I spent Virginia Tech’s open weekend having a bit of an open weekend myself. My wife and I celebrated our anniversary with a Friday night stay at The Hotel Roanoke, where we inhabited the Commonwealth Suite, which hotel manager (and sometimes-TSL-photographer) Brian Wells tells me is “the room Coach [Fuente] stays in.” Trust me, it’s nice.

My wife and I then spent Saturday shopping, and on Sunday, I knocked a couple items off the honey-do list. I have piled up some credit with the wife that will help me get through the last month of football season.

That segues nicely into today’s topic: the Coastal Division race. Should we call it a “race,” or is it more of a war of attrition?

When I was a kid, I took a copy of the 1974 NFL master schedule and wrote down each team’s schedule on a separate page in a spiral notebook, filling the notebook up with a full 14-game schedule for 26 teams. I made up an elaborate scoring system with dice and proceeded to play each team’s entire schedule, right through to the playoffs and the Super Bowl. There was no accounting for home/road venues, strength of rosters, game planning, strategy, injuries, etc. I was just rolling the dice, and it was all random luck.

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