Hokies, Williams excited about Thursday night bout with UNC

BLACKSBURG — Ryan Williams heard the excitement from his dorm room. That’s where he was almost a year ago to the day when Virginia Tech running back Darren Evans broke the school single-game rushing record with 253 yards in the Hokies’ 23-13 Thursday night win over Maryland.

Lane Stadium was just a short walk away, but Williams, who was redshirting at the time, chose to watch the game on television instead. He didn’t have to pay too close attention to the TV screen. He could tell what was going on with each roar of the crowd.

“It was crazy loud,” said Williams, who has filled in nicely for the injured Evans as the 14th-ranked Hokies’ starting tailback.

Williams will finally get his chance tonight to experience the rush of playing a Thursday night ESPN game when Tech (5-2, 3-1) takes on North Carolina (4-3, 0-3) at Lane Stadium.

“I’m just excited to play in that type of atmosphere,” said Williams, who leads the ACC and is seventh nationally with his 119.1 per game rushing average.

Williams (834 rushing yards, 10 rushing touchdowns in seven games) is on pace to break Evans’ freshman school records of 1,265 yards and 11 rushing touchdowns. One record that would be difficult to top is Evans’ single-game total from last season’s home Thursday night game.

But if history is any indication, Williams could still be in for a big night. A Tech tailback has topped the 200-yard mark in two of the last three Thursday night games at Lane Stadium — Evans last season and Branden Ore (203 against Clemson) in 2006.

Obviously, what Evans and Ore accomplished has nothing to do with Williams, but Tech’s rush offense always seems to get a jolt from playing on national television on Thursday nights. And Williams has already proven to be a spectacular runner by topping the 100-yard mark five times and the 150-yard plateau twice this season.

It seems like breaking 200 is only a matter of time.

Williams, who battled an illness during the week leading up to the Oct. 17 game at Georgia Tech, said he feels much better now, though he lost a lot of weight while sick.

“I’m feeling better. I think it was probably last Monday or Tuesday when I started eating and I could keep it in,” said Williams, who had 122 total yards and two touchdowns against the Yellow Jackets, despite lingering weakness from his illness. “I lost like eight or nine pounds. It’s the first time I weighed in the 190s since my junior year of high school.

“It was kind of scary at first, because I was surviving off of IVs for a couple of days, but I’m back to being normal. I can eat. I don’t wake up weak anymore. It feels good to go to practice and not feel like I got somebody 400 pounds on my back or something like that for the whole day.”

Tech coach Frank Beamer hopes his team is back to normal after a less-than-stellar performance in its last game against Georgia Tech.

He said he got a good vibe from his players during practice last week, but the proof will come tonight when the Hokies make their 20th Thursday night ESPN appearance.

“I think our coaches and players put that loss behind them and moved on,” Beamer said.

While it’s true the Hokies’ ACC championship hopes are on life support — they need Georgia Tech to lose to either Wake Forest on Nov. 7 or to Duke on Nov. 14 to move back into the Coastal Division lead — they still feel there is plenty to play for.

The biggest prize could be an at-large BCS bowl berth to either the Sugar Bowl or Fiesta Bowl. Tech would most certainly need to win out to make one of those major bowls, and they would also need a little help, too.

But for now, the Hokies will concern themselves with what they can control, and that is playing North Carolina, a team that has beaten one team from a BCS conference after entertaining ACC championship hopes at the start of the season.

Tech isn’t short on motivation. Perhaps most importantly, it’s eager to get back on the field and make amends for its loss to the Yellow Jackets.

“Yeah, we’re upset about the loss,” Tech linebacker Cody Grimm said. “We know what kind of team we can be. I think we’re just going to go out and do what we’ve been doing, and hopefully offense and defense can put it together, kind of like we did (in a 48-14 win over Boston College).”