Virginia Tech to propose near $230 million budget increase for athletics

This would've been nice three years ago, Brent Pry presumably thinks, hopefully at a resort pool somewhere.

Unfortunately for Virginia Tech's former head coach, it appears his failure (and those of his predecessor) were a prerequisite for the next Head Hokie to get the support he needs to compete in the ACC.

Virginia Tech's Board of Visitors will meet later this month to consider a $229 million budget increase for Hokie athletics over a 4-year period, beginning with Fiscal Year 2026. Over half, the school says, will come from donors, but the school plans to increase athletics funding by more than $10 million per year, an average of nearly $10 million per year in "bridge funding" and $21 million in total in student fees.

Virginia Tech believes that the cash infusion is necessary to avoid falling behind in the ACC. And that's not even hand-waving toward some imagined future where the top 40-or-so schools do their own thing and Virginia Tech is among the others left behind. The ACC is moving toward a revenue structure where the upper class receives outsized portions of the conference's distributions, at the expense of everyone else. 

“For us it’s really simple,” AD Whit Babcock said upon petitioning the Board of Visitors for more money last month. “We need to get better (in football) because the better you do, the more money you get from the ACC. So, the recipe is still the same. Be really good in football. Be good in some of your other sports. Don’t operate under scandal and have very good academics. But yes, there’s a sense of urgency in the near-term.”

With respect to football, Virginia Tech has lagged well behind the upper crust of the ACC, as Babcock outlined last month.

After winning seven Big East/ACC championships from 1995-2010, this will be Tech's 15th consecutive season without a conference title, and their ninth straight season without playing for a league championship. More immediately, Virginia Tech will likely suffer its fifth losing season in six tries dating back to 2020.

This season, in which the Hokies sit at 1-3 after beating Wofford 38-6 on Saturday, is unfortunately of secondary concern to nailing the search for Pry's replacement. 

Whoever that hire winds up becoming, he'll have much more money to spend than Pry. Finding the right person to spend it on, and him making the right spending decisions therein, will be the biggest challenge in Virginia Tech football history.