Gee, I Didn't Know That!

I just got back from spending the weekend in Pennsylvania, and you wouldn't think that I would come across a Hokie tidbit there, but sure enough, I did.

I was reading the Sunday paper, a publication called (if I remember correctly) the Tribune-Review, which is based out of Greensburg, PA. There was a piece in the sports section written by a Guy named Steve Sampsell. I don't know if Sampsell is local or nationally syndicated, but that's not important.

Sampsell had written a pre-season article about college football in which he gave a series of numbers and explained the significance of each number in a paragraph. You know, one of those columns that is low in imagination but high in stats, where he says clever things like "12 - the number of teams in the new Big 12 Conference."

Naturally, me being me, I scanned the thing for the two key words in my brain: Virginia Tech. And I found them in a paragraph where Mr. Sampsell demonstrated his prodigious ability with numbers. He wrote:

"25 - the number of consecutive games won by Virginia Tech. This winning streak is second in the country only to Nebraska."

Uh, yo, Steve, that's the number of consecutive wins by Nebraska, not the Hokies (for the record, Tech's winning streak is 10, and yes it is the second-longest in the country, so Mr. Sampsell was half-right). Didn't it strike you or your editors to wonder just how Virginia Tech won 25 games in a row and wasn't even remotely involved in the national title hunt the last two years?

I can see it now. All over western Pennsylvania, there are confused sports fans saying to each other: "Hey, did you know Virginia Tech has won twenty-five games in a row?"

(And if there are any denizens of western PA out there reading this, don't send me any email. I know you're not that dumb.)

Help! I've Created a Monster!

Alternative title: My Modem is Melting!

Well, as Hokie Central grew and grew from its meager beginnings in March of this year, I knew I would eventually reach this point, so ....

I'm sorry to say that I can no longer personally respond to all of the email I get. My page is averaging about 75 hits a day now, with 100 hits in a single day not being unusual, and you can imagine that the volume of email that I get is going up, too. Up until now, I've been able to respond to every email I've gotten, but lately, it's starting to get ahead of me, due to sheer volume. I'm amazed at the way Hokie Central has taken off with very little promotion on my part, and frankly, I'm flabbergasted that nearly 100 people a day would give a rat's tail what yours truly has to say about anything.

(by the way, flabbergasted has always been one of my favorite words. I encourage you to use it in a sentence whenever you get the chance)

Throw in my upcoming wedding, this week's move to Christiansburg, and that pesky full-time job that I've got, and .... well, you get the idea. Again, I apologize, but I don't think it's feasible anymore to respond to every single contact.

Now, having said that, I will encourage you to keep emailing me. I've found that nearly all of the email I get is well-written and thought-provoking, and it provides me with a different perspective than my narrow-minded, post-1980 view of Hokie sports. Also, it's an opportunity to learn about things I never knew before, like the story behind Tech's brush with greatness in the 1967 NCAA basketball tournament, when the Hokies almost made the Final Four.

So, keep sending those electrons. I'll answer the ones I can and post the ones that I think will be the most interesting to other Hokie fans. And has it occurred to anybody else that in the time it took me to write this, I could have answered a few of those emails I'm talking about?

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