Kenny Brooks, Virginia Tech’s record-setting women’s basketball coach who a year ago guided the team to a Final Four berth, announced last week that he was leaving for the University of Kentucky.
Whenever a star coach leaves, it’s natural for a school to grit its teeth and vow to go find the best replacement it can.
Instead, Virginia Tech athletic director Whit Babcock said something that many fans don’t like to hear: He acknowledged that “we have limitations.”
In this case, he was talking about budgetary limitations, and how Tech wasn’t able to hang onto Brooks because Kentucky has a bigger budget.
As with many other things, the size of a college’s sports budget isn’t the sole factor in whether a team wins or loses. “Our resources were good enough to get to the Final Four and be one quarter away from playing for a national championship,” Babcock told The Roanoke Times. “If all it was [was about the] budget, then Ohio State and Texas would be in that thing every year.”
Still, it’s always better to have more money than less money, and there is some general correlation between the size of a school’s athletic budget and its success on the field and court. Money is also what’s driving the current realignment of college sports conferences. In 2000, there wasn’t that much separation among the top conferences — teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference actually received more money from TV revenues than teams in the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference. Now a major revenue gap has opened up. ESPN reports that Big Ten schools are expected to pocket $80 million to $100 million from the league’s most recent TV deal. The SEC schools average $51.3 million. And the ACC? About $39.4 million.
This is why the Pac-12 conference imploded last summer, with its four top schools jumping to the Big Ten — they got a bigger TV payout and the Big Ten got lucrative TV markets on the West Coast. That’s also why Clemson and Florida State are now suing to get out of the ACC — they see themselves trapped in a lower-revenue conference. The chair of the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees has also made it clear that he’s not satisfied with how much money UNC is making, fueling speculation that if Clemson and Florida State find a way out of the ACC, North Carolina might be right behind them.
Scarcely a day goes by that there’s not some new speculation somewhere about which conferences are interested in which schools if the ACC flies apart. The relevance to us: Where would the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech wind up? The general consensus — which, of course, might not bear any resemblance to actual truth — is that both the Big Ten and the SEC would be interested in Virginia, because that would bring both conferences a new market. While Virginia Tech has also been mentioned as a possible contender for both, the school isn’t a member of the Association of American Universities, an invitation-only group of top research universities generally considered to be a prerequisite for membership in the Big Ten. Only one Big Ten school isn’t an AAU member — Nebraska — and it was when the Cornhuskers joined the league. (The problem with being a member of an invitation-only group is that sometimes you can get disinvited if you don’t keep up.)
You could argue all day about which conference would be the best fit for which school and vice versa — sports traditions, geographical rivalries and just general “reputations.” Last year, I even looked at how Virginia and Virginia Tech would fit academically with either the Big Ten or the SEC. (See our FAQs: “Will the Atlantic Coast Conference dissolve?“)
Now, a new database allows us to make a different sort of comparison: the size of schools’ athletic budgets, something whose relevance Babcock just indicated with the departure of one of his key coaches. Sportico, a news site dedicated to following “the business of schools,” compiles an annual database of financial figures from public universities, whose records can be accessed through Freedom of Information Act requests. This is the same database that I wrote about recently when I pointed out that James Madison University (my alma mater) is subsidizing its quest for big-time sports by relying on mandatory student fees.
With Sportico, we can look to see where Virginia and Virginia Tech would fit in if they had to find a new conference affiliation.
As with all data, let’s talk about its limitations before we dive in. The main one is this: The Sportico database doesn’t include quite everybody. Private schools aren’t subject to FOIA and, in some places, neither are some state schools. That doesn’t matter much with the Big Ten and SEC, which are overwhelmingly composed of state schools for which data is available. It becomes more of a problem with the ACC, which has a more even mix of public and private schools. That means out of 15 ACC schools (a number set to go up to 18), we only have data on eight of them.
