10 Years of Whit, and how has he done

Please ignore my mistakes, I was able to put this together because I'm home sick and my brain fog comes and goes ...

Whit Babcock joined VT in January 2014 and like the Fuente hire, this was seen as a big win to get an up and coming AD that was known for his fund-raising initiatives, marketing, and splashy coach hires. Whomever replaced Jim Weaver was going to be the person to make the biggest hire in Virginia Tech's history, Frank's successor. There are no bigger shoes to fill. Very few people replace an active HoF Coach, even fewer replace one that built the program, especially one that started that build during their playing days.

But replacing Frank was only a small part of the job. VT made its name in football, but for most sports they were still adjusting to being in a major conference. Many of us can easily remember the mid-major days of VT sports, but now with conference re-alignments and overall changes in college athletics VT needed grow into being a major play in all sports, they needed to increase donations to fund the grows.

It's now been over 10 years of Whit Babcock at the helm, now leading us to our 25th season of power conference sports how has he done?

I first am going to look at financials because that is one of the biggest selling points everyone mentioned when Whit was hired. The financial data is from the Knight Commission. And just to note, the year convers the previous season, so 2017 has a large competition bonus, that was for the 2016-2017 season where we played Tennessee in Bristol. I've included two years prior to Whit for reference (and because when I started getting the data I didn't realize that 2014 in data meant 2013 financials so I left it because I had it)

There are a couple of things to quickly note, first 2021, the COVID year, was a mess for financials. I will exclude it from some of my calculations (which I will note) just because it is wildly out of bed with any other year and we all know why. The other thing that people should notice is that donations rose from $16.1m to $27.6m. Which without any context is great, out of all the ways we get money, Babcock really can only influence two of them, Corporate sponsorships/Advertising and Donations. Competition Guarantees are going to change year to year because there are only so many kickoff classics and other games that will pay for VT to play. Tickets are odd, we can see the issue with sales during COVID, but lots of fans come win or lose, so the AD doesn't have a lot of sway unless we're selling boxes. Student Fees and what VT/Gov't gives the athletic department aren't really up to Whit either, he has some influence, but at the end of the day those decisions are made elsewhere and don't have emotion or ROI behind them like donations and advertising respectively.

Now Whit has increased Donations $11m, which sounds amazing. So, let's look into that in a different way. Below is the percentage each revenue steam makes of the entire revenue.

Note, the variance column ignores 2021 and tickets variance also ignores 2022 and 2023 as last season (which is not in this data) was the first year we got back to selling out lane after COVID.

The big thing that sticks out is Media Rights have increased a lot. They make up 10% more of our revenue than when Weaver was here. We are making $32m more today than we did when Weaver was here just from media rights, which the AD really has no say in. And what is insane, that number is going to go up even more with Cal, Stanford, and SMU joining the conference (because Cal and Stanford don't get their full distribution and SMU is taking any of it). It kind of makes the $11m donation gains look a bit smaller. We went from Donor/Media being $16.6m/$22.2m to now $27.6m/$54.3m. Now looking at donations, it typically accounts for ~20% of our revenue. Corporate Advertising does really change at all. Honestly, other than media rights the other revenue streams have stayed lock step with each other. The revenue profile today looks very much like the profile that Weaver had when he left. Honestly, it looks like Whit has maintained the status quo, not improved it.

Now I have been trying to figure out how to show this information in the best way and I have no clue so the graph and the table are the same information just visually different.

Add the table data (which is not normalized unlike the image)

For the graph I have done 2 things, 1) removed 2021, and 2) added 2021 inflation into 2022 number. Looking at the graph, every steam of revenue increases at similar rates until media and "other" just shoots up at the end, which is really what inflations does too. I am not sure what the take away from the graph is, but in the table, we can see that we have increased Media rights 144% while donations have only increased 66.3% and overall, we have increased 85%. But those numbers don't include the 28.2% inflation which I got from here.

That 66% increase is now more like 36% increase. Which is still good, but that really only a $6m increase in 2023 dollars or about $4.5m over what Jim Weaver raised his last year. I don't want anyone to think that this is nothing, it's great to increase donations, but it should be viewed in context of everything else. This wasn't some Clemson style increase donations hand of fist, it was probably a lot of hard work to keep donations in line with the increases to all the other revenue streams.

