Synaesthesia

It's how the rap sheet/leper's colony feature has always worked on Something Awful. So when you see a person has dozens of various probations and bans, it's easier to decide to just not engage with them in the first place, if they're always posting in bad faith, or if they're Just That Way.

VT's current alleged budget, around 190M, would put it 7th as of the old data. Which, if they published the data in early 2024, might have actually been mostly spent in 2023, but obviously 1) everyone else is also increasing their budgets every year, 2) it most likely doesn't capture any NIL spending that doesn't filter through athletic departments, and 3) USA Today can only get these numbers from public schools, so, private schools that we can reasonably infer are big spenders (Notre Dame, Miami, etc.) not ranked at all. My guess is VT's probably closer to 15th or so, at best.

It's not like VT is suddenly a top 5, or even top 10, spender in the country, even with all the recent commitment to athletics. Everything that the BOV voted on last year, all it does is just get VT back to the point where they're not actively being hamstrung by lack of spending. I think this is mostly Franklin's doing, and the money is just putting him in a position to succeed.

VT was down in the dumps, FSU and Clemson were fading, only Miami was on the rise.

The defense actually was decent his second year. It fell apart when we lost all those players to the portal.

They conspicuously leave out how the first 20 bowls fared. Plus, the real question is whether or not the % growth on those ratings exceeded the growth of all sports broadcast by ESPN in general. Bowl games between 2 teams with 6 wins are mostly not interesting, games between 2 teams with 9+ wins mostly are. ** Edited by Synaesthesia at 1/2/2026, 5:44:16 PM

A coach of Franklin's resume being fired in October almost never happens, and, over the summer, no broker would've even set odds on the possibility that Franklin would be the Virginia Tech coach in 2026. In the world in which Penn State recovers against Northwestern, and they just have the 1 embarrassing loss against UCLA after being hung over against Oregon, maybe Franklin isn't fired, and now the only way anyone gets him out of Penn State is poaching him with an exorbitant salary, one that Tech probably can't afford. And then there's the factor of how Franklin's spent most of his coaching career in the mid-Atlantic, and how Penn State and Virginia Tech share a lot of overlap. I just don't know that Babcock, or any athletic director for that matter, can expect to replicate this kind of hire in the future.

I'm not even joking, it's just people saying "I know who that is. That other guy? I don't know who he is, he's a stranger, he's an Outsider, in fact I'm already starting to hate the other guy"

All of those examples you mentioned, they're things associated with the immediate aftermath of something bad happening, a negative turnover, a post-loss press conference, etc. But you can tell what they really wanted to see is the coach throwing a tantrum that mirrored their own: screaming in anger, stomping around, throwing/breaking things, a child's tantrum in an adult's body. They say they want the coach to "show emotion," but they implicitly believe that the only acceptable emotions are anger, rage, etc., because they're too stupid to see through the lens of anything beyond their own lived experience. So, what specific behavior of the new coach will annoy a bunch of VT fans? Just watch for the bad outcomes, when all the slack-jawed yokels are howling with anger, flapping their arms around, dumping all their toys on the floor. Whatever the coach is doing at that moment, that's what they're going to latch onto.

I.e. there's no future development benefit or upside. You might as well just play the guys you trust the most, even if you know what their limits are.

The salary structure reflected it, that was supposed to be the capstone assistant hire for Pry, and he was gone for Notre Dame in a year.

Being a rich program doesn't guarantee success every single year. Lots of programs richer than Virginia Tech floundered for several years, Michigan, Texas, etc. But, once they had the right coach, they quickly achieved greater heights than VT ever did.

Some of these interim coaching things, where there's like 1 game left in the season, or just the bowl game, who cares, you can give it to whoever, give it to the guy the players like the best, or the guy who's got some tie back to the program. But they still have most of a season that requires week-to-week preparation, practice, planning, management, and ideally you don't want to look as lost and non-competitive as VT did for most of last night's game.

It's a feature that's nice to have for your coach, but it's not needed to win. There's never gonna be another Frank Beamer at VT, a coach who wins more than like 95% of other teams out there and also wants to stay at VT forever because they love it so much. If the next VT football coach is the equivalent of Buzz Williams, a guy who shows up, turns a bad, losing program into a contender in 4 or 5 years, and then leaves, I would take that trade in an instant.

This is the type of move that VT needed to make if they're serious about becoming good at football again. Yeah, it's more expensive to fire now than then, but, it's not even that significant compared to the yearly cost of what everyone else is spending, among programs with a level of success to which VT aspires. The job being open as early as mid-September reduces the chance that VT gets scooped by another program looking for a coach.

Like yeah there were always bagmen, but nowhere near the dollar amounts seen now (it was only back in 2010 that 180k was mentioned in conjunction with Cam Newton's recruitment, VT reportedly had multiple players eclipsing that last year). Any recruiting-specific skillset that a coach has, whether it's Pry or any other coach for that matter, is rapidly becoming vestigial. By 2030, the value of recruiting skills and salesmanship may go completely to 0, replaced entirely by the front office's skill in identifying high player value (skill : price ratio, scheme fit, etc.). So, when Pry was initially evaluated as a hire, they looked at his various pluses and minuses, but if any of his pluses at the time were considered to be recruiting, sales pitch, in 2025 and beyond, it's no longer all that useful.

