foolishly gave Coleman Hawkins $2 million and he's giving below average production for them, and they lost to a mediocre LSU team. David N'Guessan has been their most valuable player and he's probably making 1/6th of what Hawkins is. I think the best way for both VT football and basketball to succeed in this new era is to have an NIL analytics "front office" to aid coaching staffs in allocating money/targeting players. For starters, not wasting NIL on bringing back 4 wide receivers when you are a run first team, have some talented underclassmen in the WR room, and have major holes at OL/LB/S. For basketball it's a little bit different because they've already had to do that out of necessity but it's hard to run an efficient system in year 1 when you're bringing in 5-6 new rotation pieces every season. I've comped this VT team to Notre Dame last year, who had a bunch of new players and struggled early (lost to Western Carolina and Citadel). They got better as year went on and brought everyone back, and look like a potential bubble team already. The issue is it's a lot easier to keep players at a storied school like ND than it is here. Even if we get NIL to a middle of the ACC level is that enough from keeping bigger schools from poaching our players if they show promise? I'm skeptical of that.