Roth Report: February 2025

Talk about a ‘new look’ football team; Virginia Tech will have one in 2025.

Since the end of last season, Head Coach Brent Pry has hired new offensive and defensive coordinators, a new offensive line coach, a new strength and conditioning coach and brought in over 30 new players.

Actually, that’s more than a fresh look. That’s a total makeover.

The Hokies will have new schemes and personnel on both sides of the ball, which Pry hopes will translate to more wins following a 6-7 season in 2024.

New OC Philip Montgomery arrives in Blacksburg with the chops, the pedigree and the resume after building elite offenses at Baylor and then later as head coach at Tulsa.

What should Tech fans expect out of the Hokies’ 2025 offense?

“We're going to be physical,” Montgomery told me. “We're going to spread you out, and we're going to use the whole field horizontally and vertically and make defenses feel uncomfortable out in space and then being able to change formations, reduce them, bunch them, be able to give our receivers opportunities to get open, to get steps, and be able to take advantage of us pushing the ball.”

A year ago, Tech finished 88th nationally in total offense, averaging 367.8 yards per game. Tech was 67th in scoring offense, averaging 28.2 points per game.

Before taking the job in Blacksburg, Montgomery said he did his homework, researching the personnel Tech currently has on its roster and spending a lot of time looking at tape of the ’24 team. 

“I really wanted to kind of get an idea of the talent that we had on the football team, being able to use that talent in what we do offensively and being able to continue to raise the standard in the bar of what we want it to be,” Montgomery said.

You know, we'll be a ‘controlling tempo’ type team. You know, at Baylor, we did put up some numbers, but we were calling like our hair was on fire, playing with tempo all the time. Defenses have kind of adapted to that a little bit. And so now we've changed our mindset on how we use tempo. It's still going to be a part of it.

I still think it can be a way to catch defenses off balance. So, we'll use it and install it, but we'll control it a lot more than we used to. We're an RPO-based offense. We're going to play downhill.”

Most of all, Montgomery is convinced he can improve Tech’s passing game. The Hokies finished 16th (out of 17 teams in the ACC) in passing a year ago, but Montgomery’s familiarity with Kyron Drones – “I offered him out of high school, but I wasn’t at a big-enough place (Tulsa) to get him,” has him feeling confident about the Tech’s returning starter at QB.

“He brings so many things to the table,” Montgomery said. He's got a big arm. He's athletic. He's a big, strong kid. I think he did some really great things as you start watching and breaking down the tape.

“So, it's building on the successes that they've been able to develop here but also adding our brand to it and continuing to grow. 

“I think he (Drones) did a really good job in all the different reads that they gave him last year, reading defensive end, reading linebackers, reading guys at second levels. I think we can build on those things and continue to grow and develop those things, but I think we can add more to his game, especially from a passing game standpoint. Give him a little bit more freedom.

“Give him a little bit more options and make sure that we are, you know, locking into this guy's going to tell us what to do. And we know the ball needs to come out here when that happens and be on time with it. Let's do it off of timing. 

And I think he'll be really exceptional at that.” 

From a big-picture standpoint, Montgomery says his familiarity with Pry and Tech’s program made his move to Blacksburg an easy one.

“Coach Pry and I had met each other several years ago, had a good opportunity to sit down, and actually had dinner with him and his wife. So, we got to know each other. I think that's about the time he took the job here. 

We had played against each other a couple of times on opposite sidelines, and so I have a lot of respect for what he does. But for me, the tradition around here of what Virginia Tech football is, when you start coaching, going back to Coach Beamer, and, you know, I had the opportunity to play him in his last game, and that was kind of surreal in all of it. But then just watching what Coach Pry had done just from a foundation standpoint, from a culture standpoint, the excitement of the community and the fans, it just seemed like a home run for me and my family.

When I started hearing that this position was going to come open, I reached out to our agents, and I said, Hey, this is one that I would really like to be a part of and have an opportunity to interview for. And I pushed extremely hard to get in this mix.”

New defensive coordinator Sam Siefkes has also hit the ground running. See that light in the Merryman Center every morning at 4:30 a.m.? That’s the light in Sam’s office as the 33-year-old former Arizona Cardinals assistant gets a head start on each day.

In just a short few weeks on the job, he’s set the tone for what Tech fans will see out of the team’s 2025 defense.

“We want to play with great effort, which is what we call our motor, and we want to play with great violence,” Siefkes told me. “And the main thing is that is, you know, we want to be tough; we want to be physical at the point of attack. Like, that's the biggest thing.

When you watch great defenses, they all do those two things, you know. So, if we do nothing else as a defense, that's what I want to hang my hat on from a defensive coordinator standpoint. And I think the biggest thing in terms of our philosophy is, you know, we need to be what I call simplex, which is, you know, it's simple in how we teach it to the players, it's simple in how I present it to the coaches, but it's complex to every offense that we're going to play.” 

Simplex is the code word for what the innovative Siefkes wants to do. Schemes that are simple to teach but complex for the other team’s coaches and, most importantly, the opposing quarterback.

“When they look at us in a week’s time, it's going to be really hard for them to game plan and figure out what we're doing. But it's very easy for us to be able to manipulate the pieces and do what we need to do to execute and win the game,” Siefkes said.

The Hokies will clearly play multiple defenses this fall.

“I think when you watch us, you're not going to know what's about to happen, and you're not going to know pre-snap, you ain't going to know post-snap,” Siefkes joked.

Having versatile players who can move around and play several spots is huge in what the Cardinals did last year and what he hopes to bring to Tech.

“I kind of cater to that ‘positionless defense,” he said. “I think that's kind of where the game is going. You know, a lot of teams are going to try to bank you for what personnel you're in and what kind of structures you show within that personnel.

And I've always felt like you're pigeonholing yourself into some things that you don't want to go down. And so, my biggest thing is we've got to be able to have some structures in place where we're in one grouping of people, right? But they can play a lot of different positions, and that could be a safety, that could be a linebacker, that could be a defensive alignment, that could be a variety of people.

"But we want to be able to have, teach things so simply from a technique standpoint that they can play those different spots.”

He’s one of the youngest coordinators in major college football, but he’s got coordinator experience in both Division III and in the Southern Conference at Wofford.

“When I was in Division III and I made my jump to FCS, people tried to tell me that it's such a different game and it's such a higher level and this and that,” Siefkes said.

“The game's the game. You know, they said the same thing to me when I went from the FCS to the National Football League.

The game's the game, right? You either know it or you don't. And I think that's one of the things it's like, I know it.”

Two new coordinators who are smart, experienced and hungry have given a totally different flavor to Virginia Tech’s football program. Spending just 30 minutes with each of them was enough to know they understand the game and how to do the job. How they mesh with the returning staff and players, plus all those newcomers, will be exciting and fascinating to watch leading up to Tech’s season-opener against South Carolina in Atlanta.

During our Duke’s Mayo Bowl broadcast in January, Mike Burnop and I noted several times that the Virginia Tech team we saw that night in Charlotte won’t look like the one that takes the field in Atlanta for the ’25 season opener.

Turns out, that was a massive understatement! It’s a total makeover that has rejuvenated this team with fresh concepts, innovative ideas, and three dozen new players. That will make for a fun off-season for all of us.