The Virginia Tech fanbase seems a little uncertain about how to gauge this win, and I’m there, too. Taking it one game at a time, 35-14 doesn’t look bad in the score roundups, and plenty of big-name teams fared much worse. Mitchell’s injury certainly sours it, but it doesn’t change the final score. But if this is a team we want to see take advantage of Coastal chaos before staging a coup against Clemson, it wasn’t the performance that’ll have anyone looking for hotels in Charlotte.

In the big picture, the good news is that Tech won handily. The bad news is that the Hokies started slow. But the good news is that Tech played with one hand tied behind its back because of intentionally conservative play-calling, and they showed that they could tear open an opponent’s seams when they wanted to. The bad news is that the Hokies were sloppy. But some additional good news is that there were spots in the game where Tech showed some clear athletic advantages over MTSU—it might be damning with faint praise, but there’ve been some recent games against non-P5 opponents where we didn’t see many of those moments—and good play from the linebackers and running backs. On the other hand, even when they pulled things together and showed clear advantages in matchups, the Hokies couldn’t impose their will on the Blue Raiders, particularly on the LOS, and the passing game failed to impress.  

We’ve seen games before where the Hokies had a very vanilla plan, but this was Dollar General imitation vanilla flavoring. Against a defense that had problems dealing with backfield action and receiver motion, the Hokie offense was nearly static early in the game. When the Hokie defense took the field, they didn’t do much to confuse a suspect offensive line or rattle a quarterback who, when pressured, has the decision-making skills of a drunk teenager.

Going through the first quarter, most of the Hokies’ plays were base zone runs, screens, and hitting one-on-one matchups. There wasn’t much in the way of changing up tendencies, mixing action in the backfield, or running any of the motions that MT struggled with. That’s not bad in itself if you’re looking to test your team, provided the team passes the test. Tech’s offense, though, struggled in the first quarter until they opened up with things like jet motion and attacking the backside of zone plays (both of which you saw on their first TD drive.) Tech’s defense, on the other hand, did well except for a spell where MT figured out the Hokies were going play a base front with off coverage on nearly every snap.

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