In 2014, Louisiana Tech University released a commercial that ended with a particularly bold claim:
Louisiana Tech is not a Tech. It is THE Tech.
Now we were probably meant to accept or forget this and move on with our lives. But instead, this assertion sat in the back of my mind for 12 years and has slowly driven me insane. So to finally give myself some peace, I set out to settle this matter once and for all with a 16-team bracket pitting every collegiate “Tech” against each other.
The Field
Our bracket includes the obvious teams you’ve probably heard of:
Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Texas Tech, and Louisiana Tech
The states you may not have known had a “Tech”:
Michigan Tech, Montana Tech, Tennessee Tech, Arkansas Tech, Florida Tech, New York Tech, and Indiana Tech
Some schools that contain the word “Tech” in their full legal name, but typically go by a shorthand name that doesn’t include it:
MIT, RIT, Cal Poly, and Missouri S&T
And one more Tech thrown in for good measure:
Lawrence Tech
Round of 16
Georgia Tech vs. MIT. A genuine battle of engineering heavyweights starts us off, the two schools that could each claim to embody “technology” more credibly than anyone else in the field. So instead we’ll look at football. But it’s not just D1 Georgia Tech vs D3 MIT that decides it. The only reason MIT has football now is because a group of students in 1978 started a team in secret and secured hand-me-down uniforms from the Rochester Institute of Technology before even approaching the university. If you have to “hack” your school to get a sport sponsored, you don’t have the institutional support to win this tournament. Georgia Tech wins.
Virginia Tech vs. Florida Tech. Florida Tech is probably best celebrated for its strong NASA ties, which is very techy. But although Florida Tech has five astronaut alumni to Virginia Tech’s two, NASA’s first flight director and architect of Mission Control (Chris Kraft) was a Hokie. Virginia Tech wins.
Texas Tech vs. Arkansas Tech. At about 35,000 students, Texas Tech has the largest undergraduate enrollment of any school on this list. Unfortunately, among that rank was (until recently) Brendan Sorsby and his eligibility drama. A school that feels the need to release a 21-minute video defending their actions doesn’t deserve to move forward. Arkansas Tech advances.
Louisiana Tech vs. New York Tech. Louisiana Tech can bring up the historical success it’s had in nearly every sport, but it truly doesn’t matter here, because New York Tech suspended their entire athletic department in 2019 and has yet to reinstate it. Louisiana Tech moves on.
Michigan Tech vs. Lawrence Tech. Two Michigan schools, but not two equal ones. Michigan Tech sits way up in Houghton on the remote Keweenaw Peninsula, the Upper Peninsula of the Upper Peninsula. Lawrence Tech is a perfectly respectable private school in suburban Detroit, but it is smaller and younger. And if one school should advance out of the Great Lakes State, it should be Michigan Tech.
Tennessee Tech vs. Indiana Tech. Tennessee Tech’s Golden Eagles face Indiana Tech, whose mascot is Maximus, a Roman soldier. But this proves to be Indiana Tech’s undoing. The ancient Romans practiced augury (reading omens in the flight of birds) and Maximus could very well take one look at the Golden Eagle circling overhead, interpret it as a sign of certain defeat, and concede. So, uhh, I’ll say that happens here. Tennessee Tech advances.
Montana Tech vs. Rochester Institute of Technology RIT’s campus is called “Brick City,” earned by the roughly 15.7 million bricks that make up its buildings and walkways. Only the Great Wall of China can dwarf that number. Montana Tech, meanwhile, sits in Butte overlooking the Berkeley Pit, a former open-pit mine now filled with water so acidic it has killed migrating geese mid-flight. That’s a campus backdrop a bit more awe-inspiring than a stack of bricks. Montana Tech advances.
Cal Poly vs. Missouri S&T. This one comes down to geography. Missouri S&T plays in Rolla, a perfectly respectable town in the middle of Missouri whose chief selling point is a half-scale partial replica of Stonehenge. Cal Poly, meanwhile, is in San Luis Obispo, which is routinely ranked one of the happiest towns in America. When one team’s home-field advantage is “the weather is perfect and everyone here is cheerful,” it’s a fairly easy choice. Cal Poly advances.
Quarterfinals
Georgia Tech vs. Virginia Tech. A genuine heavyweight bout, and one both schools clearly believe is the title game. They call their rivalry the Battle of the Techs, apparently having decided amongst themselves that no other Tech merits consideration. That said, let’s look at the 2007 “Jerseygate” meeting, when someone swiped four Virginia Tech jerseys from the visiting locker room before kickoff, forcing several Hokies to play in Georgia Tech’s spare whites with their names Sharpied onto handmade nameplates.
Virginia Tech won that game 27-3 while literally wearing Georgia Tech’s clothes. On the strength of that historical humiliation, Virginia Tech advances.
Arkansas Tech vs. Louisiana Tech. Let’s actually take a look at Arkansas Tech now after they advanced past Texas Tech by default in the last round. The women play as the Golden Suns, which sounds less like a team name and more like a retirement community in Boca Raton. And the men are the Wonder Boys, a nickname makes me think of exactly one thing: Robin, the Boy Wonder. Which means Arkansas Tech has voluntarily aligned itself with the sidekick.
And if the movie Sky High taught me anything, it’s that you cannot be The Tech when your own nickname concedes you’re someone else’s number two (though I may have misunderstood the moral of that movie). Louisiana Tech advances.