That data shows that for 2022-23, the most recent year available, Virginia Tech had the smallest athletic budget of the schools available for comparison:
Clemson $174,276,658
Florida State $172,130,700
Louisville $140,216,963
North Carolina $139,079,504
Virginia $138,225,818
California $134,872,860
Georgia Tech $132,273,817
N.C. State $118,653,089
Virginia Tech $116,947,347
Not included: Duke, Boston College, Miami, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Southern Methodist, Stanford, Syracuse, Wake Forest.
That tells us something, but not enough. Since we only have half the conference, I’m certainly not comfortable saying Virginia Tech has the smallest athletic budget in the ACC because I doubt that’s so. All we know for certain is that it’s at least eighth out of 15 or 18 (and for analytical purposes, I’m going ahead and adding in schools that have made plans to join conferences, such as California, but haven’t been fully vested yet). The one thing we can see clearly is how far out in front Clemson and Florida State are, which helps explain why they think they could compete at a higher level. So let’s move on:
If either Virginia or Virginia Tech joined the Big Ten, they’d have some of the smallest budgets in the conference.
Here’s how those schools would fit in:
Ohio State $274,948,554
Michigan $225,548,280
Penn State $202,073,671
Wisconsin $194,020,289
Nebraska $190,870,384
Michigan State $181,850,581
Iowa $160,302,475
Rutgers $153,523,767
Illinois 152,809,698
Washington 150,037,375
Minnesota $146,982,927
Oregon $146,778,941
UCLA $141,964,728
Indiana $139,087,323
Virginia $138,225,818
Maryland $121,160,348
Purdue $119,773,814
Virginia Tech $116,947,347
Not included: Northwestern and the University of Southern California
Now, this is somewhat misleading because if either Virginia or Virginia Tech was in the Big Ten, they’d be getting Big Ten TV money — and would be able to have bigger athletic budgets. This simply shows what they’re spending now with a lesser amount of ACC TV money. With Big Ten TV money, they’d presumably be higher up in the rankings. Still, if you want to see how they compare now, here’s how. The Pac-12 refugees — Oregon, Washington, Southern California and UCLA — would also move up. These numbers show where they are with Pac-12 money, not the Big Ten money they’ll be getting once they complete the move.
Virginia or Virginia Tech would also have some of the smallest budgets in the SEC.
Texas $232,323,521
Alabama $212,030,188
Louisiana State $199,110,998
Oklahoma $198,975,224
Texas A&M $194,692,848
Auburn $192,030,692
Tennessee $181,032,519
Georgia $186,604,238
Florida $175,738,444
Kentucky $169,565,280
Arkansas $166,552,649
South Carolina $160,420,148
Mississippi $150,195,985
Missouri $141,558,286
Virginia $138,225,818
Mississippi State $120,959,663
Virginia Tech $116,947,347
Not included: Vanderbilt
Once again, the same qualifier applies: If either Virginia or Virginia Tech was in the SEC, they’d be making SEC money and would no doubt rank higher. This, at least, shows where they’d be starting from.
Budgetwise, both Virginia and Virginia Tech would fit nicely in the Big 12
Like the ACC, the Big 12 contains a lot of private schools, so we can’t make a perfect comparison. But we can make an imperfect one:
Arizona $142,814,430
Arizona State $141,717,696
Virginia $138,225,818
Texas Tech $136,364,850
Colorado $136,114,470
Utah $124,453,484
Kansas $124,210,259
Oklahoma State $121,160,348
Virginia Tech $116,947,347
Iowa State $115,523,596
West Virginia $103,142,400
Kansas State $95,281,988
Central Florida $88,199,644
Not included: Baylor, Brigham Young, Cincinnati, Houston, Texas Christian.
Update: I’ve seen conflicting figures on how the ACC payouts compare to the Big 12 payouts.
We also don’t know how much more valuable each conference’s TV rights would be with more schools from new markets. But I suspect these comparisons might have more bearing on conference moves than things such as tradition and geography — those factors got tossed aside a long time ago. So, in the words of the great philosopher Biggie Smalls, “If you don’t know, now you know.”