ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 2, 1996 TAG: 9601020116
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK STAFF WRITER
BRYAN STILL and the rest of Virginia Tech's graduating class is proud of four-year turnaround.
Some of them went to Bourbon Street for beers.
Some of them left the Superdome turf in tears.
For Virginia Tech's senior football players, however, the 62nd Sugar Bowl was a time to reflect on what they had accomplished - and not just on one glorious, final night of their college careers.
In a 28-10 whipping of Texas, the Hokies played with emotion that sometimes sailed out of bounds. Years from now, many of coach Frank Beamer's fellow alumni will talk about how this Tech team was setting records.
What was most important was setting an example. Tech had 11 senior starters and three other last-year players on the two-deep chart. Those who cried while leaving a joyous celebration had to be considering how far they'd come.
Three seasons ago, the Hokies were 2-8-1. The seniors who played their last game in Tech's brightest football hour were freshmen or redshirt freshmen then.
That team blew five fourth-quarter leads to lose or tie. If those Hokies thought about the Sugar Bowl, it was only to ponder where to go to watch it on television.
``It was bad,'' senior linebacker George DelRicco remembered after he had taken off his Hokies shoulder pads for the final time. ``It wasn't just 2-8-1, it was the attitude.
``I really thought about packing my bags and leaving Virginia Tech. I thought we had so much talent, but the older guys couldn't get it done. We'd get ahead, then turn around and lose.''
DelRicco and his classmates changed that scenario. In the past three seasons, Tech is 27-9 and has lost only one game it led in the fourth quarter - to Syracuse in 1994 at the Carrier Dome.
``I think about that all of the time,'' said receiver Bryan Still, whose punctuation on his career was an exclamation point. ``From 2-8-1 to 10-2. We've come from the bottom. We've stuck together.''
Still won the Miller-Digby Award as the Sugar Bowl's most outstanding player after returning a punt and catching a Jim Druckenmiller pass for touchdowns.
As has been his class' custom, Still wasn't bragging.
``Nobody really talked about the receivers much this year,'' he said. ``But we got enough talk. We're OK with it, even though it's nice to get more.''
DelRicco said the tough and heralded Tech defense, which had eight seniors on the two-deep, learned how to reverse its fortunes from someone who stayed at Tech only briefly.
After two years as the Hokies' defensive coordinator, Phil Elmassian left Beamer's staff after the 1994 season to become the secondary coach at the University of Washington.
``He was the guy who made a difference for us,'' DelRicco said. ``I remember that first day Coach Elmassian came into a defensive meeting, and he looked at us, and he could really look at you.
``He said, `I'm going to a bowl game. I know I'm going to a bowl game. Are you going with me?' And we're sitting there thinking, `Who the heck is this guy and what's he talking about?'''
The Hokies went to the Independence Bowl and dismantled Indiana that season. The players who would be seniors two years down the road saw the line between winning and losing was one that had to be walked every day.
And when Tech slipped late last season to an 8-4 finish after a 7-1 start, the seniors of the next year saw what they didn't want to happen again.
``We talked a lot among ourselves about how we wanted to do things as a team. We knew we just couldn't [throw] it away in one year. We weren't going to let it happen.''
It easily could have, however, after the Hokies started 0-2 before finishing with a school-record 10 consecutive victories in a season. That's quite a responsibility for this year's juniors to accept for 1996.
The Hokies have huge losses on the defensive front. Six of the eight linemen on the two-deep are seniors. One of those is tackle J.C. Price, who played much of his final game in lanes trying to wreck the Longhorns' ``BMW'' backfield.
Not long before the finish, Beamer sought out Price in what had become a tumultuous Tech bench area. Beamer hugged the tackle.
``I told him I was awfully proud of what he did and what the team did. J.C. looked at me and said, `Coach, I knew I was a winner.'''
He wasn't alone.
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ALAN KIM/Staff Tech's Bryan Still returns a punt forby CNBa touchdown in the second quarter of Sunday's Sugar Bowl. color
2. DON PETERSEN/Staff Bryan Still hauls in a pass from Jim
Druckenmiller for a 54-yard touchdown reception in the fourth
quarter of Sunday's Sugar Bowl. color