Whew, that was horrific. The offense was okay, but defensively, the Hokies rolled out a bad game plan and doubled down by executing it terribly. The team hung in there for a while, but something went wrong (the ball bounced off Sean Savoy’s facemask on a punt return), and they collapsed mentally, tightened up offensively, and folded up defensively. The result was brutal.

Everyone’s got a lot of questions, but some of them won’t be answered for the next one to three years.

• Is Virginia Tech really this bad?
• Do the Hokies have any defensive line talent in the pipeline?
• Will these young players get better, or do they have an inherent talent problem?
• Where’s the leadership going to come from?
• Can the Hokies win any more games this season, and are the UVA streak and bowl streak in jeopardy?
• Is Justin Fuente in over his head?
• Is the Hokie Football world caving in, and is everything Frank Beamer built being destroyed forever?

Okay, that last one is melodramatic, but when you lose a game like this one, in which the defense is non-competitive and the other team scores 35 straight points — something that hasn’t happened to Virginia Tech since Florida State took a 41-0 lead in 1989 — it engenders all kinds of reactions.

You can scan that list of questions, though, and see that we won’t have definitive answers to some of them for a few years. No one likes to hear that, because everyone’s nervous, and they want to know what’s going to happen. But you can’t, not with certainty.

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