Orange Bowl 2012: Wishing West Virginia Was Playing Virginia Tech, Not Clemson

First and foremost, it feels good to be in a BCS game.  Dana Holgorsen should be ecstatic about heading to South beach on Jan. 4.  

The Big East was chaos incarnate this season with the way teams won and lost, resulting in a traffic jam in league standings coming into the final few weeks of the season.  

To have emerged victorious from the scramble to claim the conference's BCS bid should be enough to edify the most ravenous fans in Mountaineer nation.  Personally, I was hoping for something just a little more—say, getting to play Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl.  

So, you can imagine how unhappy I was when Virginia Tech went out and did any and everything to get blown out by Clemson in the ACC Championship Game.  It was a pitiful display from a team that was comically over-ranked.  

Normally, I would be celebrating Virginia Tech getting destroyed by the same team twice in one season.  But, after ending the Backyard Brawl on a high note, all I could think about was how sweet it would be to meet Frank Beamer down in Miami and take back the Black Diamond Trophy.  

Virginia Tech either wanted to lose last night, or they were simply dominated by a superior team. I'm going with the latter.  

Clemson will be a good matchup for us, as they have a potent offense that plays vertically and possess some premier talent in Tahj Boyd and Sammy Watkins.  

That aside, I can't get over how much fun it would have been to revisit one of the best rivalries from the early 2000s.  

West Virginia has faced Clemson only once before in the 1989 Gator Bowl, where the Tigers handed the gold and blue a 27-7 loss.  OK, we owe them for that.  

But, West Virginia has faced Virginia Tech 53 times since 1912, and the last meeting was in 2005 in Morgantown when Tech won 34-17.  

I have too many friends who are either Virginia Tech graduates or ride the bandwagon hard. 

Either way, I would love to have seen Dana Holgorsen hand Frank Beamer a beat-down and gently remind Hokie nation that West Virginia, in fact, has the edge in the series 28-22-1.  After which I would gently remind all of my maroon-clad friends that no one knows what "Beamer ball" is and that turkey tastes delicious.  

Alas, you can't have everything.  Where would you put it?

I'm looking forward to the Orange Bowl immensely.  Clemson and West Virginia should be a fireworks display put on by two dynamic offensive units.  Call me spoiled, but I wish it was Virginia Tech that was on the receiving end of Geno Smith's air-raid theatrics.  

I suppose I could complain all day long that we're not getting the matchup that many people were hoping for, but that would be narrow-minded to say the least.  

The important, all-encompassing truth is that West Virginia is back in a BCS bowl for the first time in three years.  With that in mind, it shouldn't matter who West Virginia is playing, even though turkey tastes a lot better than tiger.