Virginia Tech Director of Athletics Whit Babcock sat down with Bill Roth, the voice of Hokies football, this week to discuss important topics around college athletics and how it impacts Tech, including the House vs. NCAA settlement.
Tech athletics released the interview, which is 29 minutes in length, on Friday afternoon. Click here to listen.
Here is a full transcript of the conversation. Timestamps are listed below.
Chapters
0:00 (-28:40): Welcome
0:19 (-28:21): Football
8:40 (-20:00): House vs. NCAA settlement
13:17 (-15:23): Revenue Sharing and Roster Sizes
16:24 (-12:16): Virginia Tech's Plan for Revenue Sharing and Scholarship Increases
20:37 (-8:03): General Manager/Front Office model
23:39 (-5:01): What's Next for Virginia Tech Athletics?
26:52 (-1:48): Hokie Nation Appreciation
Transcript
Bill Roth: We are joined today by Virginia Tech’s Director of Athletics, Whit Babcock. Whit, it is good to be with you today.
Whit Babcock: Thanks, Bill. Always good to visit with you and a good chance to get together at the end of the season here and had a great Signing Day so good to get together.
Roth: Let’s start with that — that’s what’s on everyone’s mind: football. Now that the regular season and Signing Day are completed, what is your view on the status on Virginia Tech’s football program?
Babcock: Yeah, it is a chance to reflect back. I want to start and recognize all of the effort that goes into the season. Our players put their bodies on the line, our coaches give it everything, our operations people, gameday production, our donors, NIL folks. I mean, everybody poured into the program and it was a great effort across the board that way. Winning the game against UVa is always nice, keep that streak alive. Looking forward to a bowl game and some extra practices there, and then as I started with, it was successful on Signing Day. I think that really speaks to Coach [Brent] Pry and his staff, the relationships that they build, all of the Virginia kids, keeping guys in the fold.
All of that has been a positive, but certainly the overall results of the season, extremely frustrating and disappointing. We’re so invested, all of us. It hurts when you fall short. I want to empathize and apologize to the fan base and let them know that we’re determined to fix it, so the effort and the intent was there; we’ve got to get better on the results, and really where we are now record-wise for the past five years or so is not what Virginia Tech football represents. We all know that. We’ve got to get it back. We were close this year and we’re going to get after this bowl game and then turn the attention to next year, but great effort, record was not what we expected and that’s not good enough for Virginia Tech football.
Roth: You said 6-6 was disappointing. What are your expectations for Virginia Tech football moving forward?
Babcock: We know this. The expectations here are pretty simple. It’s to compete and win ACC championships and get in that 12-team playoff, you can’t win the national championship without that. Our fan base represents at that top-tier level. It’s incredibly important, Virginia Tech football is, to too many. Like I said, the results weren’t good enough collectively. That’s got to improve. That’s my responsibility. We’re dang sure not a .500 program, as I mentioned earlier. It’s too much tradition, too much emphasis, too much focus and pouring into football and that is not who we are and we will get out of this valley and bounce it back.
We were favored in a lot of games, you know that, Bill. We had a lead in just as many. I think we’re really close. We’ve got to get over the hump, we’ve got to make this thing happen. We have high expectations; we will meet those, and it’s been a long haul but we have enough energy in us to get this rock over the hill and get the momentum where we want it to be, and that’s nationally relevant Virginia Tech football.
Roth: Have you met with Coach Pry and what happens next with our program?
Babcock: Coach Pry and I have visited briefly. We will definitely get together, or already have planned to get together, extensively early next week. I’ll get into that in a second, but as far as him building the program, I do believe we’re really close. I think it’s logical to assume when you’re building a program, which is where we were in Coach Pry’s first year, we went 3-8, you lose games, and then the next step in that process is you start to lose smaller, close games, and we know what our record is there. The next iteration is to start winning those close games, and then the final one is to win convincingly. And I truly believe we’re close to that. We know what Hokie Nation expects and we know what they deserve.
