Hokies find some redemption in win

MIAMI —  The opening moments were filled with just about every problem Virginia Tech Coach Frank Beamer feared his team would have against Cincinnati.

It was merely a blip.

Nearly everything else went according to Beamer’s plan -- and the Hokies ended a yearlong Orange Bowl hangover.

Darren Evans had 28 carries for 153 yards and a touchdown, quarterback Tyrod Taylor rushed for another score and No. 21 Virginia Tech beat No. 12 Cincinnati, 20-7, in the Orange Bowl on Thursday night, joining USC and Texas as the only schools to win 10 games in each of the last five seasons.

The Hokies (10-4) forced Cincinnati quarterback Tony Pike into a season-high four interceptions. Pike, who wasn’t even on Cincinnati’s depth chart at the start of the season before blossoming into an all-Big East Conference quarterback, threw for 239 yards and a touchdown, but had his game marred by the interceptions and getting stopped on a fourth and goal in the fourth quarter.

Mardy Gilyard had 255 all-purpose yards (158 receiving, 97 returning) and a touchdown catch for Cincinnati, which had its six-game winning streak stopped.

The Bearcats (11-3) came in as slight favorites over the Hokies, who lost this game to Kansas a year ago.

“All year, all year, all year we’ve been the underdogs,” said cornerback Victor “Macho” Harris, who didn’t jump to the NFL last year in part because he didn’t want to leave school with an Orange Bowl loss. “All year. We had to scratch and claw our way to a victory. We had to scratch our way up to a victory. It says a lot about the character on our team.”

So this one was especially sweet for Virginia Tech, and really, for the entire Atlantic Coast Conference.

The Hokies became the first ACC team to win a BCS game since Florida State -- ironically, perhaps -- beat Virginia Tech, then a Big East member, for the national championship to close the 1999 season.

It was eight BCS losses for the ACC since.

And the oft-maligned league was 5-12 over the last two seasons in all postseason games before the Hokies broke through, befuddling the Bearcats’ spread offense with an array of different blitzes and, at times anyway, simply winning the battle up front.

“We did a good job mixing it up,” Beamer said. “Overall, I’m really proud of this football team. We hung in there.”

Evans, the game’s most valuable player, got the clinching score early in the fourth quarter, after Pike threw his third interception.

“You work out in the summer and in preseason camp because you want to get to this point,” said Cincinnati Coach Brian Kelly, whose team was picked fifth in the Big East’s preseason poll before taking the league title. “But you want to finish it off, so there’s a lot of disappointment.”