Collegiate Times

I wasn’t feeling as if an unranked Virginia Tech team had much of a shot to win going into Thursday night’s nationally televised football game with No.10 Clemson University.

My original gut instincts were reinforced on the Tigers’ second drive of the game, during which they marched 77 yards to the endzone on 11 plays, while taking better than five minutes off the game clock.

I may not be the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the analysis of college football, as my current ranking in today’s Sports Picks indicates, but there is one thing about which I am now sure — I have seen the future of Virginia Tech football and his name is Branden Ore.

I’ve been coming to Tech games for about as long as I can remember. I have yet to miss a home game since the 1995 season, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more impressive running back than Ore — and I’ve seen some greats.

Ken Oxendine, Lee Suggs and Kevin Jones all had their shining moments in Blacksburg, but none of them have ever rushed for 200 yards in consecutive games and none has carried a team the way Ore has done thus far.

Oxendine had Marcus Parker blocking for him and a good college quarterback in Jim Druckenmiller under center. Suggs and Jones had more talented offensive lines and each other to share the burden with.

When the Vicks were under center, the team didn’t even need an exceptional back in order to be successful since both had the ability to pull the ball down and make plays with his legs.

Even the better-than-average Cedric Humes and Mike Imoh had one another with whom to shoulder the load with at running attack.

Ore, a redshirt sophomore, has done something that none of Tech’s other good backs have had to do recently — he’s put the team on has back and carried well more than his fair share of the workload. Even more to his credit, he’s made his achievements running behind a mediocre offensive line.

Ore rushed for 203 yards and two touchdowns on 37 carries against Clemson; an impressive feat against any team, much less one of the best scoring defenses in the country.

“It feels good,” said Ore. “I knew I was capable of doing it, but it was just a matter of me and my offensive line working together—and that’s pretty much what we did today.”

Even more impressively, Ore managed to rush for more yards Thursday night than any other running back against a Tommy Bowden coached Clemson team in a single game. Additionally, his 40-yard first quarter run was part of the longest scoring drive on this season’s Clemson team to that point.

“(He’s) a very good running back, we knew he was coming in—he’s very talented,” said Clemson head coach Tommy Bowden. “He was everything we thought he was…We thought he was very equal to what we had on the field.”

If Ore can build on Thursday night’s performance during the Hokies’ November 4th contest at the University of Miami and November 18th road trip to Wake Forest, look for him to garner some postseason accolades from the Atlantic coast conference—especially considering he’s likely to have a couple of statistic padding games at home versus Kent State University and the University of Virginia.