Editor’s Note, 9/15/25: Since this issue hit newsstands, Virginia Tech has made headlines with the dismissal of Coach Brent Pry. That development only underscores the timeliness and importance of our cover story. NIL has reshaped the very foundation of college athletics — challenging coaches, programs and athletes to adapt in real time. Pry’s departure highlights just how high the stakes are, and why understanding the pressures of this new era is more important than ever.
Editor's Note, 9/1/25: This exclusive interview between sportswriter Roland Lazenby and Virginia Tech Football Coach Brent Pry took place earlier this spring. Get an inside look at Coach Pry’s vision, the team’s season ahead and the game-changing impact of NIL by reading the full story here.
It was a rapidly moving story, this business of Virginia Tech coming to grips with the costs and complexities of Virginia Tech trying to remain in the upper tier of college football and basketball competition in America.
Then, in August, the school’s athletic director, Whit Babcock, delivered the knockout blow. Virginia Tech athletics would need an immediate infusion of $70 million to remain competitive in the spiraling business of college athletics.
Ostensibly, these millions would go to meet a shortfall in operating costs not covered by revenue.
As explained in my main story in The Roanoker, a Supreme Court ruling that college athletes cannot be denied their Name, Image, Likeness rights has thrust colleges into the business of paying athletes and essentially running pro sports teams in football and basketball with serious questions remaining about the huge costs of that.
For decades, the Hokies have done more with less. There are 10 public colleges in the newly expanded Atlantic Coast Conference (which now includes teams such as Cal and Stanford on the West Coast).
Of those 10 public colleges, Virginia Tech is ranked last in spending on athletics. The Hokies’ budget for their athletic department is about $120 million per year.
As athletic director, Whit Babcock explained to the school’s Board of Visitors in mid-August, the Hokies are going to have to spend tens of millions more, and make that decision almost immediately, to avoid losing their standing in the world of college competition, which requires the broadcasting presence and viewership ratings to sustain that in hopes of netting the program millions more in broadcast revenue.
While my story in the magazine deals in general with these circumstances, my conversation in June with Tech’s head football coach Brent Pry explored mostly the coaching and team issues amid the hectic efforts to contend with the craziness of the rapidly shifting financial challenges as colleges begin running what are basically professional sports operations that pay players whatever the market demands.
After all, the show must go on. And what a challenging show it will be. As veteran journalist Andy Bitter, who has covered the program for years, pointed out, to face this fall’s schedule, Pry has had to turn to the transfer portal to hire more than 30 athletes from other schools to come in on the fly and man many of Tech’s top positions on the team.
The thirty or so athletes Pry has brought in is more than the total he has hired in his previous three seasons combined, Bitter pointed out.
“It’s mind-boggling the amount of moving parts in this thing,” I told Coach Pry as our conversation began. “I’m looking for some clarity.”
(Which becomes an almost laughable comment as we see a wild scenario that has the entire Tech community searching for answers.)
I began the interview by citing school president Tim Sands' rather quiet comment earlier in the year “that the situation in college athletics, and I’m paraphrasing, is not sustainable… Schools will be dominated more than ever by the financial demands of their football and basketball programs.”
Sands’ comments were based on “a recognition of the reality,” I told Pry and asked, “What’s going on?”
“Yeah,” Pry answered with a long pause, a mix of disappointment and concern packed into that single word.
“Particularly by the president,” he added. “We’ve said that in our coaching circles, the majority of us, for a while, that we just can’t keep doing this. It’s the wild, wild west and it’s bad for our game.
“It wasn’t the intent of you know of how things shifted, it truly wasn’t the intent…We felt the pressures of it, as head coaches and coaching staffs and athletic directors. So pretty quickly you realized there’s no way we could keep going at this rate.
“The donor base… You know, there’s a handful of schools that can afford” to spend on the levels necessary to prosper in the strange new business of professional college sports.
“Some of them can probably do it and would want to do it,” he said. “I’ve sat there at the ACC meetings and for the most part of it, all of the schools in our league, some of us, about 15 of us, are sitting there going, ‘We need things to change. Cause this is not good the way things are.’
“But then I’m sitting there with the head coach at Miami (Mario Cristobal) and the head coach at Clemson (Dabo Swinney), and Dabo’s pretty outspoken about wanting things to change. Mario doesn’t say a whole lot. You know. So, I wondered if he would be in favor of the way things are. Because they’re very advantageous with him. Because of the deep pockets they have.
“But Dr. Sands gets it,” Pry added. “To have a president with an academic background but who really understands the football piece… And I think Whit does a good job. They have a good relationship. So, Whit does a good job of Dr. Sands having the pulse of things…”
The question looms that both men and the school’s Board of Visitors are faced with serious spending issues that are going to have to be addressed immediately even though the exact picture of where the added money is going to come from is far from clear.
