In Whit Babcock’s brief press conference earlier this week, he mentioned a “new structure” that would be more like professional football for the football program, and more like a professional business for the athletic department in general.
I think most people heard that and thought it meant a new GM, more money for football, and perhaps a new or existing athletic director for the rest of the sports. Along with more money for them too.
I’ve been through various “new” structures in my business career and it occurred to me I’ve never once experienced a deal where they said they’d leave everything as it was, add a new layer of management, and give everybody more money.
Usually restructuring was a synonym for “something has to go.” Which I’m thinking could make the September 30 Board of Visitors meeting even more interesting than it already will be.
I’ll offer as an analogy a situation I experienced more than once in my furniture career. We had just gotten a new president, he wanted the product line “restructured” and he didn’t want to raise prices. His focus – rightfully so – was you can’t be all things to all people. He wanted us to focus on what we did well and what people bought from us in quantity, and wanted the rest to eventually be eliminated.
So I did this, and the howling and gnashing of teeth was incredible each time I said we were no longer going to make a certain product. You find in product management that no matter what, if you drop a product, it ends up being SOMEONE’s favorite product. And that someone usually had a loud voice and became a giant pain in your side.
But we kept going and by the end of the year a strange thing occurred. We cut out products that contributed millions of dollars of sales, yet our sales went up as customers just bought the better selling product instead of their own personal favorites. Gross margins went up because we stopped making the stuff we manufactured in small quantities and made even bigger runs of the stuff we did make.
We made more by offering less.
The same situation exists if you look at the number of sports Virginia Tech now offers, and it too is an emotional lightning rod to the fan base. If you ever feel lonely and want to get a huge reaction to something you say on social media, mention dropping one of the 22 sports the Hokies play.
You will be blasted from the blue waters of the Chesapeake to the hills of Tennessee.
But much like business, you have to focus your resources and efforts on what you hope to do well. With NIL and not being a school with a pot of gold behind the German Club, you can’t have an athletic department that is a football silo, a basketball silo and an every other sport silo and hope to be successful in any of them.
I’m anticipating…or at least hoping…we hear strategy that involves this kind of thought. I’m not saying I want to see the number of sports reduced, any more than I want to be blasted from the blue waters of the Chesapeake to the hills of Tennessee.
But it has to be on the table.
I mean, if Virginia Tech is seriously going to restructure athletics from the top on down, this has to be more than forcing the current AD to resign and hiring a general manager. It has to be much like Georgia Tech has just done, deciding who you’re going to be in this brave new world of semi-professional sports and planning accordingly, even if you have to make some painful decisions.
What we hear on September 30th will go a long way in telling us whether these plans will truly position Virginia Tech athletics for the future.
Or are just hiring some new people while moving chairs around the deck of the Titanic.
