It’s excruciating to be a Virginia football fan. The Cavaliers are 1-9 against the Hokies over the last 10 seasons. They’ve never won the ACC outright since joining the conference in 1953. Virginia Tech has won 3 ACC Championships during their short 5 year tenure. Simply put the problem is UVA football is in a rut. And it has been for sometime. The campaign gaining steam on TheSabre.com to move the battle for the Commonwealth Cup away from the week of Thanksgiving would only be another Band-Aid to the problem.

What makes the games at Scott Stadium such a windfall for Hokie fans, and in turn for their team, is that many Virginia students and alumni — some 35 to 40 percent, depending on when they matriculated — have out-of-state ties that often take them “home,” several states away — much as I have ties in Pennsylvania and Florida — and they have trouble breaking away from the social occasion with relatives in order to attend a football game on Thanksgiving weekend. With the Hokies, pardon my metaphor, the apple doesn’t fall far from the horse. Many more Tech alumni reside in-state and come from families who were, and are, in-state. That makes getting to Charlottesville after Thanksgiving a lot easier for them, often easier than getting to Blacksburg. Mind you, as a die hard Virginia fan, I have frustrated my extended family and left them behind since the late 1980s, as I have returned for every game Virginia has played after Thanksgiving, but it hasn’t been easy, and I know from my cohorts that I am an exception to the rule.
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My suggestion is that Virginia should schedule an out-of-conference opponent, whenever possible, for every Thanksgiving weekend, some time before the ACC can drop the conference games into the schedule. When the ACC and Tech try to say “but VT wants to put the game at the end of the season,” Virginia should be able to say “Sorry, but we already agreed with Team X to play on that date. We can’t jeopardize what we have already agreed upon with an out-of-conference team.” The arrangement with the out-of-conference team would help in minimizing visitor impact on the game’s outcome in home years, and could allow many of our more far-flung out-of-state base to show up for an away game that might even be in their backyard, so to speak.

Out-of-state fans, and instate for that matter, travel and stay at home during Thanksgiving because they know they have no chance to beat us (the Hokies). Convenience is going to get an extra, what: 100, 500, 1000 Hoos to come to Lane Stadium North (Scott Stadium)? The solution doesn’t involve flip-flopping games, it is much more straight forward. UVA needs to field a more talented, better coached football team that is backed by a more passionate fan-base. Only then will the Cavaliers win games and crawl out of the shadow cast by their southern brother.