The obvious thing for the Hokies, here, is that it was a Win. There were lots of good things that Virginia Tech did, and some things need some serious tidying up, but there are still a few issues that need serious fixing. The Georgia Tech game was a seriously important win, however.
The Stakes at Hand for Saturday
The truth is that with a 12-game regular season and standing depending on votes of one poll or another, there is little room to maneuver when it comes to wins and losses in FBS football. In the FCS, the end of season playoffs
are literally that, playoffs of conference winners faced off against conference winners. In the FBS, the fact that the season ending effort to determine some form of champion, heavily involves polling and a committee to pick a very large number of the participants means that even a single loss can eliminate a program from consideration.
That situation means every single loss is significant beyond just having a down day or being overwhelmed by a single team on the schedule. A true playoff with rationally structured conferences where all championships are determined on the field just doesn’t seem to appeal to the power structures of FBS Division 1 football. Perhaps it is time to institute a system of realistically defined levels of competition and program funding levels where there are four divisions in FBS football, the bowl system and the playoffs combine into 4 different playoff structures for 4 different championships.
Well, the stakes at hand for Virginia Tech on Saturday October 17th weren’t directly impacted by the situation mentioned above. Tech had lost 2 prior games and stood at a rationally respectable 4-2 before the kickoff. The relevance, now, since any ephemeral dreams of tournament bids were off the table was that Virginia Tech needed to get a win to regain the bowl eligibility momentum at 5-2 and provide staging for a push to end the season above the expected middle of the ACC and over the .500 mark for the first time in quite a few seasons. It’s not playing for pride, per se, but it is playing for the future. The game was loaded with recruits, and there are few doubts that players stuck on marginal teams are going to be looking for somewhere to land after the season wraps.
So, the stakes for the Georgia Tech game were really high. If Tech lost, they might have ended up scrambling hard just to reach the .500 mark and bowl eligibility. That would have been a really disappointing outcome for a fanbase that has been hungry for better than par performances for the better part of 8 seasons. If the Hokies could bring home a win, it would get them one step closer to bowl eligibility and impress the live audience of high school recruits on the field.
The Win on Saturday pumped some real energy into a program and changed its trajectory.
So, What Worked?
Let’s just look at the top three things that worked the best in this contest, without going down rabbit holes of excess celebration.
Putting an Opponent Away
Besides the obvious win for the record books, the Hokies did something that they have rarely done over the past decade, and that’s stop a momentum shift and put away an opponent in the 4th quarter. Tech has managed comebacks after losing a lead, or if you remember 2024 and 2025 suffered repeated heartbreaks of losing the lead, momentum, and then the game.
The Hokies got the lead early, maintained it, even with the post halftime momentum shift, and then turned up the offense enough to put 10 points on the board that made it impossible for the Yellow Jackets to catch up. They did do that on a smaller scale against BC but this time they managed to stop Georgia Tech’s third quarter surge (more about that a bit later) and go up by multiple possessions.
What’s even better, is that the defense buckled down, got the final stop against Georgia Tech, and the Hokies burned off the final minutes of the game without having to cede possession. With the score stabilized at 34-24, Virginia Tech successfully burned off the remaining clock.
The Juniors, Jeffery Overton and Marcellous Hawkins, Jr. both contributed heavily to the effort to regain some ball control mojo, especially in the latter stages of the game. Hawkins’s critical 3 1/2-yard power plunge late in the 4th quarter on 4th down and 1 yard, slammed the door on any hopes that the Yellow Jackets could mount any sort of two possession end of game miracle. He made sure that the Hokies never gave up possession of the ball at the end.
Q. Brown
Georgia Tech might have been prepared for this on paper, but on the field, Que’Sean Brown was his own force even running an end around for significant yardage. Brown caught 6 passes for 182 yards, and ran the ball, but where he made a major impact was his punt returns. (Yes, he had the 1 muff, and the defense picked him up by forcing a field goal.) He made it be known that he’s becoming the team’s deep threat.
Ethan Grunkemeyer to…
Behind 182 of those yards was a rifle armed quarterback. Ethan Grunkemeyer was pegged as depending too much on Luke Reynolds (who had a sterling game as well) but Grunk just proved that he can tough it up, wait patiently for an open man downfield and hit the home run ball.
