NEWPORT NEWS, VA. ? Attention all Hokie math nerds, and you know who you are: Let’s attempt to decipher, without aid of calculator, computer or slide rule, what must happen for Virginia Tech’s football team to qualify for the national title game.

First, the bad news: Your Hokies are sixth in this week’s Bowl Championship Series standings, and in four previous years of BCS calculations, no team outside of the top three at this stage of the season cracked the top two to land in the title game.

Now, the good news: Tech’s one-week leap from 16th to sixth is the most dramatic in what we can only hope will be the BCS’ brief existence.

Amazing what a 31-7 dusting of No. 2 Miami does for a team’s rep. But will it be enough?

It depends on a series of events more unlikely than the return of Comet Kohoutek and the reincarnation of former Hokie Frank Peake. Then again, this is a college football season in which Duke beat Rice, which beat Nevada, which beat Washington, which beat Oregon State, which beat California, which beat Southern California. Meaning, of course, that Duke would whip USC. Right?

Anyway, the biggest “if” in our equation is Tech.

To have any chance of earning a return trip to the Sugar Bowl, the Hokies must win their four remaining regular-season games at Pittsburgh, at Temple, Boston College and at Virginia.

Saturday’s conquest of Miami aside, four more victories hardly are a given, and the sternest test figures to be the first. Pitt (6-2, 3-0 Big East) has defeated Tech (7-1, 3-1) the past two seasons, boasts an all-galaxy receiver in Larry Fitzgerald and is primed for its finest season since Dan Marino led the 1982 Panthers to the Cotton Bowl.

But for kicks, let’s say the Hokies finish the regular season 11-1. To qualify for New Orleans, they’d have to pass four of the five teams ahead of them in the BCS standings — Oklahoma, USC, Florida State, Miami and Ohio State — and hold off seventh-place Louisiana State.

Virginia Tech's DeAngelo Hall tackles Miami's Jarrett Payton. The Hokies defeated the Hurricanes Saturday at Blacksburg, Va.

Tech leads LSU by a substantial margin, 2.45 points, but if the 8-1 Tigers defeat Mississippi and Arkansas and win the Southeastern Conference championship game, they could, depending on computers and pollsters, bypass the Hokies.

A quick aside on the computer ratings used by the BCS, specifically those produced by Jeff Sagarin: They’re a joke. This week Sagarin has Miami No. 2, Bowling Green No. 4, Miami of Ohio No. 7 and Tech No. 20. And BCS officials wonder why we mock this nonsense.

Alas, we’re stuck with it, so back to Tech’s plight. Each of the five teams ahead of the Hokies face difficult games, with Ohio State the most likely to lose, Oklahoma the least likely. The Buckeyes because they play Michigan State, Purdue and Michigan; the Sooners because they’re so good.

The most maddening possibility for Tech is to finish third in the BCS standings behind Miami. Here’s how it could happen:

USC, Florida State and Ohio State lose their respective rivalry games to UCLA, Florida and Michigan. Then LSU falls in the SEC title game, leaving Miami and Tech as the one-loss candidates to face Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl.

Logic dictates the Hokies, unless their 24-point victory against the Hurricanes was as fictional as ESPN’s “Playmakers.” But logic means nothing to the BCS. Miami stands two spots and 2.22 points ahead of Tech, and victories against Tennessee and Pittsburgh probably would be enough to retain that edge.

The culprits, again, are computers. Miami’s average ranking is 2.83, Tech’s 6.17.

No math nerd, computer program or football fan can justify that.