Courtesy of Virginia Tech
WHO IS BRENT PRY?
I spent the spring trying to get a sense of the coach who is at the center of this existential moment for Virginia Tech.
“I can’t imagine more moving parts for a coach,” I tell him. “This is a tough situation. A really tight schedule. I been watching you this spring. You do not seem rattled in the least.”
“I’ve never really been that guy,” he replies, “at least not in memory… I think one of the reasons I love wrestling so much, I was a wrestler… I think the strength of character and the resolve, because you’re out there by yourself.”
Strange as it seems (I was a 24-year-old varsity head wrestling coach at Blacksburg High, beginning in 1976 and relate to his reply), Pry likens that to the moments in his job where he’s on the sideline amidst dozens of players, trying to orchestrate a football victory.
A sense of humor helps, Pry observes in regard to that challenge. “If you’re a play caller in big games, in championship games, for me at least, you kind of get to a place where a little bit of levity is good. And poise. And people need to see that in you. But it also comes from I believe in how we’re doing this. To my core. I’m also reminded a lot from people who understand this place and understand how coach (Frank Beamer; Pry was on his staff as an intern in the 1990s) built it.”
The people, former players, former coaches, recognize that effort from him, Pry says. “They are reaching out and saying, ‘We see what you’re doing, coach, and we believe in you. Stay the course.’
“I’m not saying there’s not things where we didn’t learn and made some decisions on things and cut some new paths, but the process is the process and I do believe in it.
“It’s nothing fancy. It’s accountability and hard conversations. Being genuine and transparent. It’s a competitive environment for coaches and players. We’re very detail oriented in everything we do.”
One of Pry’s huge accomplishments among the challenges and struggles is that he and his staff have been able to identify and sign players in the transfer portal who have allowed them to upgrade the talent level on the roster.
The circumstances mean that more than ever Pry is faced with finding very good talent, players he and his staff can develop, at a relative bargain.
It prompts me to tell him of my conversations with the great Jerry West in my times writing about the Los Angeles Lakers. West, whom the great Jim Murry once described as “being able to spot talent through the window of a moving train,” told me decades ago that it’s fairly easy to see what an athlete can do on the field. The hard part in assessing talent is reading their hearts, West told me.
Pry laughs. “Well, you try to,” he says. “I learned that from Bud Foster (Beamer’s long time defensive coordinator) here. We coach mentality as hard as we coach anything. I believe in it. It’s a skill set. You give me a guy that’s got an elite quality, that may be his character traits.”
Sometimes the elite quality of a player, Pry says, “is the character trait. Well, you can win with that too. I’m not saying he can be a wideout running 4.9 (the widely used metric of timing a player’s running a 40-yard dash). But he don’t have to be 4.4 if he’s got all these other things. So, the mentality piece is really important. That was Virginia Tech. I cut my teeth in that mind-set.”
He stops to narrow his eyes and make a point: “I say this a lot and I mean it. I can be exactly who I want to be as the head coach at Virginia Tech. I didn’t have to sacrifice anything or pretend to be something I’m not. That’s why this was easy to say yes to.”
You don’t have to do a whole lot more than watch video of Pry greeting the members of Metallica when they came to Virginia Tech for their show in May.
Pry laughs at his own unbridled joy at greeting the band.
“You can’t fake joy,” I tell him. “That’s why my story in the magazine is called ‘Love In the Time of NIL.’”
It implies the emotional intelligence and personal approach required to somehow create more with less.
Pry’s strategy at the core seems to be love, to provide an atmosphere that goes beyond all the bidding wars for that. While this is a very weird time in the decades of American spectator sports, there are still the traditional qualities required of a coach, things like toughness, will and instinct for the ebb and flow of a contest.
Never mind that major college sports have come unhitched from their identity and mission, basically due to a Supreme Court decision that required almost overnight the jack-legging of college sports programs into professional teams. These changes unfolded over the past few several seasons, just as the country was emerging from the pandemic.
“The game has lost a lot of its core values,” I observe.
“Well, we try not to here,” Pry says immediately. “We want it to be about the right things still. We don’t out-bid anybody for a kid to come here. I don’t let them make a decision based on money. We don’t get players to stay here because of that. Kyron Drones could have made twice the money he’s made here at Virginia Tech…
“We got several guys who could have hit that portal and made more money. I want guys to stay here for the right reasons. We want guys to come here for the right reasons. I tell every recruit and family that we’re interested in, ‘We’ll be competitive in the NIL space. I want to be competitive. But don’t let money be the reason you choose Virginia Tech.’
“On a very, very rare occasion, in my recall, have we spent the most money… We’ve always come in under, either because we couldn’t afford to spend and match or we didn’t feel it