Imagine, if you will, you received a windfall allowing you to dump all your current electronics and replace them with current day 4K UHD TVs, the fastest computers, and everything you need to face today’s environment with contemporary technology instead of the stuff you purchased years ago.
It would be pretty cool.
To a certain extent, that’s the situation Virginia Tech athletics finds itself in this morning. College sports is not the same game it was 20 years ago when many schools hired their current executives, and the rough and tumble, semi-professional atmosphere of today’s environment requires a vastly different mindset.
With Athletic Director Whit Babcock announcing his retirement yesterday, only two weeks after University President Tim Sands did the same, the Hokies will by summer have the chance to get people in these two critical positions that are on the same page when it comes to being successful in the NIL era. Combined with the seismic hiring of James Franklin to run the football program last November, this seems to be one of those once in a lifetime opportunities to get things right if you want to be successful in college sports for many years to come.
What really encourages me is this appears to all have been coordinated and orchestrated by the Board of Visitors. My biggest complaint (besides all the losing) of late has been that it didn’t seem as anyone with a vision was in charge. Sands did good things improving the school’s standing in the academic world, but didn’t seem to care that much about football or basketball, and several have mentioned to me he seemed to go out of his way to avoid dealing with conflict.
Babcock was good at several things, but struck me from the first year (when everyone was hailing him as the greatest thing since sliced bread and saying “In Whit We Trust”) as the classic career bureaucrat, the kind who was good at maintaining a business and saying all the right things in front of cameras, but if an unseen disaster were to hit, he might not have enough wind in his sails to turn the ship around.
Which is what happened in 2020 when his first football hire – Justin Fuente – crashed into the iceberg.
The hiring of Franklin seems to have changed all that, because I believe all of this is related and has been in the works since then. Sands had a contract running through 2027 and Babcock had one going through 2029, so for them to both retire at basically the same time suggests both may have been “nudged” with some incentive to decide to go now instead of later. I also believe all this was shared with Franklin at the time and probably contributed to him deciding to come to Blacksburg.
Who “they” are, I don’t know for sure, but the leading suspects have to be the key members of the BOV who drove through the decision to hire Franklin. When Franklin was introduced that day at the press conference in Cassell, I remember being impressed that people at the table making comments were not political appointees.
They were, in the words of the movie The Godfather, “wartime consiglieres.”
So this morning I’m waking up to the impression that someone is finally back in the driver’s seat for where football, basketball and sports in general are heading, and that a plan is in place that is starting to be executed. Plus if this is indeed true and has been in the works for six months, then it would also stand to reason the people in charge have already been in touch with who they want the next athletic director to be. Perhaps multiple times.
Same may be true regarding the next president.
So we’ll see. The door is now open, and of course, the Hokies have to pick the right people. Success is not guaranteed. But as both the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and New York Jets head coach Herm Edwards once accurately said, “a goal without a plan is just a wish.”
Through my orange and maroon colored glasses, it appears that the Hokies finally have one.
