MIAMI (AP) – Never.
That’s how many times Virginia Tech has beaten a top-5 team away from its Blacksburg home. And that streak only got longer in the Orange Bowl on Monday night.
No. 5 Stanford rolled in the second half to beat the 12th-ranked Hokies 40-12, the 23rd straight time that Virginia Tech has faced a team ranked in the top 5 of The Associated Press poll away from home and lost.
The Hokies are 1-27 in those games, the lone win coming Nov. 1, 2003, against No. 2 Miami, 31-7.
It was a thud of an ending for the Atlantic Coast Conference champions, who broke out all the stops for the Orange Bowl, even going with white jerseys and white pants – the color combination that they donned for wins in the 2008 and 2010 ACC title games, as well as the 2009 Orange Bowl.
Instead, they were awash in crimson – Stanford’s primary color – by night’s end. The Cardinal led just 13-12 at halftime, then simply dominated from there, the biggest blow being a two-play, 97-yard, 29-second drive that made it a two-touchdown game midway through the third quarter.
Andrew Luck’s second touchdown pass of the game, a 41-yarder to Coby Fleener with 5:49 left in the third, put Stanford up 26-12 – moments after Stepfan Taylor broke loose on a 56-yard run on the first play after the Cardinal took the ball at their own 3-yard line.
Hokies fans started heading for the exits not long afterward, with good reason.
“I think as you go along, to state that you’re one of the top programs in the country, you’ve got to get your share of wins against a top-5 team – and this is a real, for-real, top-5 team,” Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer said Sunday in his final pregame meeting with reporters. “That’s why I think it’s very important.”
In the end, it was simply too daunting.
Virginia Tech started this season 0-2, those losses by a combined eight points: 33-30 to Boise State, 21-16 five days later to lower-division James Madison.
Led by quarterback Tyrod Taylor, the Hokies won 11 straight games after that dismal beginning and thought this might be the chance for that breakthrough top-5 win. Instead, it wound up as the most one-sided defeat Virginia Tech endured since a 48-7 drubbing against LSU in September 2007.
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