RJ Young’s latest college football run put Virginia Tech in a spot it will not love on paper and may embrace on the field: an ACC sleeper for the 2026 season. Young, appearing on First Things First to go through his 138 CFB rankings, singled out the Hokies as a team that could climb well beyond a preseason projection of eighth in the conference.
The timing matters because college football begins in earnest this Saturday, and preseason lists are already shaping the way fans judge the 2026 season before a snap is taken. Young also framed the year as the most competitive in college football history, which makes the hunt for teams that can beat their slotting more urgent than usual. Virginia Tech is one of those teams because it sits outside the ACC spotlight while still carrying real ingredients.
Those ingredients start with James Franklin and a roster that ranked top-five in the country in returning production. That combination is what makes the Hokies hard to dismiss. A new coach usually means a reset, but Franklin arrives with a team that does not need to be rebuilt from scratch, only organized and pushed into a better range than the ACC poll gave it.
The quarterback situation is part of that case too. Ethan Grunkemeyer is expected to be under center after being forced into action when Penn State starter Drew Allar was lost for the season midway through 2025. That kind of experience can harden a young player fast, and Virginia Tech is betting that the leap from emergency duty to full-time command can happen quickly enough to matter this fall.
There is still a built-in contradiction in the projection. Virginia Tech was picked to finish eighth in the ACC even with that returning production and a new head coach, a placement that says more about the league’s uncertainty than about the Hokies’ ceiling. The setup also leaves room for a sharper rise, with the team viewed as capable of pushing SMU and Louisville for the silver medal spot in the conference if the pieces settle early.
That path is made a little easier by the schedule. A soft start can give Virginia Tech time to build before the meat of its slate arrives in late October, when the games should start telling the truth about who really belongs in the top half of the ACC. Frank Beamer’s old program has not been a regular contender since he retired, but this is the kind of roster and coaching pivot that can change a perception faster than a preseason poll ever could.
So the real question is not whether Virginia Tech can beat eighth place; it is whether Franklin, Grunkemeyer and all that returning production can turn a wide-open 2026 into something bigger than a mild surprise. If the Hokies are going to force their way into the ACC race, the opening stretch has to do more than look manageable. It has to buy time for a team that may have more to say about the conference by the end of October than anyone expected in August.
