Another week, another sub 20-point performance for the Virginia Tech offense as the Hokies were wildly inconsistent when they had the ball leading to a 24-17 defeat at Marshall. There was once again plenty of reason for frustration with this offense but also some positives as well.
Here are my offensive takeaways from the Hokies' 24-17 loss at Marshall.
1. Another Inconsistent Offensive Mess
Once again, Virginia Tech's offense decided to only show up for about 20 minutes of this game. Unfortunately for them, they still haven't learned that football is a 60-minute game and not just what you can do on your best three possessions.
The struggles were different in this game with many of them being self-inflicted. Tech ran the ball well right off the bat yet they only ended up having 11 carries in the entire first half. Now I've wrote about how Tech needs to probably run the ball less than they'd want given the issues that they had but when your rushing attack has momentum and has Marshall on the backfoot, keep going to it.
Instead, a team that has probably overused the run this year oddly abandoned it in the second quarter before Marshall came out sharp against the run in the third quarter. Tech's rushing attack in the second half largely became the scrambling of Kyron Drones which makes you also wonder why Tyler Bowen didn't try to roll Drones out more.
This offense seemed to find no rhythm during the second and third quarters with seven-straight possessions having no more than 1 first down following the early second quarter field goal from John Love that gave Tech a 10-7 lead. Yes, Marshall is a good Group of 5 team but that's very underwhelming given that Tech still has more talent even without Ali Jennings (though Jaylin Lane did not look like he was at 100% with how he moved when he had the ball in this game).
It would be one thing if this is the first time we've seen this from the Hokies, but we've seen Tech go through these good stretches and bad stretches each of the past three weeks regardless of who the QB is. If there's a positive, it's that we've seen the Hokies find something out of their ruts whether that was the third quarter surge at Rutgers or the late fourth quarter comeback effort this past week.
However, Tech has to start stringing some offensive consistency together as we saw against ODU when they put up 34 of the Hokies' 36 points. If not, you have to wonder if Tech has the right guy leading the offense given the lack of improvement.
