Blake LaRussa actually grew up watching Virginia Tech football games. Until he enrolled at Old Dominion two years ago, he considered himself a Hokies fan. His older brother, Mike, is a Virginia Tech graduate, and he informed Blake before Saturday’s game that he probably would be cheering for his alma mater.
“He told me, ‘If you go in, I’ll root for you,'” Blake LaRussa said after pulling off the season’s biggest upset. “‘Otherwise, I’ll be rooting for the Hokies.'”
LaRussa didn’t start the game for Old Dominion, but he did get in on the Monarchs’ second drive, and he gave his brother plenty to cheer for — and lament — in a stunning 49-35 win over the No. 13 team in the nation.
ODU entered the game as a 29-point underdog, making this the biggest upset by point spread of 2018, but that only begins to tell the story.
The Monarchs were 0-3, including a blowout loss to Liberty, a first-year FBS team, and coming off a humiliating defeat to Charlotte. ESPN’s FPI prediction tool gave ODU a 1.8 percent chance of winning, making this the largest upset by an FBS opponent in the metric’s 14 years of existence.
Heck, this program didn’t even exist a decade ago, and in its seven years playing at the FBS level, it had been 0-9 against Power 5 opponents with an average margin of defeat of 28 points per game.
But if every ounce of history suggested this would be a one-sided affair, head coach Bobby Wilder had his team sold on a different outcome.
“Our kids believed in it, and we just made history,” Wilder said in his postgame interview.
LaRussa was among the many stars for ODU. He threw for 495 yards and accounted for five touchdowns, including a 4-yard pass to tie the game just before halftime and a gorgeous 29-yard pass to Jonathan Duhart with 5:11 to play that gave the Monarchs a 42-35 lead and all but put the dagger through Virginia Tech’s heart.
That dagger actually came one drive later, when ODU was in position to simply kneel and run out the clock, but instead handed off to tailback Jeremy Cox, who scampered 40 yards for another score.
“Just go out and throw the ball around and have fun,” LaRussa said. “That was literally our plan.”
Fans poured from the stands and onto the field, hugging players and coaches. A half-hour later, the crowd was still cheering behind LaRussa as he relished the win.
“It’s just a moment we’ll never forget,” he said.