To understand where Virginia Tech baseball stands on the NCAA Tournament bubble, you must understand how it got there.
The Hokies (23-20, 11-13 ACC) haven’t been shy about it. They were down on themselves after a gauntlet portion of their schedule that began in Arlington, Texas, where they played three ranked SEC teams before starting ACC play with road trips to No. 2 Georgia Tech and No. 21 Virginia.
Between an 0-3 weekend at Globe Life Field and a series loss to the Yellow Jackets was perhaps the most deflating part of it all: a 13-4 thrashing by Marshall at English Field.
It was the kind of non-competitive loss that the Hokies absorbed multiple times throughout that stretch. They weren’t expecting to sweep some of the best teams in the nation, but losses like 10-0 to No. 7 Texas A&M, 15-8 to No. 10 Mississippi State, 16-1 and 14-5 against Georgia Tech and 11-6 and 10-5 at Virginia suggested they couldn’t even hang with them.
“Mentally, some guys were just pressing and beating themselves up through the Texas tournament and into the start of ACC play,” Hokies associate head coach Kurt Elbin said. “It’s taken them a long while to get out of their own way.”
Head coach John Szefc rounded his players up after the Marshall loss — before trips to Atlanta and Charlottesville — and brought them into the James C. Weaver Baseball Center, skipping on-field position meetings to, as he said, “do some things behind closed doors.
“What I had to say, I couldn’t say in the dugout,” Szefc added.
The next day, even with the Yellow Jackets up next, the Hokies did not practice. They ran. They sprinted up and down the “VT”-etched hill along Southgate Drive beyond English Field until the coaching staff was satisfied.
“I don’t want to say we hit the panic button, but there had to be some accountability,” Tech right fielder Sam Grube said. “We got wrung for that. Elbin told us, ‘This isn’t us.’”
The forthcoming weeks were not perfect, but the Hokies haven’t lost three games in a weekend since, including at Georgia Tech, UVa, Miami and Boston College — four of the ACC’s best. They’re still the only team in the conference to have beaten the Yellow Jackets in Atlanta.
The aforementioned series were still plenty messy with a number of deflating blowouts, but Tech taking one game in each of them — all but one coming as Sunday wins that Griffin Stieg started — kept it from being buried in the ACC standings.
Instead, it allowed the Hokies, who have the fifth-hardest strength of schedule in the nation, to hang around the top 50 in RPI. As dismal as the team’s outlook was, the season was never lost.
To Grube, the turning point was a late-March matchup against Radford, right off the heels of a 6-3 series loss against Stanford — a game in which Tech left 17 runners on base and lost in extra innings.
Before Tech beat the Highlanders 14-5, it held a players-only meeting. Circled around English’s center field, team leaders — seniors and graduate students like Peyton Smith, Sam Gates and Jacob Exum — refused to accept that their final seasons would end uncompetitive.
“They said, ‘Hey, this is not how I want to go out, as a bottom-feeding team,’” Grube said. “We really rallied around that. The energy brought everyone together. It made us want to play for each other.”
Inside Radford’s visiting dugout that following Tuesday, the Hokies were something they hadn’t been in weeks: loud. There was an air of confidence to the team that they used to pound the Highlanders, which has endured a month later.
“We just needed to see that we could smash a ball,” Grube said. “And we smashed that ball. It was the most runs we had all year.”
Grube will be the first to tell you that the game didn’t manufacture a complete 180 for Tech. A series loss to Miami and midweek trouncing at the hands of Liberty (No. 31 in RPI) followed. The game did, however, mark the early stages of an upswing.
The Hokies won their second ACC series opener of the year against the top-25 Eagles before losing Game 2 by a run and Game 3 by four. But they remained poised heading into another game against Radford — this time in Blacksburg — where they scored a season-high 14 runs behind a combined no-hitter, the program’s first in 26 years.
Grube and Co. made history. They weren’t going to be remembered as just another Hokies baseball team, and that gave them the confidence they needed to fire off seven wins in nine games — starting with the no-hitter — including two ACC series wins against Pitt and NC State.
“It’s fun to win, and people get confidence from winning,” Szefc said. “I don’t think we played poorly at the beginning. I just think the opponents we played were just really good, and we have a lot of new guys on our team that probably weren’t quite ready for that. But as you get [deep into the season], you have a lot of games under your belt and … things are going better.”
Belief has a way of showing itself on the diamond. After a start that made Tech players question if they could hang around with good teams, they have faith that they can beat anyone.
“We’ve been through so many ups and downs, but now we’re a completely different team,” Locurto said. “We knew the brand of baseball that we needed to play was coming. We just needed to keep believing.”
Putting the Hokies’ gritty Sunday wins and three series victories together, the NCAA Tournament is more than in the cards — and for the first time since 2022, they’re elevating to finish the season as opposed to tapering off.
Sitting at 11-13 in the ACC and No. 33 in RPI with two conference series remaining, the path to an NCAA Regional is clear: go 4-2 in the league with no non-conference losses (though it’s possible it can afford to lose at Liberty in a week depending on the rest of its résumé).
An ACC team going .500 or better in league play with excellent strength of schedule metrics not making the tournament would be unprecedented. The most recent example was Louisville in 2024. The Cardinals went 16-14 in the ACC and 32-24 overall but missed the NCAA Tournament because they finished No. 61 in RPI. In this case, if Tech finishes .500 in ACC play, its RPI should finish well above that mark.
Even better for the Hokies, they’ll likely be favored at Cal, vs. Clemson and vs. UNC Greensboro, which they’ll play in Blacksburg between their last two ACC series.
“If you finish .500 in this league, I don’t know how you can’t be a postseason team,” Szefc said.
Baseball America put Tech in its NCAA Tournament bracket projection this week — predicting that it beats Cal and Clemson — while D1Baseball listed the team in its “Four to Watch” section, essentially the outlet’s version of “Next Four Out.”Even if the Hokies hit their .500 ACC-play target, the committee may dock a couple aspects of their résumé. Their most impressive series win will be either NC State or Pitt, both of which currently have losing ACC records. And as solid as Tech’s RPI is, it’s the only top-40 team remotely close to a .500 overall record. The next closest is 26-15 (.634) UCF, which is No. 25 in the RPI.
However, considering precedence, the Hokies are on the bubble with their fate entirely in their own hands. They simply have to keep winning, and right now, they’re confident they can do so. If their 8-3 record in series finales is any indication, they’re glad to be doing it with their backs against the wall.
“It's been a gauntlet of a season,” Stieg said. “But I think we’ve learned a ton from those first few weeks, and we’re able to apply those situations now to the game.
“We’re better on the ropes. If we go out there and get punched, we punch them right back in the face. That’s our mentality, just to go out there, be relentless and attack with everything we’ve got.”