Michigan Tech vs. Tennessee Tech. Both schools are excellent but almost no one outside their state has heard of either. So let’s take another angle. Michigan Tech owns a 19-ton mass of native “Lake Copper,” the Guinness-certified largest piece of natural copper ever hauled out of any body of water. Since copper is arguably the throughline of human technology: from making up most of the bronze in the Bronze Age to the wire that powered the Electrical Age, Michigan Tech, in other words, sits on a record-setting boulder of the one element most important in the history of technology.
Meanwhile, the closest thing Tennessee Tech has is a baseball player named Cooper Casteel, whose first name at a glance kinda looks the word copper? Michigan Tech advances
Montana Tech vs. Cal Poly. San Luis Obispo, the home of Cal Poly, has a beloved local landmark called Bubblegum Alley. It is a 70-foot corridor whose walls are coated, floor to fifteen feet up, in decades of chewed gum left by passers-by, a tradition widely credited to Cal Poly students starting back in the 1950s. It is, for all intents and purposes, a wall of other people’s spit. Gross gross gross. Cal Poly is disqualified.
Semifinals
Virginia Tech vs. Louisiana Tech. Virginia Tech sounds like the favorite here. While the Hokies don’t boast any national championships in the major sports, Virginia Tech has finished in with a top-10 ranking in football five times since 1995. But it’s actually 1987 that we need to look back to.
In one of the rare NCAA rulings to hammer a school’s football and basketball programs at the same time, Virginia Tech was found to have stockpiled scholarships for years (at one point fielding 114 players on scholarship, nearly twenty over the limit) while its basketball program racked up more than a dozen violations, including a booster helping finance a player’s wife’s car.
The scandal resulted in the dismissal of head football coach Bill Dooley, the uncle of former Louisiana Tech coach Derek Dooley. This paved the way for hiring of Frank Beamer, the coach that brought the Hokies all those top-ten finishes in the 90s and 2000s.
But it’s unfair that being found guilty of NCAA violations actually helps a team in the long run, so I’m finally creating real consequences after 40 years and eliminating the Hokies. Louisiana Tech heads to the finals.
Michigan Tech vs. Montana Tech. A true mirror match: two engineering schools born from mining booms, one in Houghton on Michigan’s copper-rich Keweenaw, the other in Butte, once one of the largest copper-producing cities on earth. Both towns are also monuments to American labor history: Butte was famously known as “the Gibraltar of Unionism,” and the Keweenaw Peninsula was the site of the long, bitter 1913-14 copper miners’ strike.
So to decide this one, let’s lean on scale. Michigan Tech is the larger institution, with the deeper engineering bench and the bigger student body, and in a tournament about being The Tech, “simply more Tech” seems like a fair enough argument. Michigan Tech advances.
The Championship
Ah yes, the matchup everyone predicted when they opened this post: Louisiana Tech vs Michigan Tech. Let’s break this matchup down into some solid categories:
Level of Competition: Louisiana Tech competes in Division I, the top tier of college sports. Meanwhile, Michigan Tech plays Division II for every sport except men’s hockey. Advantage Louisiana Tech.
National Championships: Luckily for Michigan Tech, that men’s hockey team has brought the Huskies a bit of success over the years – three Division I national championships in 1962, 1965, and 1975. Meanwhile, Louisiana Tech can counter with the Lady Techsters, who won three national championships of their own (1981, 1982, 1988) in women’s basketball. Tie.
Professional Athlete Pedigree: Louisiana Tech produced Karl Malone, one of the greatest players in NBA history. The Bulldog football program sent Terry Bradshaw, Fred Dean, and Willie Roaf to the NFL and later on to the Hall of Fame in Canton.
Michigan Tech, meanwhile, has roughly five NFL players that have come through campus. A list headlined by Bob “Benchwarmer Bob” Lurtsema, a journeyman defensive lineman whose most consequential moment in the NFL was a roughing-the-passer penalty in 1972 that extended a late Miami Dolphins drive, helped cost his own Vikings the game, and paved the way for the Dolphins to complete the only perfect undefeated season in NFL history. Oh, and on the basketball side, the Huskies have produced 0 NBA players. Advantage Louisiana Tech.
School Seniority: Founded in 1885 as the Michigan Mining School, Michigan Tech predates Louisiana Tech (established in 1894 as the Industrial Institute and College of Louisiana) by nearly a decade. Advantage Michigan Tech.
Costumed Mascot: Louisiana Tech has Champ, a friendly costumed bulldog. But it’s worth noting not only is “Champ” a fairly generic name, the mascot design itself is also not unique. The University of Minnesota Duluth also has a Champ the Bulldog that looks awfully familiar:
Michigan Tech, meanwhile, has Blizzard T. Husky. Blizzard is also a mildly generic anthropomorphized dog mascot, but the difference here is the name. The “T” in Blizzard T. Husky quite literally stands for “The.” As in “Blizzard The Husky.” And since this whole tournament is to decide who “The” Tech is, advantage Michigan Tech.
Live Mascot: Not only does Louisiana Tech win this category by default since Michigan Tech lacks a live husky mascot, the Bulldog mascot’s name is literally Tech. And what’s more Tech than Tech? Advantage Louisiana Tech.
The Champion
Winning three categories to two in the final round, we can now confidently say that the 2014 commercial was correct.
Louisiana Tech is The Tech.
And I can finally rest.
