Is this a rivalry game? I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of friends who are VT fans and alums. And these same guys don’t have any lost love for Penn State, of course this is somehow tied to football, but how?
There are consistent rumors we will not sign up to play Virginia Tech in football and we obviously go head-to-head in many recruiting battles, but why is there some sense of rivalry between these two schools?
What do we have in common? Big state schools, both enroll the same type of kids and are academically very similar. We are both very passionate about our sports teams and walk the line of being top tier and middle of the road when it comes to football (both consistently ranked from 10-20 in most football polls year in and year out).
Both schools have one dominant sports team that gets 95% of all our coverage, football. And our football teams are pretty similar, built around defense with a serviceable offense. We both strive to have good basketball teams, but neither have been able to reach any sort of consistency.
How are we different? There are not many, but I would say the biggest is the length of our tradition and general reputation. Everyone on the planet has known about and respected Joe Paterno and the Penn State football program for decades, and he has built a program that has been successful for the past 5 decades. He has also built a program around building men, not just football players.
On the other hand, while VT has been more successful in the last decade, their program really did not start to get any national publicity till Mr. Vick started roaming their sidelines (~1999). And let’s call a spade a spade, while both teams have had some issues with off the field incidents, if you watch much VT football, they are more like Miami in their attitude and much less like Penn State (and yes Mr. Vick’s dog fighting issues did not help their cause).
So maybe there is a sense of jealously or feeling of being the ‘little brother’ to Penn State. And as a little brother, I can totally understand how that feels. If I am a VT fan, I am saying to myself, ‘why would anyone go to Penn State over VT for football; there is no doubt that if you look at our records over the past decade VT has been more successful, we have more conference championships, we played in a national championship in 1999 and if you had a head-to-head matchup between VT and PSU each of the past 10 years, VT would probably of won 7-8 of those games. We deserve more respect when comparing us to Penn State.
So is this a rivalry of sorts? I would say yes, of course this game would get 100 times more publicity if the coaches on the sideline were Paterno and Beamer and not DeChellis and Greenberg, but regardless I think this game comes with a fringe of rivalry attached to it. Now, let’s hope Battle and company can get us a win.
We are Penn State.
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