My Favorite College Football Games: Game 8 redux

November 3, 1990: Georgia Tech - 41 Virginia - 38

The best moment in the best game of the best college football season does not occur in the game, per se, but still takes place on the field of play, or at least, right next to it. Five minutes remain. The top-ranked and undefeated Virginia Cavaliers trail the 16th-ranked, undefeated, once-tied Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets 38-35. Virginia has the ball on Georgia Tech’s one-yard line. The Atlantic Coast Conference championship and quite possibly the national championship are at stake. The CBS broadcast cuts to a handheld sideline shot eavesdropping on Cavalier head coach George Welsh and the camera’s invasiveness causes Welsh to break the fourth wall. “Can you move the camera, please?” he says. He sounds annoyed, even exasperated, but as the “please” denotes, he’s polite about it. And it’s that politeness juxtaposed with the appreciable tension in his voice that gets me, befitting a coach, a school, a conference unfamiliar with being on the sport’s grandest stage. College football’s biggest games can be great, even extraordinary, yet in another sense, they are often the same ol’, same ol’, the same teams playing in the same places. That is what infused the tremendous 1990 tilt between Virginia and Georgia Tech with such unique energy, two teams fretting their hour upon the stage, in a manner of speaking. In chatting with Furman Bisher of Charlottesville’s Daily Progress newspaper ahead of the game, Welsh likened it to Virginia’s “15 minutes of fame,” noting that he “never went in for that game-of-the-century stuff,” referencing the moniker traditionally applied to the sport’s most ballyhooed showdowns. And yet, him asking the cameraman to move revealed a man who unexpectedly found himself smack-dab in the middle of one anyway.  

It might seem strange here in the brave new world of 2024, when the Atlantic, underline, Coast Conference improbably stretches from its Charlotte, NC headquarters to upstate New York, to the Ohio River Basin, to the Great Plains, and all the way to the San Francisco Bay, but for the first 50 years or so of its existence, it was a homogenous conglomeration of south Atlantic schools only 300 or 400 miles apart. That is why growing up, I barely ever saw ACC teams on television, as they were generally relegated to games on the Charlotte-based syndicated sports network Jefferson-Pilot. I am almost positive that the first time I ever saw Georgia Tech play a football game was the 1990 one against Virginia. No, the ACC became known first and foremost as a basketball conference, defined by its Tobacco Road rivalries, while its football identity mostly languished. By 1990, Georgia Tech’s sizable football history had languished over the previous couple decades too, while Virginia had no real history post-WWI at all, save for losing 28 games in a row from 1958 to the beginning of 1961. Welsh brought some stability and success upon arriving in 1982, even winning the conference title in 1989, and Georgia Tech had a solid 1989 season under third-year head coach Bobby Ross as well, but this was not a game to normally move the national needle. In the three years leading up to 1990, the Virginia / Georgia Tech game was, indeed, broadcast on Jefferson-Pilot. And when 1990 dawned, JP probably figured they would be broadcasting the game again.

1990 was my favorite version of my favorite kind of college football season, topsy-turvy, not just entertaining but ridiculous, and inconclusive, all of it foreshadowed in the 31-31 tie between eventual co-national champion Colorado and Tennessee that kicked it off. The top ranking changed hands three times in the first six weeks of the season, and many of the expected contenders suffered losses or ties too, save for the Cavaliers, remaining unscathed and dominant in playing generally pedestrian competition, meaning that in week seven, with no other bluebloods for pollsters to anoint, for the first time in history, Virginia ascended to #1. Georgia Tech was not even ranked when the season began, but gradually found their way into the polls and to #11 before a tough 13-13 tie with North Carolina dropped them to 16th. That was how things stood in Charlottesville on the afternoon of November 3rd as a Jefferson-Pilot game in theory became the CBS national game of the week in reality. 

