♬ Hey there ‘Dominion ♬
♬ What’s it like in east Virginia ♬
♬ You’re a thousand miles away ♬
♬ But school, tonight you look so petty ♬
♬Yes, you do ♬
At just over 1,000 miles away, Old Dominion is the farthest school from Ruston in the Sun Belt.
In the twelve years Louisiana Tech spent in Conference USA, the scheduling relationship was adversarial at best, especially at the end. In 2024 the league had Tech host Middle Tennessee on a Thursday night and then play at New Mexico State the following Tuesday. The next fall, as a parting gift, C-USA sent us to Delaware. The Sun Belt, meanwhile, threw the ‘Dogs a bone. Fresh off the buyout Louisiana Tech had to pay to get out of C-USA, the new league had its farthest flung member make the trip to Ruston instead.
So let’s take a look at the last remaining school on Tech’s 2026 football schedule and find our reasons for hate.
Reason 1: Royal Roadblock
Grievance Rating: 9/10
Before the Lady Techsters were a dynasty, Old Dominion was the thing standing between them and being a dynasty.
In 1979, the Lady Techsters reached the AIAW national championship game for the first time in program history, after running Tennessee off the floor 102-84 in the quarterfinals. Waiting for them were the Lady Monarchs and Nancy Lieberman. Old Dominion won 75-65.
The next year, Tech got back to the national semifinals. Again it was Old Dominion that ended the Techsters’ title campaign, this time with Anne Donovan alongside Lieberman, in a 73-59 win. The Monarchs went on to win their second straight title and Tech went home fourth after losing the third place game to South Carolina.
The Lady Techsters finally broke through in 1981, the first of three national championships. But consider what those two losses cost. Win either one and Tech sits on four, which would be more combined AIAW and NCAA titles than any program in the sport except UConn and Tennessee. Old Dominion took both chances away.
But while the Monarchs taketh, they also giveth.
The year after that first Tech championship, the Techsters won the first NCAA-sponsored national title ever contested. Hosting that event was Old Dominion University, in their Norfolk, Virginia backyard.
And the following March, in the 1983 national semifinals, Tech beat Old Dominion 71-55 on the way to the title game.
Reason 2: Fifty-Four and No More
Grievance Rating: 9/10
Oh, we’re not done with women’s basketball. On January 29, 1982, Louisiana Tech walked into the Old Dominion Fieldhouse riding the longest winning streak in the history of women’s college basketball with 54 straight victories.
It spanned the entire 34-0 AIAW championship season of 1980-81 and the first twenty games of 1981-82. And most of the games were not even close. 50 of the 54 came by double digits. The record would stand for two decades until UConn came along.
But Win 55 never happened. Old Dominion won 61-58.
That was the only loss in a 35-1 season. The only loss across two full seasons. Louisiana Tech played 89 games between the fall of 1980 and the spring of 1982 and lost exactly one of them, in Norfolk, to Old Dominion.
Now let’s go to the alternate universe where Tech wins that night and nothing else changes. The Techsters close the season with 15 more wins and that first NCAA championship, then win the 1982-83 opener before falling to Southern Cal 64-58.
That is a winning streak of 71 games, which would have survived the 70-game run UConn put together between 2001 and 2003.
In the long run though, the Huskies do still get the record. Their 90-game run passed 71 in March 2010. But that would have been seven more years of the longest winning streak in the history of women’s basketball belonging to Louisiana Tech.
Reason 3: Six Points
Grievance Rating: 7/10
Despite an eight year overlap as members of Conference USA, Louisiana Tech and Old Dominion have only played each other twice in football. Both were decided by three points.
The first meeting came in 2014, Old Dominion’s first season in the FBS ranks. The Bulldogs, in a season that would end with a bowl victory over Illinois, led by 14 in the second quarter in Norfolk and took a 24-14 lead into the half. But with Tech unable to put up any points in the second half, Old Dominion was able to force overtime and complete the 30-27 upset.
Old Dominion quarterback Taylor Heinicke, who would go on to become the only starting playoff quarterback in Washington Football Team history, threw four interceptions in that game. For comparison, the last Tech quarterback to throw four interceptions and win a football game was Jason Martin in 1996, which was not long after Heinicke was born.
The rematch came seven years later, also in Norfolk. The Bulldogs led 20-17 with twelve minutes left in the game, but ODU tied it with just under two minutes to go. And after Tech turned it over on downs, the Monarchs were able to hit a 46-yard game winner as time expired.
So we’ll see if Tech is able to find its own home field advantage when the Monarchs come to Ruston for the first time.
