The Virginia Tech men's basketball team is quietly off to a 7-1 start. Though the Hokies have not beaten anyone ranked in the Top 100 of the RPI, their play has drastically improved since they returned from their two-game event in Philadelphia over Thanksgiving Weekend.

The Hokies did not look like a good basketball team in the first five games of the season. They struggled in wins over Brown, UNC Greensboro and Campbell, and then lost to Temple. A 2-6 Delaware team, which has two three-point wins over Penn and Hampton to its credit, managed to take Virginia Tech into overtime. The Hokies were playing poorly, and that was clearly obvious to anyone watching them play.

Since that Delaware game, the Hokies have been much better. They beat Iowa 70-64 on the road, then followed that up with home wins over Georgia (74-62) and VMI (98-73). None of those will count as a quality win on an NCAA tournament resume. Georgia is the best team of those three, with an RPI of #111. However, the improvement on the court has been noticeable.

Virginia Tech has improved from November to December more than any team in the Seth Greenberg era. In fact, this is easily the best start of any team Greenberg has coached at Virginia Tech.

It's amazing that Virginia Tech started every season 5-3 for the last six years. Each year, the Hokies would lose to a lowly rated team early in the season when they were playing their worst basketball. VMI, Georgia, Western Michigan (twice), Bowling Green ... those are just some of the programs that beat the Hokies early in the season in the Greenberg Era. The Hokies should have won those games, and those losses generally put the fan base in a bad mood to start each season.

This year things are different, because Virginia Tech is playing better right now than most people expected them to. Considering the Hokies were 5-3 after eight games in each of the previous six seasons, what were the chances of them starting 7-1 this year? Not particularly good.

It's still too early to begin projecting conference matchups, but the Hokies have an excellent chance to post a very good non-conference record this year.

On paper, Virginia Tech should win five of those six games, with the Seton Hall game being a toss-up. It will be played on a neutral site, in Cancun. If that holds, up, Virginia Tech will go 12-2 in the non-conference portion of their schedule, which would easily be the best mark of the Seth Greenberg era.

This Penn State game is pretty big. The Nittany Lions are the defending NIT Champs, and they are a better team than their RPI suggests. This is a big game, because the Hokies set it up that way by beating the teams they should have beaten. Winning always makes the next game even bigger.

If Tech wins this game, they'll have a chance to set up another big game against Seton Hall on January 2. The Hokies should dispatch Charleston Southern, Maryland-Baltimore County and Longwood with no problem, all at home. If they can knock off Penn State, they'll be 11-1 when they head to Cancun to take on Seton Hall.

The Penn State and Seton Hall games are the swing games of the non-conference schedule. A 2-0 record would be great, though I think a 1-1 split and a 12-2 non-conference record is very acceptable as well. However, the Hokies can't afford to drop both of those games. If they do, they will have lost to every decent non-conference foe that they'll face (Georgia and Iowa will finish at or near the bottom of their respective conferences). An 11-3 record looks good on paper, but if none of those 11 wins are quality, it would put a big damper on things.