If in retrospect it proved perhaps the season’s most crucial contest given that Georgia Tech would emerge as the other co-national champion, the Yellow Jackets’ more modest ranking in the moment, each team’s meager recent history, and the broad suspicion of the CFB commentariat that neither team was, really, all that good prevented it from being labeled as a proper Game of the Century. But then, the first fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier was billed as the Fight of the Century and that’s not the one anybody remembers. No, they remember Ali/Frazier III, or the Thrilla in Manilla, and as it happens, in the game’s run-up, The Daily Progress deemed Virginia/Georgia Tech as the Thrilla in Charlottesvilla. Occasionally, it turns out, a Game of the Century just isn’t big enough for what transpires. 

As it happened, the Thrilla in Charlottesvilla was almost called off. Maybe endeavoring to make some sort of ill-conceived point about big-time college athletics, or possibly just acting like a dumb kid away at school, someone broke into Scott Stadium overnight and set fire to the AstroTurf, incinerating a chunk around the fifty-yard-line. In an unsightly but effective enough solution, postponement was avoided by removing a chunk of AstroTurf from the Virginia baseball field and sewing it into the football field, rendering a playable-enough surface. The weird-looking two-tone field contrasted with the brilliant fall foliage encircling the quaint stadium was captured in aerial views by the Shamu Blimp that flew in from SeaWorld, all these disparate elements giving the game an almost surreal when the circus comes to town sort of sensation. But if the field did not keep its end of the bargain, the game did, scintillating start to finish.

In a showdown of such evenly matched teams, the similarities between them were appropriate. Both were quarterbacked by a Shawn - Moore for Virginia and Jones for Georgia Tech - and both were my preferred kind of college football quarterback, dual threats more cut out for the CFL than the NFL. Both teams had a wide receiver doubling as a track and field athlete - high jumper Herman Moore for the Cavaliers and sprinter Jerry Gilchrist for the Yellow Jackets - who wreaked havoc on the opposing secondary. Both defenses were lamentable, though Virginia’s resisted enough at first to help twice provide a two-touchdown cushion, first 21-7, then 28-14 at intermission. In the second stanza, though, bright sunshine gave way to long shadows, casting a spell on Virginia as their offense began inhibiting itself with a bizarre rash of turnovers, including a pass ricocheting off running back Nikki Fisher’s hands and into the arms of a Georgia Tech defender and Moore fumbling when his own offensive lineman kicked up his right leg in falling to the ground and with his foot, inadvertently dislodged the ball from the signal caller’s hand. Georgia Tech then twice tied the score, at 28-all and then 35-all, before forging that 38-35 lead, which brings us back to Virginia at the one-yard line with five minutes left.

Boy, I miss the days when during the biggest college football game of the year they would still take a minute to spotlight the Ivy League scores.

By then, night had fallen in full, echoing a palpable sense of festering time, of quickening desperation. Indeed, the Cavaliers would make one more mistake, a procedure penalty at the goal-line negating a touchdown. Rather than go for broke and try for another touchdown, however, on fourth down, Welsh opted to play it safe by settling for three points to merely tie the game, hoping his defense could hold, get the ball back, and give his team one last chance to win. If it was sound rationale, students of the cosmos knew straight away what would come to pass - that is, Georgia Tech coolly driving to the winning field goal, 41-38. Suddenly Virginia’s fight song, The Good Old Song, set to the music of Auld Lang Syne, felt eerily apt. Midnight had struck on their dream season and their dream, in turn, became Georgia Tech’s in so much as this game would be their springboard to the split national title. 

Two years later gridiron powerhouse Florida State would join the ACC, changing the league’s perception but in coming to dominate it for a decade, also committing a kind of hostile takeover. Eventually, as the league continually grew larger, Clemson would become an FSU-like powerhouse in the twenty-tens, and though both Virginia and Georgia Tech have achieved successes here and there since, it’s never been anything like it was during those happy days of 1990. Now both Clemson and FSU are seeking to abandon the ACC, and Welsh, who died in 2019, has been proven right about the fickle, fleeting nature of college football in ways he probably never intended. The reconfiguring of CFB conferences that happens every offseason is typically deemed expansion, but what’s emerging instead is more like consolidation, the game’s biggest brands entrenching behind the castle walls. Though the sport was never a democracy, in its original raggedy confederation, almost any school could have its fifteen minutes of fame, and as a central college football hierarchy establishes itself little by little, soon a whole lot of schools will not even get that.