I’ve had a ton of good stuff to watch and write about so far this season.  Even most of the downers (shotgun snaps, I’m looking at you) got fixed.  If there’s one thing that’s been bothering me, it’s been the relative lack of a strong, conventional ground game.  Tech hasn’t been bad by any stretch, but compared to other aspects the highlight reel is pretty short.  Chris Coleman’s column touching on the subject confirmed something was going on.

There’s a spectrum to the college football run-game.  On one end, you’ve got schools like Flexbone-heavy Georgia Tech, where the team’s misdirection and movement confuse and beguile the defense into making mistakes.  These plays can work even if your linemen aren’t much better than speed bumps, and indeed many of these schemes only ask that linemen serve this purpose. On the other end, you have schools like Alabama, and squads from Wisconsin and Stanford of a few years back, that rely on brute physicality to move defenders around and pick up yards even against favorably aligned defenses.  For this article, I’ll call the divergent styles “misdirection” and “brute-force.”

To my eye, the Hokie running game has been more Yellow Jacket jitterbug than it’s been a ‘Bama bulldozer, though before now I haven’t looked at it in depth.  I’ve been itching to dig deeper, and used the bye weekend to do so.  My focus was on the offensive line.

I (very unscientifically) chose to review the first two quarters of the BC and ECU games.  I left out Tennessee because of how odd that game worked out to be, and Liberty because they’re FCS and the Hokies never had their foot on the gas.  I chose the first two quarters of the BC and ECU games because I felt it was more important to see the team’s performance when the game was undecided, and before substitutions, fatigue, desperation, and demoralization became factors. From those quarters, I only charted called runs (so QB scrambles off busted pass plays didn’t make the list) and plays where Evans was in the game (suddenly throwing Motley in the game has a way of catching folks with their pants down that isn’t reflected when they know he’s coming.)  This ended up being 29 plays that I think will give us our most honest evaluation of the run game, as well as our best preview of what to expect versus ACC competition.

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