Hokies Take Care of Business in Top Advanced Metrics Win since 2023

The Hokies took care of business in their first trip to visit an ACC member in California last Saturday in their 31-7 win over Stanford. In terms of Net EPA per play, this was the fourth best win of Brent Pry's career (behind UVA, Wake Forest, and Syracuse last season) and the strongest of 2024. It was the 9th best game of Week 6, and the 5th best among major conference schools.

Virginia Tech dominated on defense against an offensive making a change at quarterback, while posting their first game of the season with a positive offensive EPA/play in every quarter of action. Combining the results against Stanford with the results against Miami (strong offensively but poor on defensive), Virginia Tech moved (slightly) into the top quadrant of teams in unadjusted net EPA/play.

Even though the win was not overly flashy, Virginia Tech had some of their most success passing the ball. Successful plays are first down plays that gain 50% of the yards to gain, second down plays that gain 70% of the yards to gain, and third and fourth down conversions. Virginia Tech hit 50% passing success against Stanford, well above their average for the season (38.9%) and was explosive on 15.0% of their passing attempts (above their season average of 12.6%).

The Hokie took a hit against a surprisingly stout Stanford rush defense, but overall have improved slightly on their rushing explosiveness (0.5% increase) while maintaining their rushing success rate (down 0.06%) since the Week 4 recap.

On defense, Virginia Tech held Stanford to about their season average on overall success rate (41.8% in game, vs. 41.2% on the season) but did not allow a single pass play over 20 yards and cut the explosive run rate (runs over 15 yards) by 2/3rds from 8.7% to 2.7%.

The reason I like to look at success rate and explosiveness is that it allows you to look at teams' ability to move the ball both in chunk, explosive ways and methodically down the field without taking into account scoring and turnovers. Good teams manage to be both successful and explosive; and for most of the season, Virginia Tech has been explosive on offensive without sustained success, while having decent down-to-down success on defense, but allowing too many big plays. The Miami and Stanford games have so far shown a offense that is getting back to what worked on a down-to-down basis last year, while maintaining explosivity. The defense is continuing to improve on explosive plays (Miami, a top-5 offense notwithstanding) and starting to also generate turnovers. While the turnovers are great, having a sustainable defense is going to be what can take this team to reach their full potential.