Across the Beat: Getting to know Virginia Tech

Duke has already picked up bowl eligibility and beaten two of the other three coaches new to the ACC this season.

Mike Elko goes for the clean sweep with this weekend’s visit from Virginia Tech.

Brent Pry has struggled to get Virginia Tech off of the ground in his first season, the Hokies having lost six straight games and all four road games this year.

VT has been knocking on the door, though, with back-to-back one-point losses to N.C. State and Georgia Tech. To get to know more about the Hokies we’ve enlisted the help of Tim Sullivan, publisher of Hokie Haven on the Rivals network.

Here is our five-part Q&A:

1. I like to start these off with a simple vibe check and … where is this program right now?

The Hokies are not in a good place!

There were modest expectations for this season - with an eye toward a longer-term project for Brent Pry, rather than a year-one magic wand. However, the team is on pace to undershoot even those expectations by a wide, wide margin.

There's a bit of a disconnect between the raw emotions of struggling now and the expectation that things will be better long-term than they had any chance of being under the previous staff. But for the most part, Hokie fans are growing comfortable with an attitude of being appreciative that basketball season is here.

2. Back-to-back one-point losses after holding multi-score leads in the second half is a brutal swing to endure. Do you have a sense of whether that’s strengthened VT’s resolve (or the opposite)?

I don't think the resolve has really improved - if there was anything that was going to steel this team, it would have happened weeks ago when they first started dropping winnable games.

If anything, it's probably gotten worse, because there are certain segments of the team that (accurately) feel like they've done enough to win the past two games, and it's been met with exactly zero payoff.

It's easy to lose motivation in situations like that, and while we haven't seen that happen, it's a possibility. With a bowl game no longer on the table, some mental check-outs could begin (though that could also allow some younger players to make their case for the future, a potential net positive).

3. Full disclosure: I thought highly of Grant Wells when he was at Marshall. Why haven’t things panned out for him this season?

Wells has gotten a lot of negative attention externally to the program, but the reality is that he's been mostly fine. Not good, necessarily, but he's played well enough to win plenty of games for this team.

There are multiple reasons that hasn't happened, with most of them coming down to supporting cast. The offensive line has been very poor, and while protection has only been an occasional issue, long down-and-distance situations (since they can't move the ball on the ground in the least) have put him in tough positions to succeed.

That has been exacerbated by injuries keeping the top two running backs, Malachi Thomas and Keshawn King, out or limited for much of the year.

Biggest of all, though, the receiving corps simply doesn't have enough talent at this stage to win one-on-one battles, and the design of the offense has not been tailored to try to overcome that lack of athleticism. Kaleb Smith is a former walk-on who does the small things right but lacks explosiveness, and the rest of the group has been drop-heavy (Hokies have dropped more passes than any ACC team aside from rival UVa, and they've done it on much smaller passing volume than most).

4. Who has stood out for the Hokies’ defense and should be worth keeping an eye on against Duke?

The defense has performed pretty well overall, and you have to feel for a few guys who just haven't had the support from the offense to make those efforts worth it.

Defensive end TyJuan Garbutt is having a career year, but it's not always paid off in counting stats. Fellow seniors Dax Hollifield and Chamarri Conner are not quite to their historical levels of performance, but they've been good enough that a fairly experienced group around them has been able to succeed.

A big thing to watch on D is fatigue: there's not a ton of depth (in part due to some long-term injuries), and VT has faded down the stretch not just in the past two games, but almost every game all season. The guys who come in to give the big three a rest are a notable step down.

5. I know it’s Year One of Brent Pry’s tenure and nobody is pushing the eject button this early, but what needs to go right at the end of this season and during the offseason for VT to get things going in the right direction?

It's probably painful for Hokie fans to hear, but the past two games have shown signs of progress, and right now, that's more important than results. From an individual perspective, it seems like most guys have stepped up their game (including some of the bigtime strugglers from early in the year), and unfortunately it hasn't paid off due to poor game management from the staff.

Obviously, fans would like to see those massive game-management errors not happen, but realistically that can be an offseason project at this stage, and isn't super-meaningful for the distant future. Continued individual improvement and more signs of underclassmen breaking through are necessary.

And of course, a win against UVa to provide a reminder that even a struggling VT team is the Big Brother in that rivalry.