NERD. FIGHT.
As Tech plays postseason ball for the second year in a row after a distresingly long absence, this year’s opponent will be a fellow nerd team, continuing the bowl organizers’ conferences’ grand tradition of getting extremely lazy with bowl matchups by going “eh whatever make the nerds fight each other in the corner.”
That corner ended up being Birmingham, aka one of the lowest bowls on each conference’s respective ladder. But once we had all moved past the frustration of being relegated down the ladder and missing out on a game against a more prominent team… this one began to look more and more fun. Birmingham is a very doable day trip from both Atlanta and Nashville, so it’s likely to have good attendance from both fanbases for what could easily turn into an offensive shootout.
And so we move on to the opponent: Vanderbilt, a team that’s quite simply not as fun to poke fun at as other potential SEC opponents would have been. And yet they’re here in front of us, so it must be done.
The easiest place to start is a personal tale. Vanderbilt was the first road game I covered for the Technique back in 2009, and thus it was my first non-GT press box experience. It’s pretty typical for team press boxes to have photographs or art commemorating the team’s historical success—national titles, conference titles, major bowl wins, and whatever else seems noteworthy.
That gets a little harder when there’s nothing in particular to celebrate in team history. Vandy occasionally does well in other sports (ok maybe just baseball—AND WOMEN’S BOWLING, so thank you to commenter Tom Stephenson for that note), but this is a team that’s had back-to-back winning seasons in football exactly twice in the past 60 years. That might be why Vandy’s press box had an entire wall dedicated to one of the most successful seasons in team history: the 2008 season, in which they… went 7-6 and beat Boston College in the Music City Bowl.
Maybe that’s unfair, though. There are times when other teams have nothing to celebrate and still can’t beat Boston College. Like, say, Florida State this year.
Poking fun at this year’s Vanderbilt team sparks less joy, because in truth they’ve brought us all considerable joy this season. The 2024 Birmingham Bowl is, after all, a battle between two teams that delivered two of the season’s most exhilarating upsets over top-5 teams. And as magnificent as the ACC variant was for regular readers of this website and everyone who tuned in to watch a fraud get exposed, the SEC edition is the one that gave us Diego Pavia—the man previously known best for being a dedicated Hugh Freeze hunter-killer, something every respectable American can appreciate—happily giving us the phrase “Vandy [Foghat]in’ turnt” on live, uncensored TV. They’ve been an easy team to pull for all year long, particularly for those of us who enjoy traditional SEC powers being knocked down a peg.
As a result, what’s way more fun is needling the teams that Vanderbilt beat this year. They are, after all, the kings of the state of Alabama and thus the rightful owners of the land that Tech will play on this Friday. They won that by virtue of knocking off #1 Alabama in a colossal upset that led to an extreme amount of consternation over Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer wearing a (gasp) T-shirt on the sidelines, a clear indication that he simply might not be the man for this program, Pawwwwwwl. Perhaps even more satisfying was Vandy going to Auburn a month later and winning 17-7, which 1) gave Pavia his third win over Hugh Freeze in three attempts and 2) was the SEC’s most trusted doormat holding a Hugh Freeze offense to just seven points on their own field as a step toward keeping Hugh Freeze’s team out of a bowl game. (Author’s note: if it isn’t clear, my long-running appreciation of Auburn as an SEC agent of chaos has been suspended until they fire their coach.)
The game itself should be fun. It’ll feature two rising programs with increasingly folk tale-worthy quarterbacks dueling in front of what is shaping up to be a very good crowd. With Tech’s losses to the transfer portal, projecting a win isn’t the easiest thing. But Vandy has lost players too, and a Tech win would mean the team’s first 8-win season in eight years. It’s ultimately an exhibition game, but it’s a meaningful one.
And since it’ll be our final episode of Tech football for the year, let’s close with something fun to honor the holiday spirit and look back on the year that was:
(cue Timothy Miller voice, because he makes everything better)
On the twelfth day of Bowlmas, my football team gave me…
Nine deranged Bront quotes
Eight painful OTs 🙁
Seven wins and counting
Six TFLs (per game)
Five-star Josh Petty
Three Hawes blocks
Two QB shuffle
And returning to this team being fun
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all, and don’t forget to commemorate the tenth anniversary of one of our greatest national moments: Meet Me in Temecula.