Perhaps the answer to Georgia Tech’s miserable history at Virginia is sitting in a basement in Cumming, the Yellow Jackets’ version of the Cubs’ Curse of the Billy Goat.
Chris McCoy was an overjoyed 17-year-old when Scott Sisson made the most famous field goal in Tech history, a 37-yarder that beat then-No. 1 Virginia in 1990 and propelled the Jackets to a share of the national championship. McCoy, a Tech fan since birth, joined the white-and-gold melee on the Scott Stadium turf, tapping Ken Swilling on the shoulder and … snatching an end-zone pylon as a souvenir.
When he came back to the stands, his father asked him what he was doing with it.
“I said, ‘I don’t know, but I wanted it,’” McCoy said Thursday.
The win was the Jackets’ second in four trips to Charlottesville, Va. Since that day, Tech is 1-9 at Scott Stadium. McCoy doesn’t believe in curses, but he has sometimes examined the pylon, which now shares space in a Tech memorabilia case with footballs signed by Paul Johnson and Bill Curry, and wondered.
“If I could return that and we win a football game, I’d probably do it,” he said. “After that (game), it seemed to be really, really hard for the team to go up there and win.”
McCoy will not be in Charlottesville on Saturday, but the Jackets will, hoping to correct a string of results that challenges logic. Tech lost the next eight games in Charlottesville after the 1990 win, three times when favored.
Such is the apparent strength of Virginia’s home-field advantage against Tech that it required arguably Tech’s best team since the 1990 team and Virginia’s worst team in more than 20 years for the streak to end, with a 34-9 Jackets win in 2009 in Al Groh’s final season as Cavaliers coach. McCoy attended that game and believed his worries were over. Then, two years later, Tech returned with a 6-0 record, a No. 12 ranking and Groh on its sidelines and lost 24-21.
Two of the biggest heartbreakers sabotaged the 1999 and 2001 seasons.
In 1999, then-No. 7 Tech led 17-0 and 24-7 before losing 45-38, a game that took the Jackets out of BCS bowl contention and probably dropped quarterback Joe Hamilton out of Heisman Trophy contention.
In 2001, the Jackets went to Charlottesville ranked 20th in the country, 14-point favorites over the Cavaliers. Virginia, in Groh’s first season, had lost five games in a row. Down 13-0 and 20-7, Virginia rallied in a game in which the lead changed hands seven times in the fourth quarter, the last time on a Virginia hook-and-lateral touchdown pass with 22 seconds remaining.
Tech’s defensive coordinator that season was Ted Roof, who has returned 12 years later to take the job again. Apparently not joking, Roof said earlier this week that he would have the team prepare for the hook and lateral Thursday.
In the same span that Tech has won once at Virginia, Tech has won four times in Athens against Georgia, four times at Clemson and six times at North Carolina.
Johnson, who has his share of superstitions, had no advice for McCoy.
“I don’t worry about some mystique about that,” he said. “I just worry about going and playing our game.”
At first, Hamilton said McCoy can keep the pylon, that the 2009 team broke the curse if ever one existed. Then he considered it again and said that maybe McCoy should return it and be the reason that the Jackets began a winning streak at Scott.
“I do like it,” McCoy said. “But if Joe asked me, I’d do whatever Joe wanted me to do.”
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