SP+ predicts the final result for Saturday's game

The Hokies are back in action this week and will face a program for just the second time in school history and the first time in ACC play. Virginia Tech heads on the road to play Stanford, and while the Cardinals were picked to finish last in the ACC this season in the preseason poll, they have played well this year and will pose some challenges for the Hokies. The Cardinal totaled 361 yards against Clemson last weekend, including 236 on the ground, an average of 5.4 yards per carry. The other question is, how does Virginia Tech bounce back from a heartbreaking loss to Miami? Will Virginia Tech take the good things from this game and try to build momentum and get back to a bowl game, or will they let it go and influence how they play against Stanford on Saturday?

When sports betting opened on Sunday, the Hokies were almost favorites for a touchdown on the road against Stanford, and Bill Connelly's SP+ gave them the win by nine points on Saturday. SP+ projects Virginia Tech to win by a score of 32-23, giving the Hokies a 72% chance of winning Saturday's game.

What exactly is SP+? This is how Connelly himself describes it:

“As always, these are based on three main factors: returning production (final rankings can be found at the end of this article), recent recruiting and recent history. How good have you been lately? Who do you think will come back?” How good are the players who aren’t coming back? That's largely the question we ask when setting expectations for a team.

As always: SP+ is a pace- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. This is a predictive measure of the most enduring and predictable aspects of football, not a resume ranking, and with that in mind, these projections are not intended as a guess as to what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the year. These are simply early off-season performance rankings based on the information we have been able to gather so far.”

What the Hokies need to try to do now is take the good things they did against Miami and improve on them without letting that affect the referees' final decision on their trip to Stanford next Saturday. This team could still have a nice season, even if the margin for error has shrunk quite dramatically in the first five weeks. They're the favorite against Stanford next week, then they have a much-needed week off before facing Boston College and Georgia Tech at home. The game against Clemson will be tough, but Duke and Virginia are also winnable games. If they can play like they did on Friday night, the score will still be 8-4.

However, there is a reason this team is 2-3, and part of it is inconsistency. The end of the Miami tournament could be an exciting moment for the team for the rest of the year, or it could impact the rest of the season and put a bowl game in jeopardy. That's the most important thing to pay attention to as this team progresses the rest of the way.