The Week That Was in Blacksburg
The Spring Game, portal exits, and Virginia's new NIL law
This past week was full of news of indeterminable importance to the Virginia Tech football program.
Each sub-topic merits its own thread, and in time may receive it, but for now there are some high level takeaways that, when synced together, spell out where the Hokies are as they prepare for the 2024 football season.
The Spring Game
Virginia Tech played a football game last Saturday and, while there was a lot to like about what transpired on the field, there was one issue that has not received the sort of press it deserves.
Too. Many. Big. Plays.
For those who may have missed it, that was the spring game in a nutshell. Long-term, what matters is who made those big plays, and how.
Here is the break down by yardage:
19 plays of 10+ yards
5 plays of 20+ yards
4 plays of 30+ yards
1 play of 50+ yards
What’s worse is that the quarterbacks were not live, which minimized their scrambling options, and missed tackles were not a big issue. Translation: it could have been much worse.
Two of the four 30+ yard plays were runs, and the longest play was a 66-yard pass to Malachi Thomas out of the backfield.
Keep in mind that offensive and defensive starters were mostly limited to the first quarter, when the majority of the big plays were generated. The graph above is a bit skewed because the clock rules translated into significantly more plays being run in the first than any other quarter, but the point stands.
The defensive coaches could not have liked what they saw. Nineteen plays of 10+ yards is borderline ridiculous, as is a 4th string RB scampering 33 yards untouched for a score on a simple counter play.
In Episode 28 of the podcast, I posed six questions that I felt the spring game would answer. Here are the results:
Safeties
No one stood out in a positive way, and both defenses allowed a lot of chunk yardage. Pry & Co. are likely mining the portal for help as I type.
Cornerbacks
Their play met expectations. While by no means perfect, the young depth is far enough along in their development to feel good about this group as a whole.
Running backs vs. inside linebackers
Once again, the third and fourth string running backs put up big numbers. The linebacker issues from last season have not been resolved.
Quarterback play calls
Wittke’s plays were similar to Pop’s, but Pop ran them better on his way to winning the Class of 2023 QB competition (Wittke hit the portal).
Offensive line depth
A lot of the “sacks” were ticky-tack touch plays. Yes, the defensive lines generated pressure, but the offensive lines did not look incompetent (they knew who to block) nor did they resemble a wet paper bag (they were physically able to block). Progress here appears to be on track.
Fourth quarter competition
As Whit Babcock would say, “A+ for everyone!” The game went right down to the wire. Energy, hustle, hitting, and pace were all great. Entering Year 3 of the Pry era, the Tech roster is filled with really competitive guys.
While the defense had its struggles reminiscent of last year, there is a takeaway that should be noted about the offense.
In 2023, bad teams could not stop the Tech offense and good teams just out-talented Virginia Tech in the trenches. What was never entirely clear was the degree of difficulty presented by the Hokie offense, schematically.
The 2024 Virginia Tech defense is a work in progress, but no stop unit in the country knows the Hokie offense as well as Chris Marve’s players do.
And yet, I lost count of how many times I saw defenders get caught up in misdirection, their body’s momentum taking them out of the gap that an offensive player was cutting into.
Hokie defenders looked genuinely uncomfortable at times, which, theoretically anyway, should never happen in a spring game. Malachi Thomas’s attempted pass aside (how badly did Tyler Bowen want to get that play on film?), the play calling was as vanilla as expected.
The conclusion I draw is that the offensive scheme, even in base form, is a genuine competitive advantage. If Tech is at least in the ballpark with its opposition from a talent perspective, the scheme is good enough to provide a home-field level advantage.
Can that be quantified? Perhaps. It’s something I’ll be pondering as we move into the quietest period of the football calendar.
Portal departures
Speaking of talent, the portal re-opened this week. Five redshirt-freshmen entered. Here is the list, along with their 2023 snap counts:
Gabriel Arena (OL) - 0
Tralon Mitchell (RB) - 0
Dylan Wittke (QB) - 0
Antonio Cotman (DB) - 0
Tavorian Copeland (LB) - 0
Remember, these days there are three groups of freshman:
Play and do not redshirt
Play four games or less, redshirt
Do not play, redshirt
All five of these players fit into group three, meaning that they were not ready physically and/or did not have a solid enough grasp of the playbook to get on the field.
Some or all of them may develop in time into quality P4 players, but, judging by their lack of snaps last year and status on the depth chart this spring, the odds of that happening at Virginia Tech in the next few years were low.
Unless there is an unexpected portal entry this coming week, Tech will have retained all its key players while freeing up a few roster spots with which to pursue some additional help at QB, safety, and a few other spots.
Virginia’s NIL law
I’m going to reserve judgement about the new law until I read the actual text in its entirety. However, based on multiple media summations of the law, there are two big picture questions that Tech fans will have to wrestle with:
Will this law aid the cause of direct student employment by the university? By paying players for their NIL rights, would the university not be admitting outright that the players generate immense value in their roles as, what, volunteer football players? It strains credulity. I doubt the provision in the law about players not being university employees would stand up in court.
This new law presents an extreme risk that I’m not sure the powers that be have fully thought through. Whether under the auspices of a union or not, what is to stop the players from banning together and collectively bargaining for NIL money or other benefits? When the NIL collectives were separate from the athletic department, the players had little leverage as a group. Now that everything will be done in-house, the connection between value generation and value realization tilts a significant chunk of leverage back in favor of the players. Demands will no longer go through the outside NIL collective, which legally insulated the university. If, as a group, the entire team decides to demand X or they’re all hitting the portal, that demand is going directly to Whit Babcock and Timothy Sands. And, if the players are smart, the media.
Many have portrayed the week that was as positive for Virginia Tech. I would posit that uncertain is a more accurate descriptor.