The problem with great expectations is that they tend to produce great expectations. Once again, the expectations surrounding the Virginia Tech football program have proven to be false expectations, as once again, a Tech team accompanied by enormous media hype crashed and burned in what has become a hallmark of the Tech program, a loss to an unranked double-digit underdog. This one seems to hurt worse than the others.

The expressions caught by ESPN cameras on the face of Frank Beamer told it all. Not only was Tech being beaten again by what most had judged an inferior opponent, it was being manhandled in a way many who follow Virginia Tech football closely would not have thought possible. Tech was out-played, out-fought, out-hustled and out-coached in a manner that has rarely been seen during the Beamer era. We have seen losses, bad losses, but not like this.

That a team proclaimed so dominant by so much of the media could be so dominated by a 2-4 bunch defies credulity. But it happened, and it occurred in circumstances that are, quite frankly, hard to swallow. The events of last summer caused WVU to approach this game as a holy crusade. It was absolutely guaranteed that Tech would receive the best shot that could possibly be delivered by the Mountaineers. This was not only a rivalry game, it was one against an opponent whose feelings were that of a jilted lover. It was imperative that Tech match the emotion they knew would be brought by West Virginia, and not only did they not, they didn�t come close. That simply should not have been the case, for while WVU had a strong desire to teach those traitors a lesson, the stakes were much higher for Tech.

Perhaps the grief-stricken body language displayed by Frank was a realization that more than just this undefeated season was slipping away. Virginia Tech is rare among perceived top football programs in that they not only do not shy away from great expectations, they actively foster them. Tech coaches so openly talk of winning the MNC that it is often felt that this head coach and staff feels one has to be won in order to validate what they have already accomplished, which is plenty.

This attitude radiates to the players; few players of other top programs talk of a stated goal of winning the MNC as often as Tech�s. It also infuses the fan base with the great expectation of an MNC there for the taking, especially among many not around during the decades-long trials and tribulations Tech has faced in football. Winning is taken for granted, and a national championship seen almost as a birthright. These great expectations begin at the top.

An MNC has not as of yet been brought to Tech, and Frank could have been expressing an awareness that his best chance for one was vanishing in the cold West Virginia night. Given that Virginia Tech is heading to a conference that will boast of two of the most dominant programs of the last two decades as well as a sizable number of rapidly improving ones, the odds of Tech again being in the position they were prior to last night's WVU game will grow much longer. Our future ACC schedules make it unlikely that Tech will any time soon again find itself ranked Number 3 with such a clear road to the MNC ahead. It just might become apparent over the upcoming years that a very large opportunity was lost at Mountaineer Field.

Tech football over the last three years has developed a credibility gap. The media buys into, and indeed helps create the hype that fuels the great expectations surrounding the Tech football program. For three straight years, ever since the departure of Michael Vick, the story has been that Tech�s 1999-2000 successes were not a function of a good team with a magnificent quarterback, but a program that had achieved elite football status. For three straight years Tech has breezed through an early schedule of mostly lightweights and achieved a very high national ranking amid talk of a Rose/Fiesta/Sugar bowl in our near future, and for three straight years the great expectations bubble has been burst by a big underdog.

There will come a time when the media will no longer attach �elite� to the football program at Virginia Tech and instead replace it with the dreaded �overrated� one. That time might have come Wednesday night in Morgantown. Elite programs with legitimate shots at the MNC do not lose by 21 points to 14-point underdogs, and they don�t lose to those programs as often as Tech does.

Frank Beamer�s Virginia Tech football program has now arrived at a critical juncture. An attempt must be made to pick up the pieces of the devastating loss to WVU and move on. Recent history at Tech indicates the outlook is not positive. When the great expectations of an MNC run were ended in 2001 and 2002, the Tech team did not react well and more losses quickly followed, leading to mediocre seasons by the standard the program�s great expectations have brought to Tech.

The program is in the same position as it was in 2001 after the Syracuse loss and last year following the one to Pitt. Does this year�s team respond as the last two and suffer the letdown in intensity and level of play that led to more losses, or do they fight back and salvage what could still be a very good season? The road will be much tougher this time around, beginning Saturday when a Miami team that does not appear nearly as vulnerable as they did Wednesday afternoon visits Lane Stadium. The strongest teams on Tech�s 2003 schedule remain to be played, and another loss to what will be a favored Canes team could snowball into something very ugly. It is not hard to visualize this season that began with the usual great expectations fizzling into Tech limping into Charlotte in late December with barely a winning record.

It is also not difficult to carry that further and see a Tech team entering the ACC not as another added power in a conference that is getting much better in football but under an avalanche of scorn and ridicule that tabs us as a team that starts strong but folds as the season progresses. The upcoming weeks will tell us much about the character of the Virginia Tech football team and coaches.

No matter how this 2003 season turns out, there is one great lesson that can come from the debacle at WVU: our great expectations were again proven to be unattainable expectations. Maybe it is time to tone down the rhetoric a bit and for everybody connected with the Virginia Tech football program to cease weauxfing about how fantastic a team we are and are going to be and instead concentrate on what we are, a good team, perhaps a very good one but not, as the WVU game graphically demonstrated, a great one. The great expectations bit us again.

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