This is contentious stuff. Players and coaches saying they lost a game because the other team played outside the rules; coaches trading barbs in the media; the media going from one program to another, fanning the flames with tit-for-tat comments. This is positively... SEC-like. And in the span of just a few days, a nasty rivalry is born.

Where to start? To bring you up to speed, the Hokies lost a critical program-defining game to Georgia Tech on October 17th -- you already know that. Hokie defensive tackle John Graves was hurt when one of Georgia Tech's offensive guards tied him up briefly, and a GT offensive tackle blocked Graves at the knees from behind. On film, it looks like an illegal chop block -- not cut block, chop block, a play in which one blocker ties up a defender up high, and another blocker cuts him down below the waist. You can't do that, per NCAA rules. It's a 15-yard penalty. And it's a dirty play.

Georgia Tech Coach Paul Johnson, the smart, shifty architect of Georgia Tech's flexbone offense, has been accused in the past of employing chop block tactics in his offensive scheme, toeing the chop block line with his team's blocking methods ... and sometimes stepping over that line. At the very least, it's a violate-the-spirit-but-not-the-letter of the law situation, until his team actually does violate the letter of the law.

Johnson has made a successful coaching career out of pushing and bending the rules, as he did against Clemson earlier this season, when he used a shady substitution trick -- having a player hang out near the sidelines as teammates ran onto and off the field -- to fool Clemson into leaving a receiver uncovered on a special teams play. Georgia Tech threw for a touchdown to the uncovered player, providing what was ultimately the cushion of victory in a 30-27 Georgia Tech win, a win that is now critical in the ACC's Coastal Division standings.

The ACC reviewed the play later that week, determined it was illegal, and told Johnson and the media so. Too little, too late. The victory stands, and it may propel the Jackets to the ACC Championship Game, in lieu of the Hokies.

Fast forward to this week. According to published reports, the Hokies sent in tape of 11 plays from the VT-GT matchup, consisting mostly or completely of what the VT staff considered illegal blocks, to the ACC officials for review. This is standard post-game procedure, nothing new. Georgia Tech submitted 12 plays they considered to be rule violations by the Hokies.

But in Kyle Tucker's blog a couple days ago, Virginia Tech defensive backs coach Torrian Gray let it slip that the ACC had told the Hokies that four of the 11 plays were indeed illegal blocks. That's a no-no. Conversations between schools and the league office about post-game penalty analysis are typically kept private and not aired in public, unless the league office itself publicizes a mistake. I'm not saying there's a rule that it's confidential; I'm just saying that officiating mistakes are generally not talked about by the affected programs, unless the conference talks about them first.

Giving that information out to a member of the media is like throwing that big switch that brings Frankenstein's monster to life: the monster takes on a life of its own, gets up off the table, and winds up stirring up a mob of angry villagers. A crowd with pitchforks and torches eventually shows up, and things get noisy.

Thus it is with this story. Other media outlets have picked it up. Frank Beamer was asked about it on Tech Talk Live last night. He grudgingly addressed it (TTL Notes coming later today to TSL). Other newspapers grilled members of the Tech staff. The ACC's head of officials, Doug Rhoades, even addressed the issue, admitting that mistakes occurred, but declining to give out much additional information. He did, however, wag his finger at Torrian Gray for speaking publicly about it.

And then Paul Johnson got involved.

I'll put aside for the moment the questions of whether Georgia Tech routinely engages in illegal blocking practices. I'll put aside the issue of whether the Hokie coaches should be fussing about this publicly, when they're now two days away from a home game against a conference opponent, someone other than Georgia Tech. I'll even put aside concerns for John Graves and any other GT opponent whose health or career might be threatened by possible illegal blocks.

Those issues are for the coaching staffs and league office to sort out. There are channels and procedures for this. I suspect that this isn't Paul Johnson's first rodeo regarding this issue. He has been running flexbone variations for 25 years now. I'm sure John Graves isn't the first player to get injured by a shady block from a Paul Johnson-coached player, and I'm sure the Hokies aren't the first program to send tape to officials about Johnson's players' blocking methods.

This will all get sorted out in time, one way or another. Back to the focus of this article: a new, nasty rivalry.

