Entering the 2024 season, expectations were high surrounding the Virginia Tech football team, and why not? The Hokies got a ton of retainment on both sides of the ball and added some key transfer portal additions to strengthen their defense. All of that following a strong finish to the 2023 season had Virginia Tech as a national darkhorse for the new 12-team College Football Playoff.
Things went sideways in Week 1 at Vanderbilt with an overtime loss and that set the stage for a season full of ups and downs on the field and frustration within the fanbase. Again. Just when you thought the next step in the rebuild was going to take place, you could say that they took another step back in Year 3 of Pry.
The season slowly fell apart for several reasons, but some of the struggles in the two previous seasons reared its ugly head. There were games where they looked unprepared and they dug themselves deficits early in games. However, one of the biggest problems that haunted them in 2024 as in the previous two seasons, winning one-score games under Brent Pry.
Virginia Tech went 0-5 in one-score games last season and in all five of those losses, they either led entering the final two minutes or had the ball with an opportunity for a game-winning drive. They lost two games in overtime to Vanderbilt and Syracuse. They lost at Miami after holding a lead for a majority of the game and then suffered heartbreak with an overturned touchdown call on the game’s final play.
Given everything that happened, CBS Sports Chip Patterson gave out grades for third-year head coaches and Pry’s was rather puzzling.
Brent Pry receives a puzzling grade from CBS Sports
Patterson gave Pry a C for the 2024 season and given all the hype and the way the season went, it’s somewhat a puzzling grade, to say the least. Here is what Patterson wrote,
"Pry received deserved credit for pulling Virginia Tech out of a roster disaster, utilizing the transfer portal, and improved high school recruiting to make a four-win improvement from Year 1 to Year 2. That success poised the Hokies for a perceived breakthrough season in 2024, but inconsistencies left a talented roster with a 6-7 record that was not enough to change the big picture for Pry's tenure. He's got a sub.500 record overall and in ACC play (10-13), and has yet to win a game against an AP Top 25 opponent."
Look, was a CFP berth well above expectations last year? Probably, but make no mistake about it, the opportunity was there if every one-score game had the opposite result. Chalk it up to coaching, the players, or whatever you want, but a 6-7 finish (yes, the roster was depleted in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl against Minnesota) is not what anyone was expecting. Pry has won just one of the one-score games he’s coached in Blacksburg and that’s not going to cut it.
Look, Pry is a great recruiter (along with Fontel Mines), you can’t deny that, but what you also can't deny is that 2024 seems like a huge swing and a miss in terms of results on the field. There were times when even Pry himself didn’t have the answers himself. Not good. A more realistic grade would have been in at least the D+ range if not a D. This feels like a generous grade from Patterson.