Five things you don’t need to know about Virginia

Last week we looked at five non-key elements for the Marshall game. This week the Hoos come to town, and below you will find some key things to not pay attention to on Saturday.

• Virginia defeated Princeton in 1890 by a score of 116-0, amassing more points in a single game than they scored during the entirety of the Mike London era (please do not fact check).
• UVA’s famous Rotunda Clock, the clock that sits atop the iconic Rotunda building (hence Rotunda Clock) had to have bulletproof hands installed on it during the school’s early days. Students liked to shoot off the hands, like literally shoot them with guns, and the school was forced to make it bulletproof. Apparently, students were doing this while riding horses as well, which seems extraordinarily difficult to me.
• Thomas Jefferson, who founded the school and did some presidenting also, was obsessed with Mockingbirds. We’re not talking normal obsessed either, if there is such a thing. He was batshit. Jefferson had a pet Mockingbird named Dick, whom he would let eat food right out of his mouth. He also wrote this to a friend regarding the mockingbird: “Teach all the children to venerate it as a superior being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs.” Yeah, dude was whack.
• Virginia was the first team from the south in the history of the game to take down juggernaut Yale. The Ivy League being the SEC of the 1900s is still weird to me. The school newspaper headline read “Yale Bowl a Soup Tureen—Virginia Eleven Serves Dish of Bulldog Stew!” This is the most 1900s football headline ever and I’m extremely here for a return of this type of writing. I would like to request, should State win on Saturday, that the BTP contributor who writes the game recap write the entire thing in this tone. Also, maybe I’m just an idiot millennial, but I had to google tureen. Yale won the next year 61-3.
• Within the Rotunda building itself, you can find a long table with a fireplace at the end. Long ago, students would present their papers to professors here and if they really sucked, the professors would toss them in the fireplace. The seat at the end of the table became known as the “hot seat” as a result. The seat was relocated to Mike London’s office in 2012.