Something is going on down at Virginia Tech, where the school’s president, Tim Sands, announced to Hokie Nation on Thursday, in a shock move, that he will be stepping down in the coming months.
And it took a sports guy – not me, in this case – to figure it out.
The school waited until Friday morning to put out a well-crafted news release about the move, but we heard about it here Thursday evening, with a statement to the press from U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., that made it sound like Sands was pushed out the door for political reasons.
“This action has the earmarks of previous well-publicized efforts to oust presidents at other Virginia public universities — VMI, UVA and George Mason,” Kaine said. “I urge Gov. Spanberger to get to the bottom of this latest attack on Virginia higher education and take all necessary action to insulate university leadership from politically motivated schemes.”
This was a fair assumption from Kaine, given how the UVA Board of Visitors pushed Jim Ryan out the door last summer, and the VMI Board outright just decided to cut ties with Cedric Wins earlier last year.
Gregory Washington barely survived the political hit squad that was sent after him at George Mason.
ICYMI
- Jim Ryan tells all: ‘What did the Governor know, when did he know it?’
- VMI superintendent addresses BOV ouster: ‘Bias, emotion and ideology’ factored into vote
- Trump DOJ targets George Mason over its diversity program
Kaine’s statement definitely got our attention, and why I decided to wait to write about it, because it was clear just from the senator weighing in that there was more than meets the eye going on.
But then, we also got statements last night from U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Ninth District Congressman Morgan Griffith that were more straight down the line of, Tim Sands was a great guy, he did great things at Tech, he will be sorely missed.
This really got us thinking – OK, so, what Warner and Griffith had to say makes more sense than Kaine’s take, because it’s not like the MAGAs are still in political power here, with Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, in the governor’s office.
There was no smoke about politics in the weeks leading up to last night.
There was another form of smoke at play here, though.
Here’s where we turn to Chris Coleman, a longtime sports columnist at TechSideline.com.
My read of Coleman’s reporting on this suggests that neither group of pols has it right – that Kaine is off-base thinking the sudden pending retirement of Sands was at the point of a political bayonet, and that the likes of Warner and Griffith are wrong to simply accept the news as being Tim Sands, recognizing that his work is done, wanting to ride off into the sunset.
Coleman wrote (TSL subscription required) that a “a not-insubstantial number of influential alums” went to Sands several weeks ago to express displeasure with the progress in rebuilding the school’s athletics department.
Background there: last summer, the school embarked on something they’re calling the Invest to Win initiative, a $229 million fundraising plan for Virginia Tech Athletics, with $120 million of that total to come from private donors.
ICYMI
Toward that end, Virginia Tech hired former Penn State coach James Franklin to head up the football program, which has been in decline since the retirement of the legendary Frank Beamer in 2015.
The high-profile hire got the headlines, but Coleman notes that “little, if any progress, has been made behind the scenes at the athletic department level” since, and that the school has been “struggling to make hires in the athletic department, and many open positions have gone unfilled for at least a year.”
“As important as the Franklin hire was, it’s just as important that the athletic department infrastructure be up to modern standards so football — as well as Tech’s other sports — can be supported properly,” Coleman wrote.
The suggestion from Coleman, then: the boosters want a new athletics director, and Sands, who was intending to retire at the end of the 2026-2027 academic year, so, June 30, 2027, is a domino that needed to fall so that the school can fire the current AD, Whit Babcock, and get a new AD in place.
The reasoning from Coleman here is sound: you wouldn’t want a lame-duck president, which is what Sands already was, as a guy riding out the last year-plus ahead of his retirement date, hiring a new athletics director.
You also don’t want things to continue to languish now nearly a year into Invest to Win, with the clock already ticking on the tenure of James Franklin, whose contract was back-ended – the bulk of the money he’s owed in the five-year, $41.75 million deal is to be paid to him in the final two years of the deal: $12.75 million in 2029, $13.25 million in 2030.
ICYMI
- Virginia Tech gets its man: James Franklin hired as next head football coach
- The first task for James Franklin: Getting Virginia Tech back on an equal footing
- Virginia Tech releases details of back-ended James Franklin contract
That suggests the Franklin hire was a roll of the dice to try to jumpstart reinvestment into Tech Athletics from boosters, with the hope that early success in his rebuild of Tech Football, at bargain-basement prices – Franklin will be paid $6 million in base and supplemental salary in the first full year of the deal, in 2026, with the pay dropping to $5 million in 2027 and $4 million in 2028 – can cure the athletics department’s ills.
With the bulk of the money for Invest to Win needing to come from the boosters, there’s your power base – it’s their money, they don’t trust the AD to know to spend it, they need a new AD, the president is on his way to emeritus as it is, we need to get things moving.
This makes 1,000 percent sense.
It’s not politics; it’s football.
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Chris Graham
