Three games into 2025, Brent Pry is gone, and it’s official: we are living in interesting times.
“May you live in interesting times” is generally attributed as being a Chinese saying, specifically a Chinese curse, but according to the authority on all things Internet, Wikipedia, no actual Chinese source for the quote has ever been produced.
While the quote sounds like an optimistic blessing, it has actually taken on a gallows humor overtone, and I’m not surprised to read that it’s generally regarded as a curse… because “interesting times” are usually times of trouble and travail, not times of triumph.
So, here we are, living in interesting times.
Speaking of…
The Tech Sideline Web Site Continues to Struggle
We continue to have numerous issues with the Tech Sideline website delivering content and providing access to our pay message boards.The areas of the site that are struggling right now are the content delivery areas: the home page, articles, pages, etc. The message boards are humming along, so my advice is to bookmark the boards directly (provided you’re able to access them, which most people are).
In message board discussions, I have been honest about structuring a company in which the vast majority of our resources have been applied to content generation (our staff of five are all content producers, as well as our army of interns), while insufficient resources have been applied to hosting, programming, and IT support. That decision is coming home to roost.
I have tasked our technical people with providing a solution to our ongoing issues, one that will deploy additional server resources and ongoing programming and support resources.
I’ll keep you posted, but for the time being, no, you still won’t be able to comment on this article… in addition to other problems.
Back to the topic.
The Year of Our Discontent, and How Leadership Vacuums Occur
Twenty years ago, I wrote a series of articles called The Year of Our Discontent, which recounted a difficult year in Virginia Tech athletics, the entirety of the 1986-87 academic year (my senior year at Virginia Tech).I won’t recap that series of six articles because it’s a lot of material, but it’s interesting reading that provides some historical perspective that is relevant to what Virginia Tech is going through right now.
To sum it up, 40 years ago, Virginia Tech athletics was running unchecked under head football coach and athletic director Bill Dooley (yes, he held both jobs), and over time, it created issues with finances and NCAA compliance that wound up with Hokies football and men’s basketball being put on probation and the athletic department being in a mountain of debt.
Fast forward to today and you’ve got an athletic director (Whit Babcock) who recently made a presentation to the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors that outlined the difficulties the athletic department is facing, with the cure being an extra $50 million a year in funding.
The Board of Visitors as a whole was unaware of the issues facing Virginia Tech athletics, or at least their public statements indicated so. Everything that Babcock outlined was no surprise to any of us at Tech Sideline and no surprise to those who have been reading our articles and message board posts for years. As the saying goes, Whit finally said the quiet part out loud.
It led to a flurry of questions to me, along the lines of, “How could this happen? How could university leadership not know?”
Message board poster King of Hokies explained how recently on the subscriber board. In part, his post read:
“The problem is that in the university world there is no CEO or true BoD. There is a president, who is almost entirely focused on academics (and rightly so) and who is usually entirely ignorant about the [sic] athletics and trends in the industry; and there is a Board of Visitors, who are politically appointed and do not necessarily have any skills or experience or even interest in college athletics.”
All correct, and I will speak to the “interest in college athletics” part. I just went through the listing of the BOV members on vt.edu, and of the 14, only one of them has ever registered on Tech Sideline and is paying member.
Don’t get me wrong. You can be “interested in Virginia Tech athletics” and not be a registered paying member of Tech Sideline. You can know a lot about VT athletics, perhaps even more than we do here at TSL, and not be on the TSL message boards.
But in general, BOV members are busy, accomplished people, and many of them don’t spend much time, if any, thinking very deeply about Hokie sports.
Back to the topic, though. In my response to KOH’s post, I wrote in part, “Folks, don't make the mistake of assuming that someone is in charge. Very often, no one is. We learned this in 2012-2015, and we are now learning it again.”
We also learned it back in 1986-87. Dooley was running unchecked and doing things like taking on debt the department couldn’t afford and placing football players on track scholarships. It eventually caught up with him, and Virginia Tech President Bill Lavery, a good friend of Dooley, turned his attention to the athletic department, which was the beginning of the end for Dooley.
Lavery said at the time, “Those places that are in trouble have presidents that aren’t aggressive in taking charge and providing enough leadership, and [instead] athletic directors are taking charge.”
Expand Lavery’s statement to “presidents and BOVs” and you’ve got the complete picture of what’s going on today.
Lavery created a “Blueprint Committee on Athletics” in January of 1986, the purpose of which was to study Virginia Tech athletics and make recommendations for improving the whole operation, from top to bottom.
Again, that sounds really familiar. In the wake of Babcock’s presentation to the BOV, the Board’s Rector, John Rocovich, appointed members J. Pearson and Ryan McCarthy to… well, let’s just pull a quote from Virginia Tech President Tim Sands’ statement about Brent Pry’s firing:
“Board of Visitors members J. Pearson and Ryan McCarthy have been charged by the rector, John Rocovich, to work with university leadership and AD Whit Babcock to develop a financial, organizational and leadership plan that will rapidly position the Virginia Tech football program to be competitive with the best in the ACC. That plan will be presented to the Board of Visitors later this month.”
That’s Tim Sands’ three-man version of Bill Lavery’s Blueprint Committee. Forty years later, here we are again. Cue Shirley Bassey.
If you’re thinking that sounds like the woman who sang the theme to Goldfinger, then yes, move to the head of the class.
Regarding my reference to 2012-2015, that was when Frank Beamer’s career finally started to falter. At the same time, athletic director Jim Weaver’s Parkinson’s (first diagnosed in 2004) was making it difficult for him to work, all while Virginia Tech President Charles Steger was embroiled in defending himself against a lawsuit stemming from the 2007 on-campus shootings.
Virginia Tech had a leadership void at the time. History repeating.
I would therefore like to offer a humble suggestion: As part of the current process, appoint an independent person or a committee whose function is to monitor the athletic department and provide a more consistent, informative bridge between the AD and university leadership.
Such a person (or committee) would provide checks and balances on an athletic department that otherwise would function unmonitored. Such a person (or committee) would ask questions like:
- “Why don’t we have an experienced fundraiser in charge of the Hokie Club?”
- “Why don’t we have a Chief Financial Officer?”
- “Why can’t the recruiting department get a paid subscription to Hudl?”
I could go on and on. You get my point. If no one is paying attention to the athletic department, then you get ten years of “everything’s fine” followed by WE’RE IN BIG TROUBLE AND WE NEED $50 MILLION EXTRA PER YEAR.
That’s your Monday Thoughts for today, folks. I know that’s short, but I need to get back to answering customer service emails because our website su… isn’t very good right now.