Well the football schedule came out last week, and besides the normal give and take of the ACC schedule it’s looking like a fairly routine deal this season.

We feature seven home games, with a huge night opener with Carolina (minus everyone but Sam Howell). The game is presumably a nationally televised opener, and it looks like the broadcast schedule is so tweaky that the time was used to list it for either Thursday or Friday. There are many of us who are not really all that thrilled with a huge ACC game to open the season, but a chance at Sam Howell without a ton of games under his belt with a new crew might be a good thing.

The non-conference game of note for 2021 is that the Chunk of Coal (Officially known as the Black Diamond Trophy) will be at stake because the (oops... can’t read a schedule anymore - don’t know what an actual one is after 2020) West Virginia Mountaineers are coming to Blacksburg. The Hokies head to Morgantown on September 18th to fight over the lump of coal.

Our other “non-conference” but conference game challenge will be Notre Dame. The Irish travel to Blacksburg this year, and you have to wonder about their conference status along with their long term status as college football seriously considers a much needed reorganization.

Needless to say if the Virginia Tech Hokies who took the field at the end of last season and put one on the Cavaliers, show up, it’s going to be an interesting run. As far as our ‘other’ ACC Atlantic Crossover game, the Orange hop on I-81 and drive south from Western New York. Syracuse is always a painful encounter, though have been struggling of late. We’ll see, they always give us fits.

The greatest concern for both of us is the heavy away weighting of the schedule in the season stretch. From October 30 until the end of the season we play 4 away games in 5 weeks. It’s Duke’s turn to travel on November 13th. At least there will probably only be one cold weather game to deal with if we have full coverage opporunities.

Time to Talk Turkey

And now that you’ve thought about it, let’s take a gut check poll.

Note: In the basketball section of the pod: This was recorded before the unfortunate COVID encounter and the postponement (cancellation?) of the North Carolina game. Everything could be different as the postponed games are either made up or cancelled over a very short period.

We’ll be talking about the schedule some more, and also dealing with the warm up to Spring. It’s baseball time in Blacksburg, starting tomorrow. We’ll look at the team and roster in the next show.

GO HOKIES!!!