Hokie Nation is shocked, the hue and cry for heads rolling in the streets is only short of a quarter of a billion dollars and a security squad with lots of boxes. The Hokies took to Worsham Field with a solid first half and seemingly disappeared during the break.

If you were standing on the field with 4 minutes to go in the 1st half, and the Hokies driving for a potential touchdown, you left the field at

the half shaking your head and wondering if the team had just sat down thinking that 20-10 was more than enough. The lingering taste of impending disaster wasn’t far away from the mouth. as the -4 cleared the uprights.

What Worked?

Most fans would probably say “not a freaking thing”. One of my friends texted me and said… “John Love and that’s all I can think of…” Let’s talk that down a bit, there were some good things that happened in the 1st half. One thing of which was – most of the first half.

The offense worked “good enough” in the half. Tech started off passing the ball and challenging the Vanderbilt defense. They called an aggressive game mixing in some runs and getting Drones out of the pocket. Tech’s long drive down the field for its first TD after the interception was as close to perfection as this team gets. The short field drive after the fumble was decent enough. However…
Drones didn’t get too many difficult patterns to read. It seems like Montgomery was giving Kyron Drones passing plays with pattern development within his downfield vision. When receivers were open on the first read or checkdown he was getting the ball out. But…
The Offensive Line was blocking pretty well. The line wasn’t better than a C+ grade, but Drones was staying on his feet long enough to either gain yards on the ground or get the ball to a back on the merge. Umm…
John Love was perfect, again. Okay?…

What Didn’t Work?

This one seems easy… Except it’s more nuanced than some simple blow off statement. There were signs in the first half, if you knew what to look for, of impending doom. Lemme ‘splain…

The Offense

Tech’s injury luck is awful, and that line is absolutely dependent on every player staying in… arguably the best Tech 2024 Right Tackle Johnny Garrett, now at Left Tackle, went down in the 2nd quarter rolling on his back and clutching a knee. Montavious Cunningham went out in the 1st quarter. There is no word on the nature of the injuries, but the reality that Tech’s starting quality Offensive line is 1 and 2/5ths deep (if that, really) could not afford to lose them. They did, and from the end of the 2nd on, it showed.
The offensive line almost completely disappeared in the 3rd and 4th quarters. Vanderbilt was rushing 4 and dropping the remainder into coverage. The pocket collapsed so often you had to wonder if anyone on the field understood the fundamentals of how to block, in the first place. That’s not on the coaching staff or the OC’s play calling. That’s on the field performance (or non-performance as it were).
Kyron Drones is not where they wanted him to be. He’s running way too much. If the first or quick second read is not there, Drones is pulling the ball in and running. If you are Diego Pavia and seemingly bulletproof, that works fine, but Drones has had terrible injury luck, and the more hits he takes the less he sees on the field. By the end of the 2nd, he was missing reads and just pulling the ball in to run even more. What should have been a 4-minute touchdown drive to end the 1st half turned into a disappointing -4. His throwing motion was off. His release was so slow I was looking for the calendar app on my phone. He was struggling so much that I doubt he would have made it through the 2nd half if the Defense had been able to stop Vandy.
The running game besides Drones, never seemed to build up any momentum. That left the quarterback to absorb ever more hits which degraded everything else. That’s on everyone… the OC, the Backs, and the O-Line. Everyone had a part in that botch.
The Receivers weren’t getting free enough on the first and second reads to give Drones the confidence to throw them open. Frankly, I don’t think that he’s accurate enough to do that reliably. Maybe at one time in his career he was better. However, right now Drones’s throwing motion and footwork are messed up. Things are not looking up there. He’s showing signs of stress induced tunnel vision and too often balls were either turf rockets or sailed over the heads of open players.
John Love scored 8 in the first half; it should have been 4. Now, based on the final score, two more touchdowns instead of field goals wouldn’t have made a point difference if all else was equal, but if Tech had finished those two drives in the endzone they’d have walked into the halftime room, up 28-10 and that just might have been the momentum changer that got the defense motivated enough to show up in the 2nd half.

The Defense

The first half was deceptive. The turnovers buttered over the fact that the defensive line wasn’t getting off blocks. They weren’t even stunting and there was almost no penetration. If those turnovers hadn’t happened Vanderbilt was basically exerting its will at the line of scrimmage and Pavia was either passing or running through massive holes. Eventually that was going to catch up, and it did after the kickoff in the 2nd half. Maybe the defensive coaching staff was lulled into thinking that because they were fortunate enough to get to coughed up balls that stopped Vanderbilt drives they didn’t need to adjust or notice the patterns, but it didn’t look like Tech ever made any significant changes anywhere.
The Linebackers were missing keys, getting baited out of the 2nd level with misdirection and counters. Pavia and the Commodore backs just kept pounding the ball through huge gaps in the line with no 2nd level coverage. The ‘B-gaps’ looked vacated most of the time.
Tackling was problematic, again. Contact in the backfield and at the line of scrimmage was continually breaking down as defenders failed to use their fingers and hands to actually control the wrapup on the ball carrier.
Defenders were constantly losing track of where the ball was going. More often than not by the time they figured out who had the ball, it was beyond them, and the runner had eaten up 5-8 yards on first down.
The defensive backs were lost. They had bad position, loose coverage, ran coverages behind the receivers, and were rarely aware of where the ball was coming from, or where it was in the air. They just never seemed to get their heads turned around to be aware of where they were and where the ball was.