So building a program, I think another part of that evolution is finding that big, signature win. I really thought, Bill, we had that at Miami. Maybe the season would’ve taken a different turn there. That was Virginia Tech football the way we played that night. Didn’t get it, but look forward to that certainly happening next year. In college athletics, I do think we put a lot of emphasis on Year 3, on Year 3, on Year 3 and it should be so, but maybe we’re just one year away and now focused on Year 4. But we all know we can’t remain where we are now and we’ve got to improve and we know that.
As far as visiting with Coach, again, we chatted earlier this week a little bit just to talk about the structure of our meeting next week. He was really focused on Signing Day, on meetings with the players, all of that. But next week, we’ll get together, we’ll cover every facet of the program. Nothing is off limits for critique, review, evaluation, improvements. We’ll make the right decisions for Virginia Tech, even if they’re difficult decisions, and they always are, either way. I do think we had a better team, more depth this year, so you’ve got to look at, ‘Why were the results that way? What did we learn from it and how to we make sure it improves?’
But I do want everybody to know this too: I’m looking forward to supporting Coach, helping him and us, all of us, get there. I believe in him. He appreciates this place; Virginia Tech means something to him. He takes great care of the student-athletes, they seem to play really hard for him. He’s tremendous in the staff and with the community, he’s a pleasure to work with. He’s got good self-awareness, he wants to learn, he’s built the foundation. We need to keep up that learning curve, speed it up. He’s worked hard and done a really good job, and I guess I want everybody to know, we know we’ve got to move the needle. I watch the same games as all of our fans, it takes years off my life when we don’t perform too, so again, I feel for them, I hope they’ll hang with them, with us. We can’t do it without them. Our fans deserve it, we crave it and dang, the ACC needs us too, so we’ve got to get it going, and we will.
Roth: Whit, for our fans, what will happen next week when you meet with Coach Pry? What should they expect? What do you expect?
Babcock: It’s really just a continuation, obviously more in-depth and comprehensive, but Coach and I meet every Wednesday. I will be interested to hear what his evaluation is, what his ideas are. Certainly, I have some thoughts and suggestions, but really it’s just a deep dive into every area that touches the program, certainly coaching, recruiting, evaluation, player development, how we scout the portal, how we’ll do revenue share on down the line. What did we miss? He’s put a lot of time into it, I’m looking forward to hearing what he says and it will be a productive meeting. We’re both on the same page, we both want the same thing. Again, I will give my thoughts and opinions, directions. We haven’t had that conversation so there’s no need to share much more than that today, and an interesting thing about being an athletic director, every single coach that you have knows more about the X’s and O’s of that sport, so Coach and I spend a lot of time certainly him educating me on some of that, but we spend a lot of time on leadership, on what he’s learning, on who his mentors are. How can we get better as a program? That’s a long answer, it’ll be a thorough evaluation. We do it at the end of the year with every coach, and I’m confident we’ll come out with a good game plan and improve on where we were this year. We can’t stay the same, that’s for dang sure.
Roth: Understood. Well, I think everyone’s interested to see what happens next week following your meeting. Let’s move onto something else. If you could, Whit, explain the House case and revenue sharing that could come into play and likely will in 2025. How has this come to life? What does it mean for Virginia Tech?
Babcock: There’s a lot to it. It is a big communication lift to educate our coaches, our student-athletes, our fan base, donors, and campus on down the line, but essentially, the House vs. NCAA case was an antitrust class action lawsuit against the NCAA. The case has received preliminary approval on the settlement. Final approval on the settlement will not be until April, so it won’t be officially official until April 7. We expect it to be, and if it is formally approved, this new era we will be entering will begin on July 1. This case will provide some limited antitrust protection for about 10 years, get us out of the never-ending lawsuit cycle hopefully, and we’re really going to need some congressional action at some point.
