When Brent Pry was hired, the reason around choosing Pry was his plan to bring a modern Virginia Tech rooted in the identity and core values of the Frank Beamer era. That was supposed to include a resurgence on special teams, which had been fairly good during the Justin Fuente era to be fair.
While the Hokies have seen strong play from John Love, Peter Moore, and Jaylin Lane this season; Tech's special teams performance has not resembled anything close to what we saw during the Frank Beamer, from the details in execution and personnel management mistakes to bad decision-making.
And while special teams helped the Hokies win games under Beamer, special teams and the decisions surrounding their usage are central to Tech being 2-3 instead of 4-1 or maybe even 5-0 in year 3 of the Brent Pry era.
Let's start with the most obvious issue that we've seen pop up twice this season: the double numbers.
When Tech ran out two #0's against Vanderbilt, it was quite bad and inexcusable but stupid, inexcusable things sometimes happen in Week 1. This didn't make it something you could write off but you could reasonably assume that this wouldn't happen again.
Apparently that was wrong because Virginia Tech did just that against Miami sending out two #17s with Cole Nelson joining the field goal protection team late after Tech realized they only had 10 players on the field without a timeout to reset things. Brent Pry discussed how that could happen during his weekly press conference with Tech Sideline's Andy Bitter comparing that to the TV broadcast video after.
