National Analyst Predicts Virginia Tech vs Stanford Final Score

Will Virginia Tech be able to bounce back from the loss to Miami and win their first ACC game of the season?

Sep 27, 2024; Miami Gardens, Florida, USA; Virginia Tech Hokies quarterback Kyron Drones (1) runs with the football against the Miami Hurricanes during the second quarter at Hard Rock Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Sam Navarro-Imagn Images / Sam Navarro-Imagn Images

It is almost gameday for Virginia Tech. For only the second time ever and the first time since Stanford joined the ACC, the Hokies and the Cardinal are going to meet on the field and it is a big game for Virginia Tech.

This has not been the start that the Hokies wanted to the season, but they have a chance to start to get things back on track if they can win on Saturday. While they did lose to Miami last week, the Hokies showed signs of being the team that was getting so much hype at the beginning of the year. They were running the ball very well, getting pressure on the quarterback, and forcing turnovers against one of the nation's best offenses. The question will be if the Hokies can put the ending of last week's game behind them and go to the West Coast and get a win against a Stanford team that has been competitive in every game they have played this year.

Virginia Tech is the favorite coming into this game and Bleacher Report's David Kenyon has the Hokies winning, but by a closer margin than the spread would have you believe. Kenyon is projecting a 31-28 win for the Hokies.

Bill Connelly's SP+ has Virginia winning by nine points on Saturday. SP+ is projecting that Virginia Tech wins by a score of 32-23 and it gives the Hokies a 72% chance to win the game on Saturday.

What exactly is SP+? Here is how Connelly himself describes it:

"As always, these are based on three primary factors: returning production (final rankings for which you can find at the bottom of this piece), recent recruiting and recent history. How good have you been recently? Whom do you have coming back? How good are the players replacing those you don't have coming back? That's loosely what we ask when we're setting expectations for a team; it's also what these projections attempt to do objectively.

As always: SP+ is a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking, and, along those same lines, these projections aren't intended to be a guess at what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the year. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather to date."

What the Hokies have to try and do now is to take the good things they did against Miami and improve upon them while not letting the end-of-the-game decision by the officials linger and affect them when they travel to Stanford next Saturday. This team could still have a nice season, even though the margin for error has shrunk pretty drastically over the first five weeks

There is a reason this team is 2-3 though and part of that is inconsistency. The ending of the Miami could be a galvanizing moment for the team for the rest of the year or they could have it affect them the rest of the season and put a bowl game in jeopardy. That is the No.1 thing to watch with this team going forward the rest of the way.