But I think the first place to start for our fan base on our House case is kind of, ‘How in the heck did college athletics get here?’ And I’ll try to summarize it this way: Over time, television money has been the best and also the most challenging aspect of college sports. It brought all of this popularity, unparalleled viewership, and then it started to bring a lot of TV money, and over time, the NCAA was too restrictive. If a general student can transfer freely if they’re in academic good standing, why can’t a student-athlete? NIL is another example of that. If a general student can do that, why is it restrictive on student-athletes? Another example would be at a university level, there’s no limits on scholarships, yet they’re restricted by the NCAA.
So for 40 years, nearly all the legislation in the NCAA rulebook was built for cost containment and the student-athlete package didn’t change for over 40 years. So the NCAA didn’t evolve, there was poor leadership and when you don’t evolve or modernize on your own, outside forces will often dictate it, and that’s a lot more painful. So it was pretty easy pickings for some antitrust attorneys. By the way, their legal fees will be $500 million out of this. And over the last few years, we began to see the shift and the evolution of college athletics. It started with cost of attendance, then the transfer portal, then Alston awards or academic incentives were added from another lawsuit, then NIL, and now we’ll be rolling into this new era called revenue sharing.
Roth: That was a lot. That’s the background on it, but what are the terms? What’ll it actually mean for Tech athletics and our student-athletes?
Babcock: It is really complex and how we navigate it will be crucial. And here are the terms of the settlement for the folks that don’t really understand it, it’s a lot out there. Part of the settlement, the first part, are back damages, and that will be paid backwards to student-athletes that didn’t receive the opportunities that the student-athletes are today. That has a six-year statute of limitations, and part of the lawsuit settlement is the NCAA will owe $2.8 billion [total] or $280 million a year over 10 years in back damages through this lawsuit. That money will primarily be paid through March Madness. Instead of the money coming to the schools throughout all the divisions of college athletics, it will now go towards that lawsuit, and that ultimate impact to Virginia Tech will be approximately $1 million a year for 10 years. And all of those back damages, all of that money, former student-athletes can opt into the class action, should they choose to, and that $2.8 billion will be distributed 75 percent to football players, 15 percent to men’s basketball players, five percent to women’s basketball players and five percent to Olympic sports athletes. So that’s just the back damages part.
The terms of the forward-moving part, and again, this part would begin July 1 if the settlement does receive formal approval on April 7. So moving forward, for as long as we can remember, there were scholarship limits and no roster limits. For example, in football, you could have 85 guys on scholarship. You could carry, really, as many people as you wanted as long as it balanced out with Title IX. We carried 120. Now with the new rules, it will go the other way. There will be roster maximums or caps, but no restrictions on scholarships up to the roster limit, meaning football’s roster will be 105 players. You could, if you so choose, you could now fund up to 105 full scholarships. And baseball, for example, used to be restricted on 11.7 scholarships among 30-some players. Now I believe their roster size max would be 34, and hypothetically, if you wanted to pay for a full scholarship for everybody on your roster, you could. I’m not sure that’s strategically smart, and it’s really expensive, and you’ve got to certainly balance Title IX on top of that.
But the other part of the settlement moving forward is what I’m sure a lot of our fans have read about. It will now be permissive, beginning July 1, to share up to $20.5 million of athletic department revenue will our student-athletes. It doesn’t mean you have to do it, but to compete at the top tier, that’s the level to get to, and there’ll be a revenue cap management system, Bill. It’s a group called LBI that does cap management for a lot of the pro leagues. NIL will still exist — there was no jurisdiction in the lawsuit over collectives or NIL — but after July 4, those NIL deals will have to be made public for anything over $600 and it’ll have to go through a fair-market value clearinghouse. Deloitte will be the organization that runs this for us. None of the salary cap, none of the NIL and none of the enforcement on those two subjects will come from the NCAA moving forward.
So it’s a lot going on. It’s a long answer. You’ve also got Title IX considerations, getting further clarity on how enforcement of the cap and all these new rules will work. We’ve got a few other pending lawsuits, and then maybe on down the line, some form of collective bargaining, so it’s dang sure a new era and we’re up to the challenge and everybody’s in the same boat, but it will be a totally different paradigm than what we’re used to, but hopefully more structure than the Wild West NIL era we’ve been in lately.
