Well, that was a lot of fun, wasn’t it? After a much-hyped offseason, Virginia Tech went out and promptly laid an egg against a Vanderbilt team that had lost 10 games in a row. The Hokies played very good football for about 25 minutes. Unfortunately, football games are 60 minutes, or in Saturday’s case, a little bit longer than that.

We’re all Virginia Tech fans here. We should know as well or better than anybody that the start of a season doesn’t necessarily reflect how it’s going to go. Tech started 0-2 in 1995 and 2010, respectively, and eventually became conference champions. I thought I knew who the Hokies were after four games in 2019, but they got a lot better. Same in 2023. I was pretty much done after the first four games, but they turned it around. And let’s not forget 2018, when we thought we knew Virginia Tech was a pretty darn good football team after one game, only to be proved wrong over the course of the rest of the season.

There’s a lot of football to be played, and Saturday’s game is only the first chapter of a book yet to be completed. That said, if I was a casual reader and the first chapter of a book left me feeling as disappointed as I felt yesterday, I’d be pretty tempted to put that book down and start another one. We don’t have that option with football, of course, and if this fan base is anything, it’s loyal and it doesn’t check out.

That doesn’t mean we enjoyed yesterday’s chapter, though. On the contrary, it left me disappointed and demoralized. I’ve found through the years that my interest in college football has gone up or down depending on how good the Hokies are. If Tech isn’t good, I don’t watch other games as much. Maybe because seeing quality football makes me depressed about the state of VT. But when Tech is good, I enjoy watching other games, maybe because I enjoy the fact that the Hokies are better than most of the teams I watch.

...