How dare they call these Hokies 'thugs'
It's the media's fault.
Specifically, it's ESPN's fault.
Yeah, that's the ticket.
It wasn't the Virginia Tech football team's fault that people watching their game at Boston College last week thought they looked like thugs.
It was the director calling the shots and analyst Kirk Herbstreit - and those of us who watched the 22-3 turkey all the way through to the bitter, bitter end.
"Bottom line is some guy out there in the broadcast booth has six minutes to fill in a one-sided game. If I was a broadcaster, I would have probably talked about how good Boston College was, not how big of thugs we were. It's just disrespectful in a sense because he doesn't know us as people," Tech center Danny McGrath told reporters this week - pinning the blame for the bad press that the Hokies have received in the wake of the BC game on Herbstreit and ESPN and anybody and everybody else except where it belongs.
Yep, you guessed it - that would be on the Hokies.
But hey, all they did was commit a few personal fouls and then see two of their star defenders get into a verbal fracas on the sidelines on live TV, right?
No big deal there.
Oh, well, and then there was Tech linebacker Brenden Hill's now-notorious "Sweet Caroline" dance during a TV timeout late in the shellacking that drew Herbie's ire.
But again, no harm, no foul.
"We all just saw what happened with Brenden and how he got ripped nationally throughout the entire ESPN broadcast, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense when we're playing our butts off," McGrath said. "We just weren't getting things done. That doesn't make us thugs out there on the field."
No, playing your butts off and then getting them rudely handed back to you doesn't make you thugs - it was everything else that we saw on the field and on the sidelines that makes you thugs.
And we could add the political-spin-inspired campaign against ESPN to the mix, too.
This at least worked - Herbstreit has apologized for his comments about Hill and his teammates.
"The reason I got heated is because I know how hard (Tech coach Frank Beamer) and (defensive coordinator) Bud Foster and (offensive coordinator) Bryan Stinespring and the rest of that staff, how hard collectively they've worked on that very subject for the last three or four years, and what an effort they've made to try and filter all of that out of the program," Herbstreit told The Roanoke Times this week.
"And when I saw that - it wasn't so much the fighting on the sideline, I mean, that's going to happen - it was just the nonsense, the trash-talking, the dancing on the field when they were down, just things that are very uncharacteristic of a program we've all come to love in Virginia Tech. The reason I reacted why I did was out of frustration at the kids, and them evidently not getting the message that there's a right way and a wrong way to conduct yourself as Hokie football player," Herbstreit said.
OK, so the critics are sorry. That should make McGrath and his teammates happy. Shouldn't it?
"We looked pretty bad, but then two days later, Miami took the thug title right from us," McGrath said, referring to the brawl involving Atlantic Coast Conference rival Miami and Florida International that resulted in 31 players being disciplined.
Makes you want to make sure to clear the schedule for that Nov. 4 matchup featuring the Hokies and 'Canes in the Orange Bowl, doesn't it?
Somebody call Michael Buffer.
- Chris Graham