With conference baseball tournaments wrapping up, the 64-team field for the NCAA Tournament will be announced on Monday. When play begins next weekend at 16 regional sites, it will be another tourney without Virginia Tech.
After looking like a team that would be playing baseball after Memorial Day Weekend, the Hokies hit another mid-season swoon that spiraled out of control and out of the tournament. Some projections had them as high as a No. 2 seed back in April. Same as last year, but the same swoon that they couldn’t stop cost them yet again.
As John Szefc’s crew packs away the uniforms and equipment for another long off-season, another non-NCAA Tournament appearance is sending Virginia Tech men’s athletics down a dark road that has no end in sight.
Virginia Tech men’s athletics hit a new low in 2024-25
After the Hokies baseball team was bounced from the ACC Tournament by Clemson on Wednesday afternoon in the second round after beating Stanford in the first round on Tuesday, it closed the chapter on another dismal Virginia Tech athletic season for three major sports: football, men’s basketball, and baseball.
Virginia Tech missing the NCAA Baseball Tournament means that, along with California, they are one of two Power 4 programs that failed to produce a winning record in football or make the NCAA Men’s Basketball or NCAA Baseball Tournaments. If that isn’t embarrassing to the higher-ups in the athletic office, then I don’t know what is.
Honestly, at an institution like Virginia Tech, this is inexcusable. Last fall was supposed to be the breakthrough season under Brent Pry in Year 3 with a roster loaded with NFL talent. Instead, it was a huge swing and miss regular season that saw the Hokies go 6-6 again. The fact that they were once again needing to beat Virginia on Thanksgiving Weekend to become bowl-eligible was inexcusable. You can blame whoever you want, but there was no reason for them to be in that position.
Men’s basketball has struggled since winning the ACC Tournament in 2022 with a memorable run in Brooklyn. After NIT bids the last two seasons, a lack of NIL funding caught up with Mike Young last season, and after a mass exodus out of Blacksburg in the spring of 2024, a remade roster finished 13-18 before being bounced in the first round of the ACC Tournament by California. It has been reported that Young has a bigger NIL package for this off-season, but we’ll have to wait and see if it translates to different results in 2025-26.
As for the baseball team, as mentioned above, they were off to another NCAA Tournament berth-worthy start before they fizzled out with the low point being swept in Pittsburgh in the next-to-last ACC series. Heck, winning two out of three games there, and they might be playing past this upcoming weekend.
Instead, Virginia Tech fans are left with more frustration as the three men’s programs continue to spin their tires in the mud with no end in sight. At some point, you would think changes would be made, but everything remains status quo. Good luck finding more than six wins on the football schedule in the fall, and the men’s hoop team is another giant question mark. This is all being done in the ACC.
Could you imagine how things would look in the SEC? I can bet you these results would not be accepted by many, if any, SEC schools, and changes of some kind would have been made. Instead, Virginia Tech accepts the results and looks ahead to another season of average results with no end in sight.