The media got to Johnson, and never one to shy away from a chance to be a surly, sharp-tongued interview subject, Johnson fired back. From multiple sources:

"It's two weeks ago. Why are they worried about it now? They got out-schemed. So, it's illegal to out-scheme them, I guess. We blocked them the same way we blocked them a year ago, and they weren't complaining when they won [20-17]. Nobody from the conference called and told us that we did anything illegal."

In other words: "Quit whining, babies." Things just got personal, in both directions, and what we have here now is a genuine rivalry.

In order to have a rivalry, you have to have two teams that play regularly (every year) and you have to have two teams that are capable of beating each other. Each team has to instill fear of losing in the other. The rivalry against Virginia has lost its luster the last few years, because the Cavaliers have for the time being lost the ability to beat Virginia Tech, either on the field or on the recruiting trail.

Rivalries against regular opponents Duke and UNC aren't rivalries at all, because the Hokies and their fans aren't afraid of either program, and neither one has beaten the Hokies since Tech entered the ACC in 2004. The last time Duke beat Tech was 1981, and the last time UNC beat Tech was 1997.

Second, you have to have history. You can't force history, and Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech don't have much of it, having played just six times in ACC play, and seven times overall. But in those seven meetings, the Hokies only hold a slim 4-3 lead.

Third, you have to have some bad blood. Bad blood will light up a rivalry faster than history or fear of losing, and with the back-and-forth between the Hokies and Jackets this week, headlined by Paul Johnson's comments (you can just see him sneering as he says it), this rivalry just got a ton of bad blood added to it.

This element has been missing from Virginia Tech rivalries since the Hokies quit playing WVU. That was a rivalry that had a lot of bad blood, from the couch-burning behavior of WVU fans to the finger-flipping behavior of VT bad boy Marcus Vick in 2005. (And you ought to see a picture I've got of former VT defensive lineman Carlton Powell showing the WVU fans what he thought of them on the sidelines that day. It would violate our terms of service for me to post it, but let's just say that CP and the Eer fans understood each other that day, and neither party will tell their grandchildren the story. Well ... Eer fans might.)

Miami could have been a good, nasty rivalry, but ever since Nate Webster took his sucker-punching, eye-gouging self to the NFL, we've been treated to a steady diet of relatively tame Hurricane behavior, right down to two straight classy coaches (Larry Coker and Randy Shannon). Sure, Jeremy Shockey was a jerk, and Kellen Winslow was a "soldja," but it's been hard to work up real nastiness towards the Canes. The on-field rivalry is good, but the bad blood isn't there.

The last element a really good rivalry needs is that it needs to be personal. The Hokies have made it personal, questioning the very way that Paul Johnson coaches the game, threatening his livelihood. If the ACC gets serious about prosecuting this issue, it will threaten Johnson's ability to win ball game, and thus, threaten his job.

In return, Johnson has told the Hokies, in read-between-the-line fashion, to quit being wimps and quit crying like babies. Johnson hasn't made any friends among Hokie fans with his rhetoric, and when Georgia Tech ventures into Lane Stadium next year, things are going to be loud and intense, just like college football should be. It's an element that is missing from most of Virginia Tech's series with ACC opponents, but intensity just got added to this rivalry. Georgia Tech will get the Miami-WVU treatment in Lane next year.

Again, if you're looking for righteous indignation, you won't find it from me here, although I'll readily admit that the endless pictures of Georgia Tech players diving at the knees of Virginia Tech players is disturbing, to say the least. Obviously, if Georgia Tech is participating in blocking practices that threaten the health and careers of opposing players, it needs to be stopped. But by saying that, I don't add anything new to the discussion, which is going strong in blogs and on TSL's message boards.

Was it really just fours years ago that we were laughing at Reggie Ball, Georgia Tech's Human Turnover Machine of a quarterback, as the Hokies roasted GT 51-7 in Lane Stadium, in 2005? The Jackets weren't the focus of any Hokie ire in that game. The next season, when GT beat the Hokies 38-27 in Lane, VT fans still didn’t pay any attention to the Yellow Jackets, choosing instead to eat their own, Sean Glennon and Bryan Stinespring.

The media coverage this week and message board furor has taken the series with Georgia Tech to a new level, that of "rivalry." As long as Paul Johnson is in Atlanta running that flexbone offense, Virginia Tech fans will be fired up to see Georgia Tech on the schedule. PJ is the new Jeff Jagodzinski, only worse. This one just got nasty.