The Techmo Bowl returns for the latest iteration of a rivalry game that’s frankly had very weird energy since the 11-year duel between Paul Johnson and Bud Foster came to an end after 2018.
Like this used
to be a great annual schematic battle between two of the game’s best tactical minds in Georgia Tech’s head coach and Virginia Tech’s defensive coordinator. And then we got…
- 2019: VT’s hapless coach, who is midway through cratering the program, pitches 45-0 shutout against GT’s hapless coach who is doing a cratering speedrun
- 2021: GT’s hapless coach uses a timeout to run to the student section and hype them up, loses 26-17 anyway
- 2022: As per Techmo Bowl tradition, backup QB magic leads GT to an unexpected 28-27 win under an interim coach
- 2024: The backup QB magic runs out in a 21-6 game that was painful to watch
This year’s game was meant to be the third duel for Brent Supremacy between Brent Key (aka Bront) and Brent Pry (aka Brant). The good news for Brant is that he’ll go into the sunset having won his last Techmo Bowl. The bad news is that he’ll do so because he was fired after entering the year on the hot seat and promptly losing to Old Dominion to fall to 0-3.
Further good news is that Brant doesn’t seem to be nearly as hated as his predecessor at VT, having merely been bad at the job instead of ignoring-our-recruiting-base-and-torpedoing-our-program’s-future bad. Further bad news is that he somehow didn’t even survive for as long as Geoff Collins, who inexplicably made it four games into his fourth season before being unceremoniously shoved out the door.
That leaves GT to attempt to continue an unexpectedly successful start to the season by hosting VT with interim coach Phil Montgomery, a former Tulsa coach who’s better known for his time as a Baylor offensive assistant in the early 2010’s. As a lifelong Virginia fan since October 2024 (as my second team, don’t worry), I am never short on reasons to hate VT, but knowing they’re now run by a former Art Briles assistant makes for a nice little cherry on top of that rivalry hatred pie.
Since Montgomery took over, VT has won an FCS game, narrowly defeated NC State, and lost a head-scratcher at Wake Forest. If you told me every other team in the ACC had experienced that exact three-game sequence at some point over the past decade, I would have no choice but to blindly believe you. Pretty sure it’s the official ACC slogan: all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again, and if we manifest a Miami-FSU title game hard enough in the preseason media blitz then it has to happen one of these days, right?
The Hokies’ main hope in this one is to lean on running back Terion Stewart, a Bowling Green transfer who bludgeoned the Jackets a couple years ago to bring about the single most befuddling loss of the Brent Key era. Stewart is listed as questionable on this week’s injury report, so it’s possible he doesn’t play. However, that report is subject to the standard injury interpretation rules: if anyone on your team is questionable, they’ll either sit out or operate at 30% effectiveness if they do play, but if anyone on your team’s opponent is questionable, they’re 100% guaranteed to play and may in fact have a career day. (All of these rules are doubly true for fantasy football.)
The Jackets will be missing a couple key players but are otherwise healthy coming out of the bye week as they make a push to go 6-0 for the first time in 14 years. Historically the Techmo Bowl always involves some flavor of nonsense happening, and only time will tell what that will be for this year’s game. It’ll be fun to find out–well, by some definition of fun, which may include “panic-inducing” or “what were you possibly thinking” or “that is not how football works.” So in other words, it’ll be a Techmo Bowl, and that means it’ll be memorable.
