With the ACC having put the wraps on a football season that saw newcomers Tech and Miami waltz in and snatch two of the league’s top three bowl bids, attention turned to the conference’s signature sport, at least for a while longer, basketball. And what a week it was. The highlight, at least from this Tech fan’s perspective, was the Hokies picking up their first ACC basketball win, knocking off Clemson. So much for all of that 0-17 chatter.

The Tigers have historically been the ACC’s worst program and they demonstrated they were not giving up that designation without a fight. Clemson coach Oliver Purnell also kept intact his perfect record, achieved through stints at Radford, Old Dominion, Dayton and now the Tigers, of having never won in Cassell Coliseum. The names on the jerseys of Purnell’s teams may change, but not the result in Cassell.

Tech won this game through what is fast becoming the signature of this program under Seth Greenberg, strong defense, particularly on the perimeter. With little in the way of scoring punch and practically nothing passing for an inside game, Greenberg has created strong defense as the base of his program. Good fundamental defense is the foundation of any successful program in any sport, so it is a wise place to start. Defensive principals infused into the Tech program now will pay dividends down the road, when hopefully the talent level will be a bit higher than the skimpy amounts currently on hand.

Seth Greenberg has managed to develop something not seen in quite a while around Tech, a backcourt of reasonably good quality. Jamon Gordon and Zabian Dowdell are not going to be confused with Chris Paul and Justin Gray, or Daniel Ewing and JJ Redick, but they are the best seen at Tech in some time. A program that suffered through chronic guard problems during the regimes of the two previous coaches can now count on quality backcourt play most every game. This hasn’t been seen at Tech in a decade; you have to back to Shawn Good and Damon Watlington entirely too many years ago. Strong guard play is a necessity in the ACC, and Tech can now field at least a competitive backcourt.

The core of the Tech team for hopefully the next couple of seasons is coming into focus. Gordon, Dowdell, Coleman Collins and Deron Washington are all starting now and look to be the nucleus of the next two Tech teams, assuming all goes as planned. Continued development by Marquie Cooke and Wynton Witherspoon, along with any development at all by Robert Krabbendam, gives Seth, assuming everybody hangs with the program and the past problems of players transferring does not reappear, seven players to form the foundation of the Tech program.

The most pressing need will be an inside game. For the immediate future, Greenberg will have to hope for rapid development into ACC-caliber players from the lightly-recruited Hyman Taylor and Terrance Vinson. The specter of mass defections as seen under Stokes and Hussey will remain hanging over this team until it does not, but if everybody sticks with the program, a baseline for Tech basketball is in place. It is probably not a group that is going to stray too far from the bottom of the ACC standings, especially considering the collections of prep wunderkinds the rest of the league is amassing, but it should make Tech reasonably competitive with a good chunk of the ACC and, more importantly, the confusion of the past eight years or so appears to be ending.

Greenberg looks to be a solid basketball tactician, another refreshing departure from Tech’s recent past, but coaching becomes a lot easier when there is top talent on hand. With a foundation in place and the bleeding looking to have ended, the challenge now for Greenberg will be to upgrade the talent levels to something a little more in line with the rest of the conference, and do it at what is the ACC’s toughest recruiting sell. But considering that Ted Roof is managing to defy all odds and bring some highly-regarded football players to the ACC’s bleakest football outpost at Duke, who knows what is possible.

This season of firsts continued for Virginia Tech last Saturday, with another being notched in addition to the initial basketball victory. The game was televised by the ACC’s powerhouse regional Jefferson-Pilot/Raycom television partner. For this chronologically-mature Hokie who grew up watching the Pilot Life ACC basketball package, it was immensely satisfying to see the JP/Raycom logo overlaying Cassell. It reinforced the sense of belonging to the area’s dominant conference. The identity of the outfit televising the game might pale beside other firsts already experienced, such as the first ACC football game coinciding with the first ACC football win, the first ACC championship, or North Carolina in Cassell for a league game, but it was indeed another source of Tech pride.

There are other firsts to come this year, such as watching Tech take the floor in a fortnight or so at Cameron Indoor Stadium, an occasion that will cause me to actively desire a Duke basketball defeat for the first time since 1976 in the Greensboro Coliseum, or the first time Tech plays in the revered ACC Tournament. JP/Raycom televising a Tech ACC game is a little thing, but they add up to the sum of Tech now being a bona fide member of the ACC. Tech is quite a ways away from having ESPN and Dick Vitale on hand for a meaningful league game, the sort of which we have long experienced in football, but small steps include having a basketball game aired by our region’s venerable basketball network.

Of course, the reason Tech and Clemson were on the regional network was because the league’s higher-profile games were all selected by ABC and the Fox Sports Network, the flip side of Tech sauntering into the ACC and grabbing a sizable chunk of the conference‘s football television package, but so what. At this stage of Tech basketball, their initial sail with the pilot means something, at least to me.