It was an up and down day for Virginia Tech's defense where they allowed a few costly big plays and had some bad penalties, but also got their act together for most of the second half. In the end though, Tech's defense wasn't able to do enough early to prevent a 24-17 defeat to Marshall.
So with that said, here are my takeaways from the Hokies' 24-17 loss at Marshall.
1. Run Defense Highs and Lows
Virginia Tech's run defense continues to be too up and down but the Hokies are showing signs of getting closer and closer to actually having a pretty stout unit to pair with a pass defense that has been strong.
For the second-straight week, Virginia Tech allowed two runs of 30+ yards with both going over 50 in this case including the 55-yard TD from Rasheen Ali plus a 61-yard from Ali that launched a TD drive for Marshall. Whether it's the linebacker or safety run fits or tackling misses or both, Tech is having these really bad moments where instead of it just being a chunk plays, errors stack on top of each other for a game-changing play.
Brent Pry acknowledged those issues allowing the huge game-changing runs in his postgame comments.
"I think we’ve got some issues just controlling the run game. I think that’s our goal right now to get to a better place where we can manage it, our run defense. But the explosive runs are what’s killing us. We’ve got to make people drive the field. And you’ve got to keep the ball in front and inside. You may have an 8-, a 10-, a 12-, even a 15-yard explosive run, but we can’t let them go the distance. Just too much of that. It makes it too easy on teams when they can garner those. The big, explosive play through the run game," Pry said.
However, Tech only ended up allowing 4.9 yards per carry despite three runs over 20 yards including two 50+ yard carries. When you take out those 3 runs along with the 2 sacks for a loss of 12 yards and the three-yard loss on the closing kneel down, Marshall only had 90 yards on their 38 carries, an average of only 2.4 yards per carry.
Now you can't take out those long runs but the underlying details here suggest a run defense that is making progress as a whole. This is also a unit that ranks 43rd in run defense success rate according to CFB-Graphs, another sign of Tech's run defense being better overall then the raw numbers suggest.
The question now is can they stop giving up the field-flipping runs? If they can, this unit could be poised for a big statistical jump and overall improvement soon.
