Game week is finally here for Virginia Tech and they will travel to Nashville, Tennessee to face Vanderbilt. It’s the start of a highly anticipated season for the Hokies and they hope to compete for an ACC championship, but they need to start the year with a win over Vanderbilt. Most sportsbooks have Virginia Tech as a nearly two-touchdown favorite heading into this game and Bill Connelly’s SP+ matches that projected margin.

SP+ projects Virginia Tech to win this game by a score of 36-21, giving the Hokies an 81% chance to beat Vanderbilt, covering the spread but just barely.

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

“As always, these are based on three main factors: the performance of the returning players (final rankings are at the bottom of this article), recent recruiting, and recent history. How good have you been recently? Who have you brought back? How good are the players replacing the ones not coming back? That’s pretty much what we ask when we set expectations for a team; it’s also what these projections objectively try to do.

As always, SP+ is a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a resume ranking, and in that sense, 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 offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather so far.”

Since Virginia Tech is one of the most experienced teams in the country, I expect them to hit the ground running on Saturday and play just as well as they did at the end of last season.

Kickoff between Virginia Tech and Vanderbilt is at 12:00 p.m. and will be broadcast on ESPN.