Three Bold Predictions That Could Look Brilliant in November for Virginia Tech

The last time Virginia Tech played a football game, it was getting run out of Scott Stadium 27-7 while the man who'd replace its head coach watched from somewhere else.

James Franklin won 104 games in 12 seasons at Penn State, second-most in program history, and left with a 128-60 career record as a head coach. Virginia Tech has one winning season in the last six.

Something has to give. In five months Franklin flipped a recruiting class from outside the top 100 to No. 24 nationally, added more than 20 players through the transfer portal and brought his old Penn State quarterback with him.

Here are three bold predictions that could look brilliant by the end of the season.

1. Marcellous Hawkins runs for 1,000 yards and 10 touchdowns.

Hawkins carried 118 times last season and gained 749 yards. He scored once on the ground. Averaging 6.3 yards a touch and only scoring just one touchdown is almost unheard of. It is safe to say that he will be visiting the end zone many more times this season.

He forced 44 missed tackles and gained 562 yards after first contact, and finished with 23 runs of 10-plus yards. He's done volume before, too: 1,053 yards and 18 rushing touchdowns at Central Missouri in 2023.

Ty Howle's offense should keep him on the field. Hawkins has never carried 200 times in a season, and he missed the Virginia finale with an unknown injury. But give him that workload behind an improved line and 1,000 rushing yards will be inevitable. The 10 rushing touchdowns are less likely, but Hawkins is more than capable of eclipsing that number.

2. Luke Reynolds will lead the Hokies in receiving yards.

Reynolds caught 26 passes for 257 yards and zero touchdowns at Penn State last season. That's not a No. 1 receiver's résumé. It's the résumé of a five-star recruit stuck in a program that fired its head coach in October and lost its starting quarterback to injury in the same stretch.

Then came the spring game, where Virginia Tech's tight ends accounted for 205 of the team's 428 receiving yards. Reynolds led them with five catches for 69.

Ty Howle recruited him, coached him for two years and won national tight ends coach of the year in 2024, the season Tyler Warren caught 104 passes for 1,233 yards and became Penn State's first Mackey Award winner. Reynolds doesn't need to be Warren. He needs to be the safety valve for a quarterback who threw seven touchdowns and no interceptions across the final three games of his first year as a starter.

3. Eight-plus wins, and the Commonwealth Cup comes back to Blacksburg.

VMI, Old Dominion, at Maryland, at Boston College. The Keydets won a game last season. Boston College won two. Maryland won four. If Virginia Tech is what people think it is, September is a formality.

Then it gets real. Pitt under the lights on Oct. 2. A cross-country trip to Cal. Georgia Tech comes to Lane Stadium on Oct. 17, and Stanford follows on Nov. 14, the two home games this prediction can't afford to lose. The road is where it's decided: Clemson on Oct. 24, SMU after the bye, Miami on a Friday night on Nov. 20. Steal one and eight wins is comfortable.

Which brings it to Nov. 28 at Lane Stadium.

Virginia won 11 games last season and put 27 on the Hokies in Charlottesville while Virginia Tech managed a touchdown. That result has been sitting in Blacksburg for a year. Franklin has never coached in this rivalry and knows exactly what a first one is worth. The players who were on that field in November get it back at home. And Lane Stadium on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, with a season that might actually mean something, is not a place a visiting team wants to be.

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