They needed the recruiter/salesman/hype man in the pre-NIL/House settlement days. They needed the Xs & Os tactician once a front office could go buy all the players on behalf of the coaches.

It's not just because football's the most expensive sport to run. It's also that it's the sport that VT alumni care the most about, and it's also the sport developing a competitive cutoff such that below it, spending 10 million below the cutoff is as pointless as spending 80 million below it. Not just VT, a lot of universities are going to be making the same decision (or maybe it gets made for them), whether they're willing to spend higher and higher as that threshold for competitiveness keeps rising over time (because there are no guardrails in place, e.g. salary/spending caps as found in professional sports, there's nothing preventing the increasing consolidation of wealth to the largest programs, and, by extension, consolidation of on-field success). Personally, I think given enough time at a high level of success, I think basketball could substitute well enough for all those broader community benefits, student affinity for the school, etc. Like, imagine if VT started spending enough on basketball, men's and women's, such that they were in the Sweet 16 most years, multiple Final 4 appearances, maybe even a title somewhere in there. A brand new student, 17-18 years old, maybe doesn't have a strong sports favorite yet, but does like to be part of the most exciting event on campus, they would quickly find their fervor with a team that wins 90% of the time. But, where would the money for this kind of success come from? Probably at the expense of football, but that goes back to the issue of how football is what the alumni care the most about. Will they choose to sacrifice their own favorite sport in the hopes of developing a powerhouse program in other sports, for the benefit of kids who are still years removed from becoming students? I don't know, I kind of doubt it.

It's not like I could pick and choose which costs were important to me and which ones weren't. Maybe I would've been fine eating slop for having a lower meal plan cost, but slop wasn't an option, having a quality dining experience was just part of the Virginia Tech package. Things that I paid for that I never used or cared about didn't affect me directly, but they did affect someone else's experience, and the student community as a whole was enhanced because of this. There's no way I would feel the same affinity for Virginia Tech if I had lived a much more atomized life there, where the only thing I have in common with someone else is geographic proximity to them. People on this board have argued for years that athletics is inseparable from the success of the university as a whole, that the university would be smaller, lower enrollment, less prestigious, etc., if not for the prowess of sports and especially football in the 90s and 00s. If this is true, if it's to be believed, there's no way around it, it's either part of the Virginia Tech experience, or it's not. Babcock's greater point to the BOV is that the landscape is shifting such that it's forcibly shunting everyone who is only half-committed to athletics into the "not part of the experience" group, the group where sports are so insignificant that they provide no meaningful benefit to the university or its community. And that's the worst spot to be in really, it costs the most money and produces the least results. If the the board doesn't care about the results, great, let's just scrap sports entirely, they'll save at least $100,000,000 per year that they spend on academics instead. I mean look, if you're a prospective student, the only time to decide which factors are important to you and which aren't is at that selection time. If you want an engineering degree but you don't care at all about sports, there's 21 schools in the state that are ABET-accredited in at least 1 program, like a half dozen of those schools have multiple accredited programs. At the undergrad level, you will get as good of an education at any of these programs, you will come away just as smart if you went to VT or UVA or JMU or CNU. It might make a difference in terms of networking effects later which particular school you went to, but, what's a big factor in the strength of that alumni network? The affinity and camaraderie that was developed by having a strong student community, where there was something for everyone, even if it meant that you were helping subsidize someone else's experience.

Football fans often shriek and howl and gnaw on their nylabones upon hearing this because they fundamentally misunderstand the culture of the university. That said, the time for this was years ago. VT's persistent weakening as a program, the fracturing of the PAC-12 at the hands of the Big 10, there may no longer be a place for VT.

Is the future of Virginia Tech football to be a 1st-tier doormat/punching bag, or a 2nd-tier contender? It's ultimately is going to depend on the size of the 1st-tier league. But there's no point in spending aggressively if they're going to end up as a tier 1 bottom feeder.

I don't think Boston College or South Florida realistically expect to be a contender just because they were #2 at one point in that season. That Kansas team that beat Tech was either #2 or #4 in their season-ending game against Missouri. And, more importantly, even if it was relevant, it was over 20 years ago. When people post those lists of the highest revenue/highest spending athletic departments, that $50,000,000 gap between Virginia Tech and the top programs happens every single year, the effect of it builds cumulatively over time. Remember a few years ago, that big $400,000,000 cash infusion? Only eats away at part of the gap, not the whole thing, and doesn't fix it for the future. Additionally, how much appetite is there going to be to greatly increase the budget for sports when billions in research are being cancelled? I'll bet you that's gonna have more of the BOV's financial attention than whether the football team wins 6 games or 10 games.