After two seasons of despair, Virginia Tech football fans finally have something to cheer about.
The administration has launched a major financial commitment to Hokie athletics, a new head football coach is expected to bring a haul of top-flight talent with him from Penn State and, to kick things off, an anonymous fan stepped up last month with a record-setting $20 million donation.
Yet it remains to be seen if all of that will be enough to fulfill Tech’s ambition of competing with top-tier schools that have seemingly unlimited resources to invest in the post-amateur era of collegiate sports.
A court settlement last year was supposed to have brought some order to the wild-west world of Division 1 athletics. For the first time, schools were allowed to share revenue with student-athletes, but the amount per school was capped at $20.5 million a year. But the agreement has done nothing to tame the cost of “name, image and likeness” payments.
Atlantic Coast Conference members like Virginia Tech have mostly stood on the sidelines and watched as a small number of name-brand teams set the market value.
Last week, Texas Tech inked ex-University of Cincinnati quarterback Brendan Sorsby to a reportedly $5 million deal. The school, flush with West Texas oil boosters, bragged about the deal in a billboard that lit up New York’s Times Square.
Texas Tech, which rode a gusher of NIL money to this year’s College Football Playoff, has budgeted $35 million in combined revenue sharing and NIL payments to athletes in the 2025-26 school year, according to the Athletic.
There’s no way to know how Virginia Tech stacks up.
Officials in Blacksburg have provided few details about its football finances, including how it spends public funds provided by taxpayers and fees extracted from students. Tech is not an outlier when it comes to secrecy; colleges and universities fear that sharing information could provide an unfair advantage to their on-field opponents.
Reporters in North Carolina have used state open-records laws to determine how other ACC schools are distributing their $20.5 million in shared revenue.
In Virginia, however, universities have taken a unified stand in refusing to release records related to revenue sharing of public funds. Virginia Tech and other universities have used an expansive interpretation of a “scholastic records” exemption in state open government laws to withhold copies of revenue-sharing agreements or payments, even in cases when news outlets have requested the redaction of all names or other personally identifiable information.
“Even with student names redacted individual student-athletes may be identified,” the Virginia Tech FOIA office responded to a Cardinal News open-records request. “Therefore, the requested records are considered scholastic records concerning identifiable individuals. Accordingly, your request is denied.”
In December, Tech spokesman Mark Owczarski agreed via email to provide a general breakdown showing that 75% of shared revenue went to members of the football team, a higher percentage than at the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University.
Getting accurate numbers about the value of NIL deals received by Virginia Tech football players is even harder to come by. When the settlement was announced, there was anticipation that the details of any NIL deal valued at $600 or more would be released as part of a new agency set up to make sure the terms reflected market value.
The College Sports Commission, however, has released only a top-level report on the total number of deals approved and the value. The one-page document has no information about the number of deals for any school, much less information about individual NIL arrangements.
For several weeks, Cardinal News sought to schedule a follow-up interview with Owczarski about the finances of Virginia Tech football. His office eventually said it will not make him available. “University leadership is not available for interviews on this topic.”
The lack of official information has given rise to publications that have developed formulas to place an NIL value on highly touted players. Here is what On3 Media has to say about two recent Virginia Tech portal commits:
- Ethan Grunkemeyer, 6-foot-2-inch, 207-pound quarterback from Lewis Center, Ohio. Grunkemeyer started the final six regular-season games for Penn State last season and led the Nittany Lions to a 22-10 victory over Clemson in the Pinstripe Bowl. He has three years of eligibility left. On3 Media estimates Grunkemeyer’s NIL value at $783,000.
- Javion Hilson, 6-foot-4-inch, 240-pound defensive end from Cocoa Beach, Florida. Hilson appeared in three games last season with Missouri. Hilson will arrive in Blacksburg with four years of eligibility remaining. On3 Media estimates Hilson’s NIL value at $419,000.
There’s no way to know if Virginia Tech paid more or less than the On3 Media estimates.
Kelly Woolwine, the CEO of Triumph NIL, who for several years acted as Virginia Tech’s “defacto general manager” handling negotiations with players and their families, said he learned from experience that “99 percent of what you hear” about NIL values is untrue.
