College football is a results business. It is even more now with the new 12-team College Football Playoff expanded field that gives more teams an opportunity to make the field even after a loss. This season, the results were not what many people expected for Virginia Tech and head coach Brent Pry.
The Hokies entered the season as a national darling with a lot of college football writers having them as a dark horse for the new 12-team CFP. Things went sideways from the beginning with an overtime loss at Vanderbilt in Week 1 to needing a win over Virginia in Week 14 just to become bowl-eligible. A 6-6 season was not on many bingo cards for Virginia Tech.
Part of the season, well ok, a major reason for Virginia Tech’s troubles this season was their results in one-score games. The Hokies lost all five one-score games to Vanderbilt, Rutgers, Miami, Syracuse, and Duke. The common theme in all of those losses? They were at least tied or ahead at the final two-minute timeout in each game. They were a handful of plays away from winning more games. On the other side of the field Friday night, Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck had a different story in one-score games and it’s a bad sign for Pry.
P.J. Fleck has had much more success in one-score games than Brent Pry
While Virginia Tech had a bagel in one-score games this season (they only have one such win under Pry in three years), Fleck and the Gophers went 3-4 in one-score games in 2024. They own wins over USC, UCLA, and Illinois and had one-score losses to Rutgers, Michigan, Penn State, and North Carolina. That’s seven tight games for Minnesota where they had better results than the Hokies’ five.
You don’t need to be a math major to know that if you flip those one-score games and they had the opposite result, both teams would have been 11-1. Now back to reality, it would be surprising if the final score on Friday night would be a one-score game, but if it is, that would be a nightmare scenario for Pry and Virginia Tech. The closer the game, the more it favors the Gophers by these numbers.