Recent Comments
it's gonna be hard to be worse than what we had
The linemen transfers are pretty young if I recall correctly.
We have an issue that the richest parts of the state are no where close to Blacksburg, it's a trek
This is a big deal: the primary incentive for donating is tickets and access. If you can't take advantage, the value prop may not be there.
This years tourney exposes what NIL truly is.
How many SEC teams normally got to the tournament? I mean UK was usually always pretty good. Then they may have had one or two more teams that routinely did well.
All of the sudden half the damn SEC is in the Tournament. When was the last time UGA got to the tourney??? Holy crap.
You know they wanted an all SEC final four.
Kids???
Excuse me you mean poor students who are forced to play and practice with almost no time of their own only for the betterment of their coaches and the university while they get nothing.....
Yes, yes they can.
Apparently it was the first weekend ever that both baseball and softball had ranked sweeps.
I'm kinda hoping the change in coaches and the linemen transfers will help.
I think it's a bit of this is how it's been so why change, we won with Beamer, just hire another top 10 all time coach.
But this staff hasn't helped themselves by doing things others do. That $128 increase to athletes fee could be $200+ just to buy tickets for football. All students join hokie club and get tickets that way. PSU does something similar. Grow the base. Start em young like the tobacco industry. Get them started thinking about donations early, that's the habit. Otherwise it's just a line item on a larger bill.
We have an issue that the richest parts of the state are no where close to Blacksburg, it's a trek. Lots of the wealth in WV is around Morgantown. GT is in Atlanta. Even Bama is less than an hour from Birmingham. It's way easier for the money to come and participate. There aren't a lot of good hotel options either. So some way you have to compesate for that space so your middle tier money donates. You need the $10k donors to increase, you need the 20k donors to increase. You have to figure how to get the families making $200k- $300k give money. But you give that much, pay for tickets, pay for parking, pay for hotels, it's a whole ordeal after a 3-4 hour drive each way.
It doesn't seem like we've done much except as for small donations via emails after wins. Which is a start. The shit that we "sell" sucks. Its bad quality and i don't want to buy it. Who liked the common wealth cup from this year?
I see 5-7 this year personally. I don't know how you lose several talented key pieces from last year, coupled with the horrific state of the OL and LB corps which we still haven't really addressed, and expect improvement.
Have you been to BC? Can they possibly be worse than that?
SMH... the Twins are absolute trash. Based on the early sample size I think they can make the historic year the White Sox had in 2024 very short-lived.
so prep for another .500 season? or worse?
Chris Coleman also said that the offensive line is ass.
Says that Matt Moore is doing great things, but the deck has very little in it and then on top of that there's injuries.
I don't think we're suddenly going to have a Phil Knight or similar stupid money donor come out of the woodwork. But, given the amount of living alumni that VT has and our growth, particularly the enormous fundraising growth on the academic side under Sands, and I think VT athletics is way underachieving in that department. It's just been too much of a country club atmosphere and small circle of people running the AD. I'm glad Sands is seeing what other peer ADs look like and starting to turn up the heat on Whit. Everything needs a massive overhaul on that side IMO.
I don't think Whit is the right AD to lead us in this new revenue sharing/NIL era. His benchmark has generally been to compare us to UVA (hence his initial focus on Directors Cup and sinking money into non revs). We aren't going to survive in this era comparing ourselves to the Hoos.
I too, hope that is the case.
The parallels between Brent Pry and Geoff Collins are not lost on me either
I feel like we have to have some monied alum that aren't engaged like what GT had a couple years ago, but maybe that's just wishful thinking.
I feel like we are simultaneously making headway and treading water in the college athletics arms race.
Agreed... I do wonder how much of that is the fault of the current administration versus just a reality of being at Virginia Tech.
Like, is he getting blood from stones, or is there untapped oil that he can't find because he doesn't know how to drill? I imagine the truth is somewhere in between, but who actually knows 🤷♂️
Seeing that the Hokie club raised a record 18.5 mil last year, an amount that won't even cover rev share, was pretty eye opening for me. I feel like we are simultaneously making headway and treading water in the college athletics arms race.
That seems like a very VT thing to do.
March presented by CBS
I think that there is waning enthusiasm for donating to Athletic Programs (or their associated Collectives) to pump NIL money to guys who can leave 6 months later.
At places like OSU or Bama it's an easier sell because they can back the monetary demand with wins.
At non-P2 places like VT who are struggling simply to compete, it's a much harder sell.
Also, I think the ultimate fallacy of this entire charade of "NIL" is the idea that average programs are money-making machines that have a spare $20mil lying around to distribute. Do they have lots of revenue? Sure...profit is a different matter entirely.