Virginia Tech has spent years claiming it has the longest active bowl streak in the country, choosing to side with the NCAA in (wrongly) not recognizing the Florida State streak that reached 36 years in 2017. But FSU just finished 5-7 to end its streak right there.
Virginia Tech preserved the country’s longest bowl streak in weird, clutch fashion
The Hokies’ streak lives after hanging by a thread.
Lee Luther Jr.-USA TODAY Sports
The Hokies were 4-6 heading into Week 13, typically the final week of the regular season. Teams need to finish .500 to get bowl-eligible, but Tech’s regular schedule was a game short, because Hurricane Florence led to a cancelation against ECU in September.
Tech found a solution, though, and will bowl again in 2018. Our projection is the Gasparilla Bowl against USF, but the destination isn’t important as the act of bowling itself.
To to preserve its bowl streak, Tech had to do two big things.
- It had to beat rival Virginia. The Hokies had done that 14 years in a row, and the game was in Blacksburg, but UVA was favored for just the second time since 2003.
- It had to find another game. And for that, the Hokies scheduled one on Championship Saturday with Marshall, which had a game at South Carolina canceled amid Florence. Tech agreed to pay the Herd $300,000 for the game, but the whole thing was conditional: Tech would only play the game if it beat UVA and had a chance to get bowl-eligible.
To complete step one, the Hokies beat UVA in one of the biggest gut punches of the season (for the Hoos).
The Hokies trailed late, but they mounted a weird tying drive in the closing moments of regulation. In overtime, Virginia held them to a field goal. But needing just 25 yards to win the Commonwealth Cup for the first time since early in the second Bush administration, the Hoos fumbled the ball (and the game) away on their first possession of OT.
If you put together the rivalry stakes, UVA being favored for a rare change, and the devastating way the Hoos lost, it was the most devastating defeat any team’s taken all season. (Lots of teams lose big games, and everyone except Bama falls out of the title hunt at some point. This loss was unique.) And it came mere months after the UVA men’s basketball team lost to a 16th seed.
It would be hard to put together two more wrenching losses in one year for a fanbase to deal with.
And to complete step two, the Hokies had Marshall come to Blacksburg on Championship Saturday. Tech finished the job, beating the Herd 41-20.
That was more surprising than it might seem. Vegas had Tech as 3.5-point favorite, befitting an ACC team playing at home against a Conference USA team. But S&P+ had Marshall as the 37th-best team in the country and the Hokies as the 81st. That system projected a 6-point Herd margin, giving them a 64 percent chance of winning.
The Hokies had looked ugly for most of the year. They were only a few weeks removed from giving up one of the worst blowouts in Power 5 history, to Pitt. They’d lost basically an entire defense’s worth of players to various departures, and starting QB Josh Jackson had barely played all season. The circumstances were more than ripe for a loss.
But the Hokies figured it out, and they now get to brag about having the longest active bowl streak without any kind of FSU asterisk.
It cost $300,000, and whatever payout the Hokies get from their bowl will go into a fund that gets redistributed to the whole ACC. But they got to sell tickets, concessions, and merchandise at one more game, and now they get to market themselves as the only team in the country that’s made 26 straight bowl games. After a hard year, that’s not bad at all.
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