the mid-80’s and then young Beamer got his players and fan base wanting to take us down in the late ‘80’s when Shawn Moore & Co took us to the top 10. The Hokies were still an Independent then in football prior to joining the Big East.
Prior to that time, UVA considered its rival to be UNC and didn’t give much thought to VT. UVA fans since late 80’s/early 90’s probably better feel the rivalry stoked by Beamer. VT may have felt differently before that but UVA didn’t care about that little school somewhere out in western Va. Prior to Welsh making us good, there really wasn’t much passion in the football program at all other than for tailgating.
I started following the Hoos in the early '80s. UNC wasn’t a big game. VT wasn’t a big game. There were no big games, in fact, because we were so terrible. We’d come to the games, get drunk, leave at halftime. The game itself was background noise.
Maybe Maryland was a rival, but only because we hated them. We didn’t think we had an actual chance to beat them.
Then Welsh came, and suddenly EVERY game was a big game, because we had a chance to win to every game, which hadn’t happened before. If you’ve been starving, your favorite food is any food.
I don’t think there were any great rivalries until the late '80s.
I agree that with football we didn’t really experience rivalry in the 70s and early 80s. Mostly in basketball that carried over to animosity with those rivals in football. I do remember beating UNC at Scott in 83 and students stormed the field. But that was the beginning of the Welsh era.
Welsh coached 19 years and had two losing seasons. Two! And that includes his first one, when he took over a team that had won a single game the year before.
But when he got Virginia to the No. 1 ranking in 1990, instead of seeing that as a remarkable achievement, fans started believing we should expect that every year. And they started turning against him.
Sounds awfully similar to what has happened with our basketball team.
Welsh retired at 67 and we named a street after him and put up a statue and we all remember him fondly. Seems pretty okay to me. This wasn’t some Greek tragedy. He was a very good football coach who we remember as a very good football coach. Even contemporaneously, the questions were more like, “hey, he’s really good, but could we be better?”
Of course, now we all know the answer – Ha ha, no.
You know I was a student then, and not very active on message boards, so as the 1999 season happened and we lost to Duke (which back then was a MASSIVE upset) and watched VT go to the championship game, and followed that up with a beyond mediocre 2000 season, I felt like most felt it was just “his time” after ~20 good years to hang up the whistle. And at the time Groh seemed like a slam dunk hire, especially once he got some momentum those early years behind Schaub and Hagans. Recruiting and attendance were both still good, the stadium expansion was relatively new. What blissfully ignorant times we lived in.
Plus it was one year after Welsh said something about reinventing the corporation (or whatever the term he used), so it’s not like he was unaware that things needed to change a bit… even if you think the admin made him say something like that…
I agree! The lesson is hire better coaches. What do you think the lesson is? Let people coach into their mid-70s? I mean honestly, it happened less back then, but Larranaga, others proving it’s not such a bad idea…
okay, I’m coming off more snarkily than I intend. The point is that Welsh wasn’t going to coach in any scenario for more than 5 or so years. So I’m just putting the onus more on the post-Welsh choices, which have been more impactful to the last ~25 or so years than whether fans should’ve been more fond of Welsh, which in any extreme scenario wouldn’t have extended his career, by only what? A couple seasons.
I was a recruit at that time and had known Welsh since childhood and wanted truly to play for him and knew many of his players in the late 90s. That is to preface like several have said the overall feeling was growing that it was Welshs time to move on and allow someone new to help take the program to a new level.
We didn’t known about the shitty 70s and 80s we just knew about his success and saw a fast rising VT ship and FSU maintaining a chokehold on the conference.
Hindsight makes it easier to question the get Welsh out rhetoric but it was time. And I believe most if not all give him his flowers.
I also think that there were larger forces working against us in college football, that would’ve been tough for even a better coach to navigate: the rise of VPI, the nationalization of college recruiting, the re-emergence of Clemson. Etc.
I think the intervening years have made us all realize that we had an even better thing with Welsh than we realized at the time. Just like the past few years in hoops have made us all realize it’s time to fire Tony. That’s for you @BDragon