I do want to take a second and mention ticket sales.

There is a lot that goes into ticket sales and of course we sold a lot of tickets the year we had ND, Miami, and UVA at home, that's really a no brainer. None of that scheduling is controlled by VT. So, let's assume are schedule is consistent and 2013 was a good year (it was better than 2014), what would ticket sales look like vs inflation, many years we've outkicked our coverage until COVID. It's pretty safe to assume that last year we did better than $18.5m and we might have even done better than $22m that inflation says we should have received. That means we have an easy room for growth in our revenue for this year. And a bigger budget is always great.

Speaking of budgets, I have only talked about revenue, now what about the actual expenses. I am not going to break down every expense like I did revenue, you are welcome to do so yourself. So below I just look at revenue, expenses, and profit.

A couple big things stand out to me, but the biggest in the $24m in profit we've had in the last 11 years. Where is that going? There isn't a line item for it to be rolled back into anything in the financials. What is VT doing with that profit? Maybe they are saving up for the Cassell renovation, but typically those are funded through other means. Why don't we have LED lights?

The insane thing is that these numbers have Kenny Brooks, Joe Rudolph and Brad Glenn in them. Our expenses are going down with them off the books as their replacements don't make anywhere close to what they did.

Whit has been great at saving us money so next I'm going to look into where that money could go while looking at an aspect of being an AD that Jim Weaver excelled at, maybe the only one, but he really knew how to get facilities built.

Jim Weaver started VT at a time that very transitional for the Hokies. He got VT just after we moved from the Metro to the A10 but he help usher VT out of the mid-majors and into the Big East, which was better. While the A10 lasted 5 years, the BE lasted 4, and we were off to the ACC, which offered a completely different level of athletics for most sports. Big East Football and Basketball were completive leagues, but the BE lacked in Olympic sports. Weaver had to upgrade and he did, touching just about every sport at VT. New stadiums, sports specific practice areas, scoreboard galore, locker rooms for all. Weaver built VT athletics. Being a swimmer, I still can't believe we practiced in War Memorial and got any good recruits. Diving was even worse as they had to drive to Charlotte to practice on the higher platforms. Our facilities sucked and Jim Weaver fixed that big time.

With probably the only praise I will give Jim Weaver AD career, let's look at what Whit has done ... hmm, I must be missing something right? Baseball is good, Rector needed some work sure, the Student Performance Center with an entire area devoted to Gatorade is probably important. I understand the facilities were in a much better place but still it's been 10 years. PSU has approval to start on a $700m renovation of Beaver stadium which would upgrade a lot of things not in Beaver stadium (they don't name things so well up there it seems). One of those upgrades is to their football locker rooms which are 4 years newer than ours. LED lights is a big thing and not that expensive compare to a lot of other improvements. Cassell is the big one on Whit's list, the pictures look nice, but it's been over 3.5 years and everyone is still hoping they can get this started. If Whit can get Cassell updated then that will be a huge feather in his cap. NOTE: I went to look up if I should still use this phrase and I'm back after 45 minutes down the Wikipedia hole, all I can say is maybe?

So far, we have finance that look pretty so-so and facility upgrades that are stuck in purgatory.

So, let's move onto coaching hires. Whit has made some hires. Ignoring the biggest hire Whit had to make, the hires have been really really good. Buzz and Mike Young were both good hires. Both have done well with our basketball program, and while Mike isn't getting the support he probably needs, he has done very well with what he has and won the freaking ACC tournament. Kenny Brooks was a home run hire. Ben Thomas looks to be a great successor and Tony Robie was the best hire someone could luck into. I am not sure where Brian Sharp really lies on the hire scale as it was more of a promotion. I am not sure who hired Robertson but she has done very well with building the women's golf program. Both John Szefc and Pete D'Amour have baseball and software doing well, and hopefully both can take that next step the programs are on the cusp. Kristen Skiera is improving lacrosse wins each of her seasons and looks to be on the right track. And Sergio brings a resume that has helped improve our swimming program including our first NCAA champion. I would like to point out that Ben Thomas took over some MASSIVE shoes as Dave Cianelli was ACC coach of the year 20 times.