Roth: So what you’re saying, Whit, is for next year, Virginia Tech plans to share $20.5 million with the student-athletes that are participating in Virginia Tech sports, correct?
Babcock: Yeah, that is certainly our goal, and that is what top-tier athletics look at. We will be able to share that $20.5 million. Any new scholarships that are added up to $2.5 million count against the cap. We will add approximately 40-45 new scholarships at Virginia Tech across a number of sports, including football. If you offer your student-athletes Alston awards or academic incentives, those also count against the cap up to $2.5 million, and then the revenue share payments count against the cap too, obviously. For us, on the revenue share component, we will primarily focus on three sports: football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. And then with our Olympic sports, our investment will primarily be in the form of additional scholarships.
Again, I’m really glad that there will be transparency, or there’s supposed to be transparency, on what people are sharing with their student-athletes, transparency on what the NIL deals are and supposedly a much more professional enforcement agency than the NCAA’s been able to provide. And all of this is magically going to happen in the next eight months. So yes, we are going to be at that level.
Quite frankly, we have pieced it together for Year 1, and when I say Year 1, that would be July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026. We’ve used some one-time funds, we’ve gotten some assistance from campus, we’re ready to go. The challenge will be, and what we’re working on all the time as well, is how do we make it sustainable? Twenty million dollars, we don’t just have that laying around. Again, we can put it together for this first year, and now we’re working on how we partner with campus, what we can do internally to generate more money, how we can get leaner. We even have folks working with state government, not for state funds, but to make it a little easier for us to help ourselves.
We’ve got really good alignment with the president [Tim Sands] and the board. It is all hands on deck as we attack this new paradigm, and not only survive in it, but thrive in it. And when you think about how we spent our money in the past before we could share it with student-athletes, this takes me back to television money changed everything. How did we spend the revenue we made? We built incredible facilities. We paid coaches a lot in a lot of sports. ADs, our staffs got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and it’s going to take a while to turn this ship in a different direction and build the program around the student-athletes first.
If this was Corporate America, they’d probably have tremendous layoffs, tremendous cuts. Thankfully, we’re not. We will have to get leaner, but it is an ongoing, productive conversation with a lot of people figuring out how to make this sustainable, how to position Virginia Tech at the top and where we want to be, and hopefully all of this salary cap and NIL transparency will level the playing field a little bit. It will look a little more like pro sports, and at least for me, I’m still hanging onto the cause, so to speak. I do believe there’s something in the sauce of the student-athlete experience, and as long as they’re still students at Virginia Tech and they want to be enrolled here and they represent Virginia Tech well, I’m going to cheer for them, whether they come in as a freshman, a senior or whatever revenue share they may make, but it is definitely changing.
Roth: Let me ask you this: Stanford just hired Andrew Luck as its football general manager. What are your thoughts of a GM role for Tech football or other sports moving forward?
Babcock: I thought that was a really creative and good move for Stanford. We do have a general manager role currently; it will start to look much more like a front office part. The model that we will use may not be similar to Stanford’s, but it is similar to some other top-tier programs in our league and across the country, but we’re really pleased with our collective and Triumph [NIL], and Kelly Woolwine serves in that general manager role now. When I say general manager role, he is really good with our negotiations with the prospective student-athletes, with the current student-athletes, with the parents, with his relationship with our compliance office, with the coaches. We will keep that model. Now we will build out around that.
Another group that will be involved and is in player evaluation, portal evaluation. We’ve got a lot going on. It will be much more data-driven, maybe like the ‘Moneyball’ book back in the day. But now that you have a revenue-share cap, what positions are going to be worth what? How do you measure return on investment? We’re also fortunate that we have Hokies in general manager roles now. [Tampa Bay Rays president of baseball operations] Erik Neander will be advising us, [senior director of player personnel] Jeff King with the [Chicago] Bears and some others, so I really like our system, I like the data part of it. There’s still the eyeball test, but when you have a cap and you spend money strategically, we’ve got to be able to operate like a front office, evaluate return on investment and evaluate who’s the best fit to go and recruit for us.
