Hughes: James Franklin Accelerating Virginia Tech Football's Recruiting With Surging 2026 Class

The Hokies are up to 19 commitments in the class at the time of writing.

Nov 22, 2025; Blacksburg, Va.; Incoming head coach James Franklin speaks to fans on the sideline before the game at Lane Stadium. | Brian Bishop-Imagn Images

I always tend to think that the mood around any sport is brighter when you’re not actually playing it. Optimism compounds in abundance when there’s no dose of reality to combat it. The offseason, in any sport, is a blank canvas, one that fans and programs eagerly paint with possibility and the hope to surpass its previous marks. In the offseason, every weakness can be fixed, every question mark finds an answer and every team looks a few steps closer to the version of itself it wants so badly to become.

Hokie Nation, we got our guy 🤝

Coach Franklin’s here to win 🏆

➡️ https://t.co/qFtXyikfDR
🏆 https://t.co/dA4VWjes9z pic.twitter.com/J2MTYyAILt

— Virginia Tech Football (@HokiesFB) November 17, 2025

But even with that natural offseason optimism acknowledged and accounted for, it’s hard to ignore just how marked a shift James Franklin’s upcoming recruiting class has been for Virginia Tech. Franklin has long recruited well, consistently stacking top-15 classes and pulling in enough blue-chip talent at his previous stop, Penn State, to keep the Nittany Lions as top threats. But now things feel different. Not just because Franklin now lines up for Tech rather than for Penn State.

Part of that stems from the simple reality that Virginia Tech needs a spark. The program has spent the better part of the last decade stuck in an uncomfortable middle ground: too competitive to be written off entirely, yet not quite talented enough to seriously threaten the ACC’s upper tier. Whenever the Hokies line up against the league’s best — programs with deeper rosters and more established recruiting pipelines (i.e. Clemson and Florida State pre-2024) — the gap in elite, game-changing talent becomes apparent over the course of four quarters. Foundations alone don’t close the gap. You need difference-makers. You need depth. And you need recruiting classes that don’t just steady the program, but actively raise its trajectory.

That’s why this class matters. For the first time in a long time, the Hokies’ recruiting momentum feels accelerated rather than merely stable. 19 commitments (at the time of writing), spanning the skill positions and the trenches, have reshaped how people talk about the program’s ceiling. Instead of simply trying to keep pace with the rest of the ACC, Franklin is assembling a group that could eventually be capable of with the league’s best and reestablishing Tech as a genuine contender. The class blends star power with positional need, especially in the trenches, something the Hokies haven’t always balanced cleanly in recent years. This year’s group doesn’t feel top-heavy or dependent on two or three marquee names. It feels comprehensive.

That’s where I think that the genuine optimism from the fandom comes from. This isn’t offseason illusion — it’s grounded in what Tech has actually done. Franklin’s staff has operated with a renewed urgency on the trail, and recruits have responded accordingly. No single class guarantees results, but the nature of this momentum shift is hard to miss. For the first time in years, the trajectory feels pointed upward for reasons that go beyond hope.

The offseason tends to inflate expectations. That much is always true. But every now and then, a program gives its fans a reason to believe that the optimism isn’t just seasonal noise. For Tech, this recruiting class is that reason. And if Franklin continues to stack this level of talent, the program may finally push beyond its long-frustrating plateau.