The Orange Bowl has possibly the hottest team in the country -- outside of TCU, Oregon and Auburn -- in Virginia Tech who has reeled off 11 straight games since their 0-2 start that featured loses to Boise State and James Madison who hails from the FCS division. Luckily for the Hokies they are in a BCS league, because had they been on the outside looking in there would have been no chance of them getting to the Orange Bowl.
Stanford is possibly the best one-loss team in the country and have one of the best NFL quarterback prospects in Andrew Luck, the Cardinal only loss came against Oregon and in that game they started out with an early 21-3 lead before falling to the Duck offense.
Both defenses will be tested as Stanford plays a physical brand of football with the ability to beat teams in the passing game with Luck slinging the ball around. Virginia Tech has a mobile quarterback Tyrod Taylor that Stanford will need to keep tabs on, plus they have running backs Ryan Williams and Darren Evans who both averaged over 10 yards per carry.
This also could be Jim Harbaugh's last game as rumors are heating up that he may replace Rich Rodriguez at Michigan.
The line on this game has Stanford favored by three points and for reference the game opened as a pick'em. Now onto the experts predictions.
Rivals - All four writers go with Stanford and as do 77 percent of the players in the Yahoo pick'em game.
CBS Sports - Three of the five are taking Jim Harbaugh and Stanford.
USA Today - Seven of the eight writers are taking Stanford.
Fanhouse - Brett McMurphy makes his picks by the spread and takes Stanford to cover the three points.
AccuScore - The computer takes Virginia Tech at 51 percent which is a surprise and the average final score is 29.4 to 28.6.
ESPN Bloggers - National blogger Andrea Adelson takes Stanford to win 37-24, Pac-10 blogger Ted Miller also takes Stanford and ACC blogger Heather Dinich takes Stanford 35-31.
The Orange Bowl kicks off at 6:30 p.m. (MT) on ESPN.