Reason 4: Thanks for the Precedent
Grievance Rating: 4/10
In October 2021, following the announcement that six schools were leaving Conference USA for the American Athletic Conference, Old Dominion, Marshall and Southern Miss announced they were also leaving, for the Sun Belt. Conference USA bylaws required fourteen months of notice. The three schools sued, settled, and were gone eight months later. The reported price was $1.75 million apiece.
In July 2025, Louisiana Tech announced it was leaving Conference USA for the Sun Belt, effective July 1, 2026. That is twelve months of notice, four more than Old Dominion gave. Tech’s lawsuit said so directly, arguing that the conference had let Marshall, Old Dominion and Southern Miss out with less warning and that Tech deserved the same treatment.
Louisiana Tech got a settlement in April 2026. The reported figure was north of $8 million.
Is that Old Dominion’s fault? Not really. But their exit in 2021 is exactly what rallied the Conference USA offices to prepare for the next departure, which turned out to be ours.
Reason 5: The Little Engine That Couldn't
Grievance Rating: 3/10
In December 1999, Old Dominion announced it was building a magnetic levitation (maglev) train across its campus. It would be the first of its kind in the country, a fourteen million dollar project with Lockheed Martin and Dominion Virginia Power on board. Ground broke in August 2001.
The plan was a one kilometer elevated guideway with three stations, running from the Powhatan Avenue residence halls to the convocation center garage. One train running every four minutes at 40 miles per hour, carrying 140 people, free to ride.
The guideway went up. The track went down. The vehicle, a modified railcar salvaged off a dead system in Florida, was placed on it in 2002.
It only moved about 45 feet.
Then it stopped. It rattled, it bumped, it vibrated. The contractor got sued for not paying its own subcontractors and eventually walked away from the deal entirely. ODU took a $2 million federal loan in 2003 to keep going and estimated it needed $5 million more just to finish building the stations.
At that point the university announced it would stop trying to operate a transit system and would instead study maglev technology. You know what they say. Those who can’t do, teach.
By 2010 they were selling the steel track for scrap to fund the research and demolishing one of the half built stations. Students started calling it the “mag left.” When the university finally tore it down in the summer of 2023, students were upset, because by then it was a landmark. Only a single segment still remains, spanning Hampton Boulevard.
But the trouble with trains extends past the campus border.
Norfolk has been trying to build a train eighteen miles to the coast in Virginia Beach since 1986. Even after Virginia Beach voted it down in 1999, Norfolk built its half anyway, stopping at the city line with its beachfront neighbor. Just before the transit line opened in 2011, Virginia Beach spent $40 million buying the old rail corridor to the beach. But even after owning the land, the citizens of Virginia Beach voted down the extension in 2016 by a 57 to 43 margin. The city repaid the state and is now paving the corridor into a walking trail. And there’s nothing that gets you in a beach-faring mood more than a 12-mile walk first.
Reason 6: A Different Name Game
Grievance Rating: 1/10
Quick. It came up a lot in that last section, but how have you been pronouncing Norfolk in your head?
I can almost bet you that you said it wrong. Everyone says it wrong.
It is actually pronounced NAW-fuk, or NOR-fuk, or NAW-fik. What it is not is NOR-folk.
Which is to say that the locals will keep correcting you until you have pronounced their city Nor-fuck.
A Fortune 500 railroad, the headquarters of NATO’s only North American command, and the proper way to refer to the place is a word I can’t say again lest I lose my PG-13 rating.
Reason 6: A Different Name Game
Grievance Rating: 1/10
On January 1, 1776, Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, parked his fleet in the Elizabeth River and opened fire on Norfolk, the largest town in the colony. Within days most of it was gone, and within weeks essentially all of it was. No American city has ever been destroyed as completely.
But the British bombardment accounted for only nineteen buildings. The rest was Patriot troops from Virginia and North Carolina, who burned and looted the town over three days and then finished the job in February so that the crown could not use the port. Thomas Jefferson had written the phrase “Delenda est Norfolk” before any of it started, borrowing from Cato on Carthage. Norfolk must be destroyed.
Only a single colonial building survived, St. Paul’s Church, and there is a cannonball lodged in its wall to this day. Underneath it is a plaque that reads FIRED BY LORD DUNMORE JAN 1, 1776.
And then, in August 1961, Old Dominion, a school that was celebrating its own independence from the College of William and Mary, needed a nickname for its athletic teams.
In a city that both sides of a war had wanted burned to the ground, they went with the Monarchs.
The Reunion
They knocked us out of two national tournaments. They beat us to the Sun Belt. They beat us twice in football by three points each time. But when they arrive in Ruston on October 24th, Louisiana Tech can start its revenge.