Things That Make You Go Hmmm: 2024 Virginia Tech Football

It's wild that the 2024 college football season is already here. Almost all of the talent in Blacksburg is back, expectations are higher than they've been in a decade and after a summer's worth of hope the Hokies are going to put shoe to leather in Nashville to show us all if the hype is warranted.

But let's be honest, expectations are too high (can someone please check on Matt Barrie???), and it's time to come down to earth just a bit. I've been thinking long and hard about this team over the last few months — where they'll succeed, areas where they may struggle — and took a deep dive into the numbers.

After losing myself in PFF, SP+, CFB Stats and the HokieSports height and weight updates, I came out with a few trends from 2023 that I'll be watching heading into '24. They're not necessarily good or bad, just things that made me go "hmmmm...that's interesting".

2023 record against teams in SP+ top 50: 0-3

In SP+ 50-80: 2-1

In SP+ 80+: 5-2

If Kyron Drones was the face of the Hokies' phoenix-like emergence from the ACC's ashes in 2023, Tech's easy schedule was its wings. Yes, the birth of a structured, coherent offensive attack buoyed them to average 41 points in their seven wins. But it's not exactly like they were going up against a murderer's row of opposing defenses. And yes, the pass rush dominated the last two months of the year — they ended the season 11th in the country in sacks — but it was primarily on some of the worst quarterback/line play combinations I have ever seen.

This is the constant dilemma when projecting linear success in 2024. On paper, if you looked at a team that finished 6-3, winning each game by a margin of 24.5 points and returned every key player, you would assume massive growth. But it's also easy to point to Tech's schedule as maybe the single biggest factor in their mid-season turnaround. They faced a pupu platter of dysfunction, lame duck coaches, questionable game management and putrid quarterbacks. Phil Jurkovec was so bad for Pitt in 2023 that he was moved to tight end just days after losing in Blacksburg.