Virginia Tech started the James Franklin era with an emphatic 73-3 win against VMI, the program's biggest margin of victory since 1922 when they beat Catholic 73-0.
The Hokies did have one glaring issue: penalties.
The Hokies committed 11 penalties for 93 yard across the game, with James Franklin clearly frustrated about his team’s issues in this area.
"The area I wasn’t pleased with was penalties," Franklin said during Monday's press conference. I take a ton of pride in [limiting] penalties. I think it shows a disciplined football team and I don’t think we were that on Saturday. It creates a sloppy game and I don’t like what sloppy represents. They were drive killers. It made things more difficult on offense and defense. The first thing you have to do when taking over a program, before you learn to win, you have to get rid of the things that get you beat."
He continued to emphasize how important it is to limit penalties and what it can say about a program.
"The first thing you have to do when taking over a program, before you learn to win, you have to get rid of the things that get you beat."
Penalties are exactly what gets a team beat in close games. In the Brent Pry era, the Hokies were 1-12 and 0-8 in 2023 and 2024.
In those 12 one-score losses, the Hokies averaged around eight penalties a game, tallying nearly 57 penalty yards per game. The winning team, on the other hand, averaged less than seven penalties per game with around the same average yardage. (There is an outlier in the data, Miami committed 17 penalties for 159 yards in their win against the Hokies in 2022, so that does skew data.)
"When I kind of look back, those are the things I’m disappointed with in the penalties, specifically the pre-snap penalties and the post-whistle penalties," Franklin said.
The Hokies now turn their attention to Old Dominion, who has had the Hokies number in recent years, upsetting Virginia Tech as underdogs three times in the last eight seasons, including a 45-26 victory in Lane Stadium in 2025 — the loss that marked the end of the Brent Pry era. Franklin knows that VT will need to improve in the areas they struggled with against VMI including penalties if they are to play up to expectations versus ODU.
"We’re going to have to be prepared and ready for the things that we didn’t do well, because Old Dominion is going to be all over this tape just like we’re going to be all over theirs."
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