These issues can be fixed, but all of them all together on both sides of the ball and on the sideline. Lots of folks would love to pin the blame on someone specific, but wow is there a ton to go around. No one, players or coaches’ hands are clean in the 2nd half total meltdown in this one. There are the specifics, only some of which are mentioned here, but in general nearly nothing worked in the 2nd half. The offense almost never saw the field, and the defense was completely clueless and there didn’t seem to be any adjustments being made. If there were, they certainly weren’t working. Which leads us to…

Dun Busted…

There are things that are still not fixed, but the creeping suspicion that there are other hitches going on at the program level that are beginning to cast a pall over Lane Stadium as dreary as the cool cloudy weather and that weird drizzle that started after the first half.

The red zone offense is still really bad, but the reasons are even more frustrating even to the old Hokie players we talk to on the sidelines. The last two OCs were stuck in a fallacy gutter that this OC seems to be running into. We have said this before, but it’s critical. The first drive, which frustratingly stalled in the red zone, was run into the boundary side of the formation every time the ball was on that hash. As the field shrinks vertically the defensive box becomes easier to defend. If an OC has a boundary side bias (and Montgomery was nearly 100% for the entire game) the failure to use both sides of the field interchangeably, means the opposing defense eventually only has to defend a tiny rectangle on the field. The “hat on hat” fallacy just continues to limit the play selection. Even an occasional naked bootleg would be tonic. Something, anything to make the DC set up coverages that must defend the entire field. Pedantic thinking is brutalizing an offense that must innovate and break convention to win games.
Something is structurally wrong with the team on an emotional level. The pregame warmup was listless and dull. It was a bit better organized than the past two seasons, but the warmup activities were done with little enthusiasm. There was certainly a lack of “organization” in the warmups. Armies drill together for a reason. The Corps of Cadets wear the same uniform, march on to the field, and drill in formation together to form unit cohesive bodies that support each other. As pregame photos were taken the lone wolf individuals with headphones on stretching and milling about for an extended period just seemed almost self-defeating. The pregame just seemed to dip into the 2019 Duke fiasco level of almost gloom.
The program’s relationship with the fanbase has frayed far beyond program survival. One thought of the modern slang term “hopium” (using hope as an opiate) as the wishes for big name coaches begin to flow like the Niagara River to its inevitable end, but we can add “hatium” to the mix as now the core fan hatred for the current Athletic Department has screamed out of the abyss of mediocrity and chronic failure. The administration is not transparent in the least. Information is sparse, reports are placed in confidential “envelopes”, and the program is also sucking hard on their own “hopium” pipes. It’s time for the current regime to completely open the books, provide a public audit and accounting of the program’s financial books, like an annual financial report.
The Administration is too opaque and artificially cheery when total openness is required. The fanbase on which they depend for its main revenues is unsatisfied with the product being produced. That is a formula for an organizational self-reinforcing death spiral. It is high time for the program to be honest with itself and with the fan base. This program is emotionally operating on a fading memory of glories of a generation past. The stadium and field house are too small to produce enough revenue to provide basic income.
The ACCNetwork media remunerations are paltry in comparison to the “Power 2” conferences and locked in for another 11 seasons. To operate at the competition levels desired, by the fan base and this administration, is nearly $100 million a year short of the revenues needed over the next decade. However! Until this leadership stops being cagy. The continual “aw shucks” looking to “make do” isn’t working. The wicked “student athletic fee” is robbing money from student’s added fees when the cost of attending the school has blown past budgetary breaking points. And begging donors for ever more free money, donations, and endowment gifts is a poor bet. (Example: The tax benefits for giving are nearly gone – most middle-class tax filers don’t have enough deductions on Schedule A to exceed the standard deduction.) People with families are now tight fisted out of necessity and that doesn’t include families strained by divorce, job instability, health insurance costs… etc. Virginia Tech is and always has been a “middle-class” institution, and its alumni base is busy saving for retirement and trying desperately to gather enough to send their kids to college. Maybe it is time for the Administration to do a real market analysis and determine if it can even operate at the levels envisioned on their ungrounded “hopium”.
The “Vision” is broken and only going to get worse without a thorough audit and open public review. As college sports re-organizes into an actual professional business, it’s time for everyone to re-evaluate where this program really should be operating. Currently, the expectations are obviously far beyond realistic capabilities. The administration needs to produce the equivalent of an annual report based off of an audit of the full Athletic Department operations. The report should cover the last decade of operations and be presented in public, available online in detail and hiding absolutely nothing. A menu of choices needs to be published with the requirements to make each choice possible. At least some honesty and transparency might buy some goodwill back.

Time to move on to get ready for another late Saturday night. The ODU kickoff is at 7:00. Of course, the Wofford game is so uninteresting to the ACCNetwork and its monster mother ESPN that it’s going to be streamed and has been relegated to a 12:00 noon kick. Let us hope that before the NC State road-trip, that this team is 2-2 and operating at a better level.