The opening “drive” pass to Que’Sean Brown was a thing of beauty for both players. What followed was Grunkemeyer fooling everyone, jinking defenders out of their shoes, and scoring a 20+ yarder, himself, and hitting Ja’Ricous Hairston with a touch pass just past the goal line on a surprise play-action roll out.
Grunkemeyer hit Jeffery Overton, Jr. on a classic screen (Whether that was the play called or it was just an emergency dump off is only critical in the film room.) that Overton turned into a massive catch-and-run touchdown.
Grunk also hit Ayden Greene on a critical down and distance pass, Luke Reynolds on another clutch pass. It’s worth pausing for a second to watch the highlights and notice the next mention.
The Defensive Line Featuring Aycen Stevens
No one is going to call this the perfect kickoff to final whistle defense, just yet. The secondary still needs work and to communicate better. The linebackers are playing into the 3rd string with freshmen starting. And it’s been up to the Tech front four (supplemented by substitutes now and then) to control the game and at least stuff the opponents’ running games. The need is also there, and we covered it in prior articles, to get serious constant pressure on the opposing quarterbacks to help out the struggling secondary. The huge part of those efforts is Defensive End Aycen Stevens.
The Hokies are always told that Luke Reynolds will be making a roster for Sundays. Well, when it’s his time in the future, I’d lay money on the table and say that Stevens might be following him. Saturday, Stevens was a sack and TFL machine. He was probably responsible for the massive momentum shift back to the Hokies at the end of the third quarter and through the 4th. Other defenders definitely contributed, but Stevens seemed to be the single defensive player that reignited the fire that had shut down the Georgia Tech offense in the first half.
Okay, Now We Climb Off the Celebration Table…
It’s time to talk about what didn’t work, and what definitely can be fixed if this team wants to win the final game of the 2nd 3rd of the season and prepare to head into the home stretch through November.
Stalling Offense
Georgia Tech’s defense is not a slouch group inside the box. Though the Hokies did explode scoring in the air there was a serious problem dealing with maintaining balanced schedule movement of the ball. High-performance explosive plays get the crowd roaring, but the reality is that it’s the bread and butter 4- to 5-yard run and quick pass plays that keep the offense moving and the defense trying to stop it… alternating between passes and runs keeps the linebackers honest, and gives running backs a chance to get to the second level, whether or not it’s on a handoff or a short pass.
The problem comes in when the Hokies get ahead there is still that massive urge to slow things down, grind for yardage, and run the ball in the old “caveman” football style of running gut and dive plays. We’ve talked about this before and it shows up in the next section with highlights, but thankfully this time Tech’s OC pushed that aside by the middle of the 3rd quarter and got back to what was working, a balanced attack that depended on the pass to gain yardage and establish the run as the counterweight.
It was a move that should never have been necessary, since the OC should have never gone away from the formula that worked, and varied it enough to account for the Georgia Tech adjusted defensive pressure on the pocket.
Handling the Blitz
It was more than a bit frustrating to see the Hokie offense fail to react to the Yellow Jacket blitz pattern that developed in the middle of the 2nd quarter, and Georgia Tech pushed hard in the 3rd. That was probably in reaction to the Hokies’ slow reaction to adjusting the blocking audibles and changing the plays to take advantage of the blitz by getting the ball out quickly, under the zone. As soon as the linebackers and safeties (there is one safety blitz on a progression of pictures that resulted in a critical sack of Grunk, and not one person picked it up or even identified it in a line audible. Grunkemeyer might or might not have really seen it develop, but if he did, he didn’t change up his protection and keep a running back in to help protect his backside from the extra rusher.
Some of this comes from the patchwork quilt of experience that is the Hokie 2026 offensive line, but some of it is in the play-to-play offensive scheme that needed to ditch the stuff that was far too slow executing and developing on both sides of the snap. The way that you beat the chronic blitz is to “go fast and where they were”. Eventually things loosened up, but not before Georgia Tech scored 14 unanswered points.
