The folks in Vegas aren’t fooled by the strong possibility that Virginia Tech is going to have to go with its third-string freshman quarterback.

UVA Football lost tailbacks Xavier Brown (broken collarbone) and Kobe Pace (knee) during last week’s 33-7 loss to College Football Playoff contender SMU.

“It’s two in-state schools. It’s houses divided. It’s bragging rights,” UVA coach Tony Elliott said on Tuesday, musing on the topic of, ahem, rivalry week, such as the annual UVA-Virginia Tech football series can be considered a “rivalry.”

There even is a UVA Football program because the University of Virginia, like every other college and university in America that plays football, has made a Faustian bargain. We, like the others, let kids truck each other into head injuries and various other upper- and lower-body injuries and maladies involving broken bones and ligament and cartilage tears and bruised spleens and the like that will affect them the rest of their lives – the whole point to us doing that being, because it gets other kids to decide to apply for admission.