Virginia Tech’s overrated and over hyped football team got an old-fashioned butt kicking Saturday night from Miami’s Hurricane’s in front of a national television audience, ending – we can hope – all the talk of a national title.

Tech’s Hokies looked like what they are – a land-grant agricultural college athletic team named after turkeys.

Miami delivered the worst thrashing at home since they taught Tech some much needed humility with a 43-23 stomping in 1992.

I’m sorry but I don’t share the area’s fascination and love affair with Virginia Tech football. I can’t understand why Frank Beamer is worth more than $2 million a year when too many teachers in Virginia earn salaries barely above minimum wage. I find it hard to believe that a street thug like Marcus Vick was allowed to return to school. Vick, suspended after participating in the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl, was a known troublemaker long before Tech drafted him. But he was the younger brother of Michael Vick, the legendary Tech quarterback that reached near idol status.

The younger Vick, like far too many college athletes who get fat scholarships, special tutors and a separate, looser, set of rules, knows he doesn’t have to abide by the same code of conduct as those who don’t play football. That’s why his rap sheet includes rape, drug use and other offenses and he’s still allowed to play football and skate by on marginal grades.

Now he leads a team that – until Saturday night – thought it was something special but ran head-on into reality and got put firmly in its place – and that place ain’t in the top of anyone’s national college football rankings.

Those who kneel at the holy grail of college football should remember the words of Ernest Hemingway:

“There are only three sports: mountain climbing, bull fighting, and motor racing. All the rest are merely games.”