Last Thursday’s game was an old-school Virginia Tech Thursday night beatdown. The Hokies put themselves in a hole during the month of September and then spent the month of October climbing out of it, but they’ve done it and are now even at 4-4 with momentum for the stretch run.

A lot of the discussion since Thursday night has centered around the idea that this season’s turnaround (admittedly one that is still in progress) differs from anything we’ve ever seen from Virginia Tech football.

To sum it up concisely, we’ve seen talented Virginia Tech teams get off to bad starts and then right the ship (1995 and 2010 are the best examples), but we’ve never seen a team that was dead in the water turn things around like this.

I’ll admit that in 1995, we weren’t sure if the Hokies were good or not when they dropped their first two games to Boston College and Cincinnati. At that point, including the end of 1994, Virginia Tech had lost five of its last six games. A Hokie program that had gone 16-4 from the start of 1993 through game eight of 1994 had suddenly nosedived and didn’t look promising. But after losing to Cincinnati in 1995, Tech went 24-2 over their next 26 games. (I haven’t run that stat in a while; that’s amazing.)

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