The Athletic, which interviewed six current or former athletics staff members at Virginia Tech to get perspective on the hire of James Franklin as the new head football coach, buried what should have been the lede to its reporting on the move – a quote from one staffer who said “the second (Franklin) steps foot in the building,” he is going to see “just how behind we are in terms of resources, infrastructure, we have to get a building. He’s not going to be happy with what he sees.”
ICYMI
- Virginia Tech gets its man: James Franklin hired as next head football coach
- ACC Football Notebook: Will James Franklin bring Virginia Tech back to relevance?
- Podcast: James Franklin at Virginia Tech, UVA Football in Brazil, UVA hoops
Franklin, 104-45 in parts of 12 seasons at Penn State, which inexplicably fired him last month, after a 3-3 start – following a College Football Playoff run just a year ago – is obviously a home-run hire.
Per the report in The Athletic, he was the top target almost from the moment he was on the market after he was fired at Penn State.
Bud Foster, the former Frank Beamer right-hand man and member of the search committee, reached out to Franklin “right away,” according to the report, and “he was the number one pick all the way,” said Bruce Arians, a former NFL head coach and Virginia Tech alum, who was also on the search committee.
You would assume that Job #1 for Franklin would be reviving recruiting, particularly in-state recruiting, which was Beamer’s bread-and-butter, but basic infrastructure may need to be a priority at the outset.
The report in The Athletic spins a tale of program rot dating back to the final years of the Beamer era, when the motto of the athletics department was “do more with less” – to the point that when Beamer’s successor, Justin Fuente, would ask for things that were standard across what was then the Power 5, the answer would be, “Coach Beamer didn’t need this.”
From The Athletic:
An indoor practice facility opened in 2015, but it didn’t have heating. A new weight room opened in 2021, but new weights had to come later. The program still doesn’t have a standalone football office facility, long considered the norm at the Power 4 level. Fuente arrived with five operations and recruiting staffers, at a time when Clemson had 22. Attempts to hire better coordinators were shot down due to funding.
“We missed the boat on that,” said a former administrator. “We should have had more analysts and been on the forefront. We just didn’t have the money to do it.”
Tech Football has been playing catch-up since, as the landscape of college athletics – particularly as things relate to football – have been changing at a pace akin to the speed of light.
Virginia Tech was behind the curve before NIL and the House settlement created opportunities for the big spenders in the Power 4 to direct salary and sponsor dollars to student-athletes.
For an illustration of how NIL and House are adding to the catch-up game, donors at UVA provided a $35 million budget for the UVA Football roster for the 2025 season, effectively nearly doubling the budget for the program, with commitments to go bigger going forward into 2026.
“It’s just got to be killing them that now, of all people, UVA is in the top 25,” said a former Tech Athletics administrator, “and Tech are nowhere on the radar.”
The school is trying to address the deficiencies. The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors voted in September to approve a plan to commit $229 million over the next four years – $57.3 million per year, $30 million of that, more than half, coming from increased donor contributions – to boost athletics spending.
ICYMI
The trick there will be getting those donor dollars.
“I compare them a bit to Clemson in that you’ve got lots of people willing to give you $1,000, but not a lot of deep donors,” a former Tech Athletics administrator told The Athletic. “We’re not Cal, Stanford, UCLA, with Silicon Valley people. We have aerospace and great alums, but they’re not in high-dollar industries, and they’re not tied to athletics.”
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Chris Graham
