'Almosts' only add to intrigue for ODU, NSU

A few things ...

Football seasons are hundreds and hundreds of plays. But it's natural to sort through to find, and lament, the particular ones that directly link to losses, especially when losses have been few.

By that measure, Old Dominion and Norfolk State, nationally ranked teams with three FCS losses between them, are three plays from sharing an even more extraordinary season.

The Monarchs, 9-2 in the CAA, rue the decisive, 63-yard, fourth-and-29 touchdown pass Towson somehow hit them with at the end of their mid-October game at Foreman Field.

Three weeks prior, on the first play after falling behind by a point in the fourth quarter, Delaware struck with a 32-yard pass down the middle for the points that put it up on ODU to stay.

Deconstruction's not as simple for the Spartans, who won the MEAC with a 7-1 record. Their loss was to Bethune-Cookman by eight points. But had Chris Walley and Xavier Boyce connected on a wind-tossed fade pattern in the end zone in the final minute - and had the Spartans aced the two-point conversion to force overtime - well, who knows?

The interception that occurred instead sealed NSU's lone league defeat. Yet, as it does for ODU, the "almost" adds to the intrigue of a playoff-bound season so close to conference-perfect.

Saturday's meeting of coaches Jimbo Fisher of Florida State and Virginia's Mike London will be poignant because of an unlikely, personal coincidence: Both have children afflicted with a rare genetic blood condition called Fanconi anemia.

Eight years ago, London's daughter Ticynn, who's now healthy, endured chemotherapy and radiation and ultimately received a bone-marrow transplant from her father.

Fisher's 6-year-old son Ethan will eventually need a transplant, the family revealed last summer, for a disease that strikes only about three children in a million.

The London and Fisher families have become confidants over this; the latter began an organization called the Kidz 1st Fund to raise money and awareness and, as has been done at U.Va., Florida State is running a campus marrow-registry campaign.

"God puts you on this Earth for a lot of reasons and puts things on your plate for a lot of reasons," Fisher said Monday during a news conference. "Sometimes we don't understand; I didn't and I still don't, but that's part of life. How we handle it I think will help Ethan and help other folks, and that's why we started Kidz 1st."

An on-field subplot of the Cavaliers-Seminoles game will be monitoring how much FSU's quarterback EJ Manuel, a redshirt junior out of Virginia Beach's Bayside High, tries to go after ex-Marlin Tre' Nicholson, U.Va.'s true freshman cornerback.

"I'm sure a lot of people back home have watched pretty much all of my games," Manuel, who's 13th in the country in passing efficiency, said Monday, "but definitely now that we're playing U.Va., it's going to be a huge game."

I'm not a Heisman voter, but I have to believe running back David Wilson's impressive season at eighth-ranked Virginia Tech (9-1) is getting little buzz - he leads the country with 1,360 yards - because he's only scored seven rushing touchdowns and because the Hokies' beaten opponents are blah.

Tech's defeated two FBS teams with a winning record, and one of them is Arkansas State, the Sun Belt leader - but still. Georgia Tech's the other. And the Hokies, of course, were drubbed by Clemson, a loss they'd love to reverse in the ACC title game.

A bad schedule and a bad loss haven't hurt Heisman favorite Andrew Luck of Stanford. Then again, Luck, the quarterback who might have gone first in last year's draft, did enter the season significantly ahead of the field.

I'd expect to see Wilson, if he stays, and quarterback Logan Thomas on Heisman watch lists in a year.

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com