“On the flip side, truth may be stranger than fiction,” Woolwine quipped in a rare interview on the Virginia Tech Sideline podcast in December 2024.
One thing is certain: last fall, many among the Hokie faithful believed the football program had lost its way.
“What was once a great program competing for championships is now a laughingstock,” wrote Robert Irby in “Sons of Saturday,” a website dedicated to Hokie fandom.
Virginia Tech football hit a low in September after a 0-3 start, ending with a 45-25 blowout at the hands of Old Dominion University in Lane Stadium. After the game, Virginia Tech fired head coach Brent Pry.
Two weeks after Pry’s exit, the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors held a special meeting to approve “Invest to Win,” a campaign to inject an additional $229 million into Virginia Tech athletics over the next four years. Figures released by the board show that about half of the funds would come from donations, while $21.3 million would be generated by an increase in student fees.
“Today, we are stepping up to compete, and we ask our loyal fans and generous donors to step forward with us,” said Virginia Tech President Tim Sands.
In November, fans also cheered news about the hiring of head football coach James Franklin, whom Big Ten powerhouse Penn State had dismissed mid-season. (In an unorthodox twist, Franklin announced he would retain Pry — with whom he had coached at Vanderbilt and Penn State — as his defensive coordinator.)
The coaching change so far has led to a huge net gain for Virginia Tech’s roster. About a half dozen players left the team when Pry was fired, but Franklin has brought talent with him from Penn State.
For instance, Franklin was hired on Nov. 17, a little more than two weeks before top high school players would announce where they would enroll in 2026. In short order, Franklin convinced 11 recruits who had committed to play for him in Happy Valley to change their minds and follow him to Blacksburg.
As a result, Virginia Tech assembled a 2026 recruiting class that ranked fifth in the ACC, behind Miami, Florida State, North Carolina and Clemson, according to 247 Sports.
There was more good news on Dec. 15, when Virginia Tech announced that an anonymous donor had agreed to give a record $20 million gift to the athletic department.
“We are deeply grateful for this extraordinary and timely gift,” Sands said. “Doing more with less, while a testament to the talent of our staff and student athletes, is no longer an option.”
The real test begins this week, as Virginia Tech competes with other schools in a NIL bidding war in the transfer portal.
Coach Franklin has imported a member of his Penn State staff, Andy Frank, to serve as general manager and assemble the roster for the 2026 version of the Hokies.
His predecessor, Woolwine, said one of the vexing challenges in major college football today is managing players’ expectations as compensation goes up year after year.
“You’re going to have a program that is going to bring in a guy for $700,000,” Woolwine said in the December 24 podcast, “and on the other side of the line from him is a guy who has been slaving away at that same university for $75,000 a year. How happy is he going to be when he sees that?”
Woolwine said compensation is by far the biggest locker room distraction in the history of college sports. “It’s bigger than girls, and drugs and partying,” he said.
Players’ concerns about where they stand in compensation can lead to negativity in locker rooms of every major program. “They think their school or their organization was holding out on ‘em, taking advantage of ‘em, sandbagging ‘em. They are very bitter about it,” Woolwine said.
The transfer portal has made it easy for disgruntled players to seek more money and/or playing time elsewhere. This has made it harder for coaches to develop players over time. Underclassmen who have been working toward playing time can find themselves knocked down the depth chart when a school signs players from the portal.
Last season, for instance, only eight of 28 seniors on the Virginia Tech football team played their entire careers in Blacksburg, according to a Cardinal News analysis.
Woolwine said the goal is to find players who are in Blacksburg because they love Virginia Tech. “We don’t have the money to buy our way through this,” Woolwine said in December 2024.
The question remains whether today’s “Invest to Win” will generate the resources that will make it possible for Hokie football to again compete at the highest level.
The loftiness of Virginia Tech’s goal was reflected in a last-minute edit to the goal of the $229 million infusion to athletics. Instead of wanting to be competitive against the ACC (considered the weakest of the Power Four conferences), Virginia Tech expressed a desire to compete with “the best institutions nationwide.”