All that upside, all the improvements in our programs and there are two massive weights around Whit's neck bringing him down. Kenny and Mike won ACC championships in basketball which along with our ACC championships in football make VT the only school to have an ACC championship in the 3 revenue sports. Whit helped make that happen. Whit has overseen 26 of our 45 ACC championships. And it all really doesn't matter if you're not winning at football. Whit might lose his job if Pry doesn't turn it around, but it's tough to say that any AD has hit on coaches as well as Whit.

Another area I looked at while looking up old articles about Chuck Cantor was the athletic department staff. It has increased immensely under Whit. It is insane how many more people we have. Chuck left because he was one man running a department. He went to UF where he got to manage 5 people to do the job he did at VT. I wondered with the growth at VT, would people like Chuck gotten teams built under them? I looked at the staff directory (ignoring coaches) and then in went in the wayback machine and looked at it from 2019 (earliest date). Largely no. Almost unequivocally no! There are a couple of people that had title changes from associate AD to executive AD, but it appears they are doing the same job and there aren't teams of people doing jobs that would report to them. Two of those people were in compliance, and now they are on the executive team and compliance just has two more people. I am not saying they don't deserve the titles or any of that, it just doesn't appear that the title is a move up as much as a recognition of the job they do. Most of the directors are new to VT. I can't find anyone that moved up to a director role and have someone in their old job title. Reading some of these bios it seems that some of these people have been doing the same job for a couple decades. And that is not to criticize them, but no movement in 5 years of growth is odd. I worked at a small company that was growing and they started to hire a lot of management and high-ranking engineers from outside which created a weird culture of people having "1 years' experience 5 times". And I fully support not pushing people out of job's they like, but you create a culture of not allowing people to grow. There was no ladder to climb, which is a massive double edge sword right there. That company flourished on the work a lot of us did at the beginning and now it's dead; the owners even left. Lots of people want to grow and do new things and if you don't provide that outlet then they leave.

The other thing that not building the company through promotions meant you got a lot of people not knowing why something was done a certain way so they went against the grain sometimes knowingly and sometimes not. If you ever want to see blunders happen build your teams this way. I have seen it happen many times.

Speaking of blunders, the athletic department has had a few:

• Chuck Cantor walks out the door single handily tanking 3 seasons of recruiting
• Having players complain about Turkey bacon
• Selling seats that don't exist
• Tease a uniform reveal and then delay
• Then delay even further until it's leaked on youtube by a NCAA CFB 25 steamer
• Put seat backs in stadium to annoy everyone and then have to remove them all because no one sat in them
• Pete
• Wakeyleaks – not because we cheated, but we cheated ourselves to a 0-0 tie game at the end of regulation, we suck at cheating too
• Having to fire someone in their first year for impermissible use of government funds.
• Marketing field level seats before you cover up the plywood, really was Jo Ann fabrics closed?
• The weights weigh the same
• VT athletics is marketed differently than the school (hate the logo so hard not to side with Whit)
• Coaches were fining players
• Apparel deal
• Apparel Extension
• 2019 handling of the 1999 Football Team
• Alumni Relations for former athletes
• Hokie Club (which issues predate Whit)
• Hotel issues when playing WVU – you book a hotel in Pittsburgh and bus it down
• Scheduling ODU for the foreseeable future
• Scheduling Liberty

I am sure I am missing but I know it's something. But a lot of issues where no one takes the time to think what the outcomes are. No one double checks the photos or the tweets to make sure we look good. I feel we copy other schools too much that actually lead the way with innovative thinking. Cause if the weights weigh the same and every other school has way more people lifting then we have to do more with less which always means cutting corners, ignoring cracks, making drafts final. It's an industry that demands you outwork everyone else, but you can't, no one can. Frank Beamer built VT with innovation. Every coach works hard, but he is a HoF coach because no one used special teams like he did. No one ran defenses like Bud.

It feels like there is a lot of status quo in the athletic department right now. Sure, we have improved social media and marketing but we didn't force the bad employees out, they left on their own. Our revenue streams feel very stagnant. While we've had great coaching hires, we have equally great coaching losses. The department doesn't feel like it is moving forward, which can be an issue with growth. Growth is hard.

I am not sure where I stand on Whit after writing this, but something needs to change, because VT won't win straight up against most schools, which is what it feels like we are poorly trying to do. We to be different, we need to innovate.