Can Virginia Tech ever be good again?

I love Virginia Tech. I spent the last 20 years of my life being defined by my live for Virginia Tech, the school and it's athletic programs. I can count on one hand the number of football games I've missed in those 20 years. I've watched us play football or basketball at every venue here in the state of North Carolina that we have ever played in, including the random ass basketball game at Campbell University years ago.

So when I say that I have been asking myself more and more lately this question, know that it's coming from a place where I truly more than anything want us to have success. But I can't keep this question out of my mind:

Can Virginia Tech ever compete at the highest level of football or basketball again?

For the longest time, I've always felt like there was a path. I felt like if we just got a few wins and built the right amount of momentum things would begin to snowball in the right direction. And every time I feel like we have taken a step forward, it's met with an immediate 2 steps backwards. But I always felt like there might be a chance.

But now? I just don't know anymore. We gutted our funding of anything that wasn't football to pay for our NIL ventures only to see multiple key starters abandon us for a bigger payday elsewhere. Our revenue streams are a small fraction of our peers and now we are seeing schools like SMU and UNC just say screw it and ramp up their spending to levels we cannot hope to ever match in an era where you need to pay money up front to get a player to even be interested in playing for you.

I no longer see any viable path to Virginia Tech being competitive again. We don't have billionaire CEOs or billionaire oil magnates to bankroll whatever we want to do. We don't have 150 years of billion dollar endowments to fall back on to keep ourselves afloat. Our margins are apparently razor thin and we already financially cannot keep up. The more I think about it the more hopeless I am becoming. It feels like I'm watching a rapid deterioration and death of something I love and there is nothing i can do about it.

For those of you who still have hope, help explain it to me, because I think a lot of us could use it right now.

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