James Franklin doesn't want that smoke.
James Madison, which just made the College Football Playoff, was on Virginia Tech's football schedule for the season ahead. Not anymore.
Franklin is the new head football coach of the Hokies after his dismissal from Penn State, and evidently, he felt a different scheduling plan was in order.
Multiple reports have indicated that Virginia Tech is paying James Madison $800,000 to not play the scheduled game.
College sports are full of "buy games," in which a larger institution pays a smaller school a significant amount to meet on the field or the court. It helps prop up the smaller program's athletic department while giving the larger school a game it should conceptually win.
Virginia Tech apparently felt it better to pay JMU to go away rather than to come to Blacksburg and show them what a winning program looks like.
They also had to get rid of one of their non-league games due to the ACC moving to a nine-game schedule.
They'll play VMI, Old Dominion and Maryland before conference play begins.
The Hokies just completed a 3-9 season.
It's not immediately clear who they may find to fill the James Madison spot on the schedule.
In the 2025 season, Virginia Tech lost to another smaller Virginia school, Old Dominion, by a 45-26 score.
On the flip side of things, Franklin will have put together such a different roster that it's probably hard to predict the season ahead for the Hokies just based on the past.
But apparently they still think it's best to avoid James Madison, just in case.
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