Some of that is on the defense, for sure, but Tech could have rallied back and scored on their first possession of the half, instead of stalling out with ineffective plays being called, and what looked like some confusion going on around the line of scrimmage.
The Poison 3rd
And that issue on offense leads right to the doorstep of the defense, and their problems getting a critical series of stops in the 3rd quarter. Okay, for some inexplicable reason that defies the laws of averages, the Hokies keep losing the coin toss (I think that they have won one this season.) and have been forced to kick off to the opposing team to start the 2nd half.
With these repeated situations, the defense should have a much better and more aggressive game plan since it’s very obvious that the opposition is going to put an offense on the field that challenges what the defense was doing in the first half. Now, the score versus play quality was a tad misleading for the Jackets. Tech forced a fumble in Georgia Tech’s first drive of the 1st quarter. The ball was knocked out just before the Georgia Tech running back was about to cross the goal line and rolled untouched out of the back of the endzone. That kept the Yellow Jackets off the board and turned it over to Virginia Tech on its own 20.
With that wakeup call the Hokie Defense tightened down things, and Georgia Tech only managed 3 points on that muffed punt return that put the Yellow Jackets in the Hokie red zone.
All that is to say that the defensive coaching staff and players needed to be acutely aware of the reality that Georgia Tech could move the ball in the air and do it in chunks. Mendoza has a good arm, quick release, and if given even a half a breath of time was hitting passes downfield consistently under the zone and between the seams. I don’t remember seeing many that went beyond the 15-to-20-yard mark, and most in between the 5–15-yard range. That seems to be his strength zone, and he used it effectively in the game on Saturday.
The Secondary is a Weak Spot that Will Receive Attention (one way or the other)
The unfortunate reality of the Hokie 2026 defense is that the secondary is struggling to cover, getting behind plays, getting flagged for PI offenses too often (which also is a self-reinforcing feedback loop for the refs), and flat getting beaten under the zone. Some of it looks to be communication issues with zone coverage. Some of it is that the one-on-one coverage is good enough to keep the passes at the intermediate ranges, but that still means the offense is moving the ball efficiently and threatening to score or actually scoring. Quentin Reddish did pick off a Mendoza pass that looked like it was going to become a dirt rocket. Reddish’s layout looked like a wide receiver move, but he came up with the ball.
The Georgia Tech OC really took advantage of that big gap in coverage under the zone in the 3rd quarter. Georgia Tech quickly used the lack of adjustments on both sides of the ball by the Hokies to its advantage. It just ran out of time before Aycen Stevens and Linebacker Noah Chambers began to get the range again. And the Grunkemeyer to Overton connection resulted in the Hokies staunching the blood loss late in the 3rd.
In general, the Hokies need to figure out how to anticipate adjustments on both sides of the ball. The offense needs to learn to keep its foot on the gas, and the defense needs to start altering its rush patterns, blitz occasionally, and sometimes get brave enough to send the house in critical situations.
This Program is Cleaning Up Critical Things
The poison 3rd quarter might have ended up in the “Dun Busted” category had the offense and defense not caught itself and managed to get a critical stop and score a door slamming touchdown at the end of the quarter. There are some things that probably could be mentioned, but when the team takes on a tough opponent in a critical game, and puts up a clutch 34 points, it’s really difficult to toss anything in the section.
So, let’s hopefully take one out that was looming.
John Love hit every PAT and both field goals in a swirling gusty wind on both sides of the field on Saturday. Let’s take him off the Dun Busted watch list and hope that he stays there for the rest of the season. There was talk from Coach Franklin that he had done something to adjust his approach footwork in the offseason. Well, Love “unadjusted” it back to what worked, and kicked two very important -4s in critical situations. Everyone in Lane Stadium was rooting for him, and the crowd still cheered wildly when his name was announced before the game.
The 3rd quarter melt is still on the watch list, and the secondary is as well. The offensive line seems to be getting better with each game, and the 1s are beginning to trickle back on to the active roster.
Next Week It’s an Away Game at Clemson
If the Hokies can button down the secondary. Supplement and vary the rush to take the Clemson quarterback out of his comfort zone. Stand on the accelerator on offense without letting up, and keep John Love in between the uprights the Tigers can be beaten this season.
