COLLEGE FOOTBALL BOWL GAMES : Virginia Tech Leaves a Footprint on Texas

Frank Beamer wants Virginia Tech to be more like Texas? Glamorous, he called it.

Carrying tradition, notoriety, rankings. A catch for any bowl.

That’s Texas, he said, and “that’s where we want to be.”

He’s aiming a little low. The Hokies were hardly glamorous Sunday in their 28-10 victory over Texas in the Sugar Bowl, but they were prettier than the Longhorns. Virginia Tech could claim OK late in the third quarter when Marcus Parker ran two yards untouched for a touchdown and a 14-10 lead. And maybe even attractive when Jim Druckenmiller completed a 54-yard pass to Bryan Still for the game’s final points.

But glamorous?

Nobody that plays defense and special teams like Virginia Tech is glamorous. A winner, sure. A coach’s delight, maybe, but not something you’d hang in an art gallery.

“Their defense was every bit as good as anyone we’ve played this year,” Texas Coach John Mackovic said.

Their punt-return team was no slouch, either.

The first Tech touchdown, scored on a punt return, was the game’s key. The last, scored by the defense, was its comedy. In between, the offense did enough to hold up its head after aiming in the other direction for most of two quarters.

“We kept shooting ourselves in the foot,” said Tech quarterback Jim Druckenmiller. “Deep down, we knew we weren’t that bad.”

That first touchdown, which came on a 60-yard punt return by Still, the game’s most valuable player, was scored with 2:34 to play in the first half and cut the Longhorn lead to 10-7.

“We were playing pretty awful in that first half, giving them field position, penalties, turnovers,” Beamer said. “Then all of a sudden we’re only three points behind at halftime as bad as we played in the first half, and that had us feeling pretty good.”

Druckenmiller was more enthusiastic, if less mathematically accurate.

“It was a 360-degree turn for us,” he said.

Still, who alternates with Larry Green as the Hokies’ punt returner, was cooler about the whole thing.

“It was just my turn,” he said.

Yeah, right.

“Well, I dreamed of making a big play in the Sugar Bowl,” he said.

He made two.

The second came in the final quarter, after Tech had taken the lead. The Hokie offense was finally working, as seen in 27-yard completions from Druckenmiller to Bryan Jennings and Still in a touchdown drive finished by Parker for a 14-10 lead.

Virginia Tech got the ball back when William Yarborough intercepted a James Brown pass, and Druckenmiller found Still alone, yards behind Texas’ Taje Allen, on a 54-yard pass play.

“I couldn’t have asked for anything more,” Still said. “A lot of people said we didn’t belong here, and I think this victory shows we belong with the greatest teams in the country.”

Well, maybe with the top 10 teams. Tech (10-2) began the game ranked 13th.

It ended the game taking aim at Texas’ Brown. He completed 14 of 37 passes for 148 yards, but threw three interceptions, was sacked five times and spent much of the night running for his life.

He was caught on the play that brought the game’s final points, Jim Baron’s 20-yard return of a Texas fumble. It seemed only apropos, given the way the Hokies played defense all season.

“We had decided that we were going to make [Brown] beat us,” Baron said. “We were going to rush him, and we didn’t think he could pass well enough to beat us.

“We rushed him on that play, and the ball just came loose, out in the open and I picked it up.”

The ball was jarred loose from Brown by Virginia Tech’s George Delricco and Cornell Brown, who spent as much of Sunday with the quarterback as his offensive linemen. Tech’s Hank Coleman dived on the pile, but not the ball, which was lying there, ready for Baron. He picked it up, stepped over the pile of players and rumbled 20 yards to the end zone while everybody else looked around in confusion.

It was the seventh touchdown by the Hokie defense in its last six games, the second by Baron, and it finished a season in which Tech won its last 10 games in a row.

It also finished Texas, though Mackovic would not let the night dull the season put together by the ninth-ranked Longhorns (10-2-1).

“We were the undisputed Southwest Conference champions and had to knock off three teams at the end of the year that would have been here in New Orleans if we hadn’t beaten them,” he said.