New era, I really feel good about it. I feel like we’ll be on the leading edge. What it’s also going to do, Bill, it will put a much bigger emphasis for us and the university on financial education for student-athletes. Maybe as simple as taxes or investments. Again, it’s our job to develop them, protect them if we can. I saw a stat the other day on a 30-for-30 on ESPN called ‘Broke’ about NFL football players, that 60 percent of NFL players declare bankruptcy four years after playing in the league. I’m not suggesting our student-athletes will have that problem, but it’s our job to get out in front of that too. Just another piece of our student-athlete development program and part of this new era.
Roth: 2025 is going to look different than any year ever in college sports, but let’s focus on the Hokies because that’s what our fans want to know. They’re out there listening to us now. What’s next for Tech athletics in the short-term? In the next six to 12 months, what do you want to see? What are your aspirations, starting here in a few weeks when we flip the calendar to 2025?
Babcock: Six to 12 months is a good planning time frame. It’s been really tough to do five- and 10-year plans when the world changes so fast, but it’s really everything that we’ve talked about. It’s strategically position our department to compete at the top of the league, provide some proactive leadership in an era that none of us have experienced before. It will be a large education lift, which I also mentioned, just to explain all of this and educate our recruits, our student-athletes, our coaches, our fans, our donors, campus, state legislatures and more. But in the next six to 12 months too, we certainly want to right the ship in football and men’s basketball and some others, but in the near term, it will be adjusting to this new normal and getting ahead of the game.
And then as far as looking out into the future, I know we’ve got to stick with some core values, so to speak. Yes, our job is to win, period, the end, but it’s also to develop young people. We’ve got to be bold and aggressive in this new era in the future. Quite frankly, we need to instill, or reinstill, trust and confidence that may have wavered in some of our fan base. We’ve got to reward them. The values in those pylons are set in stone, literally and figuratively. We’ve got to represent that. And in all of this craziness too, we’ve got to remain focused on the student-athlete experience. We’re in charge of taking care of someone’s sons and daughters. Also have to support our staff, make sure the right people are in the right seats on the bus, all that.
But really, I’ll finish with this: vision for the future, what we really like to do here is accomplish some things that have never been done before. Certainly victories, championships, rankings, but largest attendance, best GPAs, having Metallica here has never been done before. We like those ‘never been dones’ and then our entire department, Bill, as you know from being in those meetings, we try to boil it down to this: that our single-minded proposition in the athletic department is, ‘We create memorable experiences that only Virginia Tech can offer.’ Enter Sandman is a memorable experience, seeing yourself on the video board, winning a big game is certainly a memorable experience. Graduation is a memorable experience. How people are greeted when they come in. So the next six to 12 months we’ll still be in the current grind mode that we’re in; then hopefully we can start projecting out a little bit longer than that.
Roth: Well, I know like me, you appreciate the incredible support and the passion that our fans have. Every [football] game was sold out, even the UVa game. The Hokies and Cavaliers are 5-6, it’s 26 degrees with the wind chill and it’s packed. And every game again this year was sold out. We’re really lucky to have this amazing fan base that supports our teams and our players.
Babcock: The country notices it, we notice it. I’ve worked at six schools and worked in the SEC and the Big 12 and we’re second to none. And the way they show out, the way they care, the way they support, they’re definitely doing their part. We’ve got to do our part, but we want to reward them, we want to deliver to them, and again, when we don’t meet expectations, it’s pretty painful. It just makes us more determined to deliver to them. They’re amazing and I’m honored to be here. This has been my dream schools since I got here, it’s where I’m going to be and everybody’s going to get my best, and we’ve got a great staff to work with. We’re going to get it all turned where we want it to go.