So I know a lot of us aren't happy about the Howard game being moved to a Thursday night. BUT.....the timing turns out to be very interesting as far as preparation for the VT game. Currently now, the team plays Howard on August 29th, has 9 days to prepare for Akron on Sept. 7th, then has 2 weeks to prepare for traveling down to VT on the 21st. And given how weak the Howard and Akron teams are (FYI: Akron went 2-10 last year), we can basically win those games with vanilla offense and defense. So not only will our team be well rested and hopefully injury free, Tech will have no meaningful game tape for our schemes.
Conversely, VT opens with 3 straight games, 1 against Vanderbilt, a weak team that is still a part of a P5 conference, and 2 against G5 teams, Marshall and Old Dominion. And they lost to Marshall last year 24-17. In addition, both those G5 teams were 6-6 during the regular season, so they aren't bottom of the barrel teams. They'll have to play to win without holding back, at least in the first half of all of those games. So they'll come in with the strain of playing 3 straight games, and we will have tape from all 3 of those games to help us scheme against them.
To add insult to injury, after our game VT will be traveling down to play Miami on a short week, as that game has been moved to Friday, Sept. 27th. And then they fly out to the west coast the following week to play Stanford on Oct. 5th before finally getting a bye week.
So despite having to work out the logistics for playing a Thursday night game before LDW, the schedule really sets up nice for us coming into the VT game. I expect them to be favored in this game, which is fine by me. Hopefully we can repeat last year's performance and walk out of there with a win.
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