BLACKSBURG — The first half of Virginia Tech’s football season included a number of unexpected twists and turns — which would be true even if head coach Brent Pry had not been dismissed just three weeks into the campaign.
The team knew that by the time it headed to Atlanta for Saturday’s 3:30 p.m. game at No. 13 Georgia Tech, all the progress that has been made meshing a team full of first-year freshmen and first-year Hokies acquired through the transfer portal would need to be showing results.
Now that this game has arrived, the rest of Virginia Tech’s road is even more treacherous than expected. The Yellow Jackets (5-0, 2-0 ACC) are the first of six down-the-stretch foes with winning records and one of the four ACC members holding a spot in AP Top 25: Georgia Tech, No. 2 Miami, No. 19 Virginia and No. 25 Florida State.
If there’s a bright side to that slate, at least interim head coach Philip Montgomery does not have to worry about his team looking past this weekend. The Yellow Jackets, who opened the season with a win at Colorado and a few weeks later knocked off ACC preseason favorite Clemson, feature one of the top three offenses in the conference, leads the league in red-zone efficiency and is among the top four in scoring at 37 points per game.
“Georgia Tech is playing really well right now,” Montgomery said this week. “They’re balanced in what they’re doing and playing really well defensively.”
The unit is led by quarterback Haynes King, a player Montgomery knows well. When King was a high school star in Longview, Texas, Montgomery was Tulsa’s head coach and hopeful suitor of the dual-threat quarterback. King chose Texas A&M first, where he spent three seasons before transferring to Georgia Tech prior to the 2023 campaign.
“Haynes has been there for what seems like forever now and playing extremely well,” Montgomery said. “I recruited him out of high school, so I’ve known him and his dad for some time.”
In the Jackets’ last game, a 30-29 OT win at Wake Forest (Georgia Tech is coming off of a bye week), King had at least one rushing and passing touchdown each for a school-record 13th time. He also finished with more than 100 rushing yards and 100 passing yards for the sixth time — also Ramblin’ Wreck record. He’s done all that in just 28 starts.
While the passing numbers are good, King and the rest of the offense still prefer to run the football. Georgia Tech is one of three ACC teams averaging more than 200 yards rushing per game, which means that Virginia Tech’s young linebackers and defensive backs will need to help out near the line of scrimmage.
“They want to run the football,” Montgomery said. “That’s what they hang their hat on. … The way they use Haynes, the way they use their running backs and tight ends in different stuff, they take pride in what their offensive line and the physicality they possess. We’ll have to match that.”
The defense is stingy, too. especially in the red zone, where opponents fail to score points nearly 20% of the time. That does not include the Jackets’ biggest stop to date, when they thwarted a Wake Forest two-point conversion attempt in overtime that would have won the game for the Demon Deacons.
“Their (defense) is going to show us pressures that we’ve seen before,” said Hokies offensive lineman Tomas Rimac, who due to various injuries to teammates has played four different positions in the first six games. “It’s all about consistency. We’re going to have to put our heads down and work this week on the pressures we’ve seen from them on film and make corrections during the game for ones we haven’t seen.”
So where do the Hokies start if they want to challenge Georgia Tech? The first place would be cutting back on penalties, which seem to pop up during the most crucial parts of the game. Virginia Tech holds the sixth-highest penalty yards average in the 17-team ACC at 64.3 yards per game. In Wake’s 30-23 win over the Hokies last week, two of the Deacons’ three first-half TD drives were helped by personal foul calls in the Virginia Tech defense.
Meanwhile, a potential touchdown drive for the Hokies also stalled because of an illegal shift call that forced them to settle for a field-goal attempt.
“We played with a lot of effort and did a lot of good things in the game,” Montgomery said. “But obviously, we hurt ourselves with some critical errors.
“… We only had six penalties (against Wake Forest), but they came at critical times. When you’re pushing the envelope — and these guys are playing with relentless effort — we just have to make better decisions in those situations. We’ve talked about that and we’re addressing it.”
