So naturally it didn't take long for a smart businessman like Mike Finney to figure it out. Right after the Illinois-born Finney married a Christiansburg native, moved to the New River Valley, opened his own Sign-A-Rama franchise and found himself at his very first Virginia Tech football game with the Hokies pitted against the Duke Blue Devils, his brain got busy. "We were tailgating," Finney remembered. "I saw all the VTs and Hokie Bird heads - kind of blah. I came in Monday and talked to Kevin and said, 'We've got to come up with a new idea.'"

Kevin is Kevin Altizer, a 26-year-old Radford University graduate and graphic designer who works in the store Finney opened last November. Altizer, a longtime Hokie fan, agreed with his boss. Deep in his soul, he knew a new Hokie Bird was waiting to be hatched.

"Everything you see is a profile," Altizer said, referring to familiar Hokie Bird illustrations. "You never see a full frontal view of the Hokie Bird. I wanted a cartoon aspect where he's moving."

Altizer said the birth of his bird was relatively painless. After only three hours of labor, the new bird came kicking - if not screaming - into the world.

He said it took maybe two hours to get the bird out of his head and onto his sketchbook.

Altizer's depiction is of a burly bird bearing the number 1 ("Just to say Hokies are No. 1," he noted). The determined gobbler is charging full-steam ahead with a football tucked under its wing and a turkey talon extended in midair.

Finney loved it.

"I know these are going to sell like hot cakes," he said, beaming.

Finney, whose Sign-A-Rama franchise is in Christiansburg's Spradlin Farm shopping center, made up a batch of magnetic signs featuring Altizer's design. The process involved printing digital pictures of the drawing and attaching them to aroll of magnetic material. After the magnetic images were laminated, they were cut with a dye-cutting machine. Finney sent an example of the finished product to Locke White, Virginia Tech's director of licensing and trademarks.

"I really liked it, and I think it will do exceptionally well," White said. "It's different from a lot of things we have seen."

White said his office licenses about 500 companies that offer about 10,000 different Hokie products. When he comes to the office on a Monday morning - especially after a big Hokie win - he expects his message light to be blinking.

"Everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon," he noted.

Jumping on the bandwagon, however, isn't without risk. White said companies have to pay a $250 annual advance on royalties and take out $1 million worth of liability insurance to be licensed. Virginia Tech also gets 8 percent of the proceeds from wholesale sales of products though a royalty agreement.

Finney said his company is happy to support the university and expects to have the signs in university bookstores soon. He also hopes to put them in local Wal-Mart stores where everything from Hokie wine to Hokie windsocks are marketed.

For customers who can't wait, his Sign-A-Rama store in Christiansburg has signs available at $16 for the large 8-by-11-inch size and $12 for the smaller 5-by-7-inch size.

Finney already has a sign on his Toyota Camry. He claims people notice.

"Kevin and I were on campus last Friday," he said. "People were staring at us, pointing at us, talking about us. I'm just surprised at the response we get [from the signs]. I've given away about 50 of them. Everybody loves them."

Finney thinks he knows why, too. Even a birdbrain could figure it out.

"It's football!" he bellowed as he gazed at the new Hokie Bird magnet. "He looks like he's ready to win the national championship."