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ACC QUESTION of the Week : After a wild past two weeks, who are the real Virginia Tech Hokies?
The real 2018 Virginia Tech Hokies aren’t an easy team to know. Not having the Opening Day starting quarterback muddies the waters. Injuries and player defections cast clouds over this team and its prospects. Upheaval, attrition, transition, tumult, and a supremely humiliating defeat suffered against Old Dominion have created a complicated chemical cocktail which doesn’t go down smoothly. To say that the Hokies are a knowable entity doesn’t mesh with the reality of the first five weeks of the season.
What’s more is that the team Virginia Tech defeated in Week 5, the Duke Blue Devils, has absorbed tons of important injuries throughout its roster. The Duke team which thumped Northwestern a few weeks ago (more decisively than Jim Harbaugh and Michigan beat the Wildcats this past Saturday) is not the team Virginia Tech handled with relative ease. How Duke evolves this season will shed more light on how meaningful — or revealing — the Hokies’ win in Durham actually was.
The real 2018 Virginia Tech Hokies have not stood up… because we don’t know where this journey is going to lead if we are being honest. The one predictable aspect of this season: how unpredictable it figures to be. I don’t have a handle on this team yet, and I suspect few do.
However:
What is important about the win over Duke — and where the Hokies currently stand — is profound. Very simply, if Virginia Tech had lost (especially if it had been blown out), one could have easily imagined this season flying off the rails. The inner turmoil coursing through the locker room after the undisciplined performance against Old Dominion was bad enough. Player behavior, though, was a problem in the offseason as well. This remains an industry in which coaches depend on 19- and 20-year-old males of the human species to behave at a certain level, and that can never be guaranteed. Coach Justin Fuente can try to create a culture all he wants, but he and other coaches are sometimes powerless in the face of what young men choose to do. Fuente, remember, would have likely had a great 2017 team if Jerod Evans had not made the baffling decision to go to the NFL. He has been hit hard by player decisions and player behavior throughout his brief tenure in Blacksburg.
Back to Duke, then: Beating Duke immediately restored and calmed the locker room. Old Dominion was a profound embarrassment, but it was not a conference game. At 2-0 in the ACC, with Miami coming to Lane Stadium later this year and Notre Dame about to make the trip to the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Hokies have everything to play for. They might fall short of where they want to be, but this team apparently still trusts its coach. A no-show against Duke would have indicated just the opposite.
A unified team with its biggest games remaining? Virginia Tech might be a hard team to know, but it has given itself every chance to make something out of this already-tumultuous season.
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