The biggest challenge facing Virginia Tech’s next football coach: Make the program attractive for the next round of conference realignment

Virginia Tech’s next football coach will be a critical hire, perhaps more off the field than on the field.

Here’s what’s at stake beyond the team’s won-loss record: which conference Virginia Tech plays in and who else is in it.

No pressure, dude.

Put another way: Will Tech remain in the Atlantic Coast Conference and will the ACC remain what it is today? Or will the ACC fall apart like the Pac-12 — which saw most of its members depart for other conferences — and leave Tech scrambling for a place in some lesser conference?

These questions aren’t going to be settled this year, but the time when they will be is drawing close — close enough that they may have to be addressed during the tenure of Tech’s next coach.

Here are the relevant facts:

Conferences are in a state of flux

College football is big business and schools have been rearranging themselves in new conference alignments to cash in on the biggest paydays from television contracts. Entire conferences have collapsed like old European monarchies — the Holy Roman Empire and Austria-Hungary in our political history; the Big East, the Big 8, the Southwest Conference in sports. Most recently, the once venerable Pac-12 was left with just two teams when its four biggest sports names (UCLA, Southern California, Oregon and Washington) bolted for more money in the Big Ten and then four more (Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah) sought refuge in the Big 12. That left Oregon State and Washington State — considered not particularly marketable by TV standards — to rebuild the conference with lesser-name schools.

Traditional groupings are a thing of the past

Names, numbers and geography mean nothing anymore. The Big Ten has an iconic name but 18 members. The Atlantic Coast Conference, which picked up two Pac-12 escapees (California and Stanford) as well as Texas-based Southern Methodist (which left a lesser conference), now stretches to the Pacific Coast. The Pac-12 is being reconstituted with nine members, some of which are nowhere close to the Pacific. Money is what rules, with desperation not far behind.

There’s a big gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots‘

We used to talk about the five “power” conferences, which were all considered roughly equal. Now an income gap is opening up in college sports. 

The two premier conferences are the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference. The Business of College Sports says that Big Ten schools will get an average of $71.8 million each year from their TV contract; the SEC schools $68.75 million. 

By contrast, Big 12 schools get $31.7 million a year while the Pac-12 schools get $20.8 million, and the ACC schools — which include Virginia and Virginia Tech — get $17.1 million.

The ACC potentially faces an existential crisis

Clemson and Florida State have made it clear they want more money — and probably want out in hopes they can get into the Big Ten or the SEC. Whether those leagues want additional schools (which would mean dividing the TV pie) and whether they want those specific schools is an open question, one that sports talk shows can spend hours on. What we know is that both schools sued the ACC over the exit terms. Those suits were settled earlier this year but the future is anything but settled. For now, the ACC has revised how it distributes TV money in a way that at least temporarily appeases marquee schools such as Clemson and Florida State. 

The most important thing that came out of that settlement, though, was clarity on what it would cost schools to leave the ACC. If a school wanted to leave this year, it would have to shell out $165 million to the league. That number drops each year, though, until it hits $75 million in 2030 and stays there.

Given the income gap between conferences, if a school thought it could pay a one-time fee of $75 million to leave the ACC and more than triple its TV revenue to $70 million a year, that might be an exit fee worth paying. The conventional wisdom is that as 2030 approaches, Clemson and Florida State will be saving up money to pay their way out of the ACC and hope to find a better deal elsewhere. 

Something else happens in 2030: That’s when the TV deals for the Big Ten and the Big 12 expire; the SEC’s TV contract expires in 2033. The ACC’s TV deal runs through 2036. All those contracts are going to be renegotiated with the knowledge that some schools could write a check to exit the ACC. Conferences won’t want to expand just for the sake of expansion; they’ll want to know that if they expand they will get more money out of a bigger pie, not less. The TV networks will have a big say in all this: Which markets do they want? More to the point, would they pay the Big Ten more if it included Clemson and Florida State? If so, how much more? Feel free to insert the names of other schools.

We’re likely to have a big game of musical chairs that will reconfigure conferences even more than they have been. So circle this date: 2030.

Virginia Tech’s next football coach will probably have a six-year contract

When Virginia Tech hired Justin Fuente in 2015, he signed a six-year deal and later got an extension of two more years. When Tech hired Brent Pry to replace the fired Fuente in 2021, he also had a six-year deal. That’s pretty typical. Contracts for football coaches at Virginia Tech’s level appears to be about five years or more (although tenures run less, as first Fuente and then Pry found out). At the University of Virginia, Tony Elliott has a six-year deal. At Clemson, Dabo Swinney has a 10-year contract. Bill Belichick has “only” a five-year deal at North Carolina, but he’s also 73 years old.

The point is this: Whoever Tech hires next will probably sign a contract that runs through that 2030 date when schools can start exiting the ACC at the lowest rate possible.

That brings us this:

The main job of Tech’s next coach isn’t just winning, it’s making Tech attractive in future conference realignments

Sports fans sometimes make the mistake of thinking conference alignments are based on silly, old-fashioned things like, well, you know, sports. They’re not. They’re based on marketability — a fancy word for money. Some schools are marketable because they have national brands and people all over the country will watch them no matter what their records are — Notre Dame, currently 1-2, is the classic example. Other schools are marketable only if they’re winning. That’s the category Virginia Tech is in.

If the ACC implodes like the Pac-12 did, Tech will have two choices: It can stay put and see what other schools the league can bring in. Or it can if it can find a better home. The former will almost certainly will involve bringing in “lesser” schools from both an athletic and marketing point of view. The Pac-12 “traded down,” losing UCLA and Southern Cal and picking up Cal State-Fresno and Utah State, among others. From a TV standpoint, it’s simply not as attractive as it once was. The latter option raises the question of which other conferences would want Virginia Tech. That has nothing to do with what those conferences think about Tech as a school or even Tech as a football program; it has to do with what kind of value Tech would add to that conference’s TV contract. Nothing personal; it’s just business.

We’ve heard all kinds of speculation about which ACC school the Big Ten and SEC might want to pick off. All those projections have one thing in common: Virginia Tech isn’t that high a priority. Tech may be a great school but it doesn’t have a national football brand the way Clemson and Florida State do, nor does it bring in a big TV market. You can certainly make the argument that the SEC might want more mid-Atlantic TV markets, but is adding Virginia Tech the best way to get them? What if an evenly matched Clemson-Alabama game was a bigger TV draw in the state than an Alabama-Virginia Tech blowout? If the Big Ten wanted a school in Virginia, it might prefer the one in Charlottesville — the Big Ten has the quaint notion of preferring schools that are members of the invitation-only Association of American Universities, an elite group of research universities. The University of Virginia is a member; Virginia Tech isn’t. 

We must remember that a quarter-century ago the ACC didn’t want Virginia Tech — the conference didn’t see where it added enough value in terms of TV markets. It took some machinations from then-Gov. Mark Warner and then-Attorney General Jerry Kilgore to get Tech an invite. It’s not hard to imagine the ACC falling apart, Tech getting spurned by both the Big Ten and SEC and having to scramble to find some other conference that would be a downgrade from its current status.

That’s where the next coach comes in: He needs not just to win; he needs to rebuild Tech’s football brand so that if the school does find itself a free agent, so to speak, that affluent conferences find adding Tech to be an attractive business proposition.

Future Virginia office-holders need to be on alert

Normally I write about politics. Here’s where all these sports scenarios interact with politics. Just as Warner and Kilgore found themselves involved in getting Tech out of the crumbling Big East and into the expanding ACC in the early 2000s, some future governor and some future attorney general might have to deal with the same issues. That could be our current candidates — Abigail Spanberger and Winsome Earle-Sears for governor, Jay Jones and Jason Miyares for attorney general. Whoever wins will be in office until early January 2030, so if realignment starts before then, they could have a role to play. Whoever is elected in November 2029 to succeed them might have a hotter seat. 

How might they get involved? The same way Warner and Kilgore did. Kilgore went to court. Warner made sure the University of Virginia was looking out for its fellow Virginia school — then-president John Casteen is said to have practically demanded the ACC admit Tech. Miyares has already made his views known. When conference realignment talk was swirling in 2023, he told Cardinal News that neither Tech nor Virginia should do anything to endanger the other. Would a future Virginia governor insist his or her board of visitors appointees take the same approach? Would that future governor make it clear that the University of Virginia shouldn’t go to the Big Ten unless Virginia Tech could come with it? For now, these are all hypotheticals. Before Tech’s next football coach is up for a contract renewal, they might be real questions.