On Wednesday, the ACC and ESPN jointly dropped a significant portion of their kickoff times for the 2026 season. That includes five Virginia Tech kickoff times for the first year of the James Franklin era in Blacksburg.
Opponents and dates have been known for a while, but kickoff times are significant because, often, they reveal how a program is viewed nationally. Suddenly, with Franklin at the helm, the Hokies are a draw.
Both of Virginia Tech’s Friday night games are, unsurprisingly, slated for 7:00 p.m. ET kickoffs, one at home against Pitt on October 2, and the other on the road in Dallas against SMU. However, those are only half of Virginia Tech’s primetime games so far. Of the five kickoff times announced for the Hokies, four are in primetime.
James Franklin is a huge draw in his 1st season at Virginia Tech
Franklin’s first true ‘Enter Sandman’ has to be under the lights at Lane Stadium, so, of course, the Week 1 matchup with VMI is a 7:30 p.m. ET kick on the ACC Network. Then, two weeks later, after a noon kickoff at home against Old Dominion and former Penn State offensive coordinator Ricky Rahne, Virginia Tech heads to Franklin’s old stomping grounds in College Park to play Maryland under the lights with a 7:30 p.m. ET kickoff on FOX.
The Friday games have to be in primetime, and Week 1 at night was a given, but a Week 3 non-conference matchup with Maryland getting top billing is proof that Franklin is a huge draw as the head coach of the Hokies. He’s expected to be the program’s savior and a return to Maryland, where he was once the coach-in-waiting under Ralph Friedgen before leaving to start his head coaching career at Vanderbilt after Friedgen was fired, is a big enough storyline to thrust Virginia Tech onto a platform it rarely saw under Brent Pry or Justin Fuente before him.
Joe Paterno was the Penn State football program, and even considering how unseemly the end of his tenure in Happy Valley was, he built it to a point where it would be hard for a coach to be bigger than the program. Franklin certainly wasn’t, even when he won the Big Ten Title in 2016, and before the narrative of his big game woes enveloped him. Matt Campbell won’t be either.
Virginia Tech, however, is a program that hasn’t seen a 10-win season since 2016 and hasn’t sniffed real contention since well before Frank Beamer ultimately retired. It will always be Beamer’s program, but Franklin’s arrival has thrust it back into the national spotlight, where Penn State will seemingly always reside. That makes Virginia Tech the perfect place for Franklin’s next chapter.
The funny thing is that sustained relevance may not have been possible for the Nittany Lions without Franklin and everything he did to pull them out of the heavily sanctioned mess he found them in. He just couldn’t get over the hump to win a title and stay in Happy Valley for the long haul. The good news is that’s not the expectation at Virginia Tech, and maybe he can get the program to a point where it is, like he did in Happy Valley. He’s already got the spotlight pointed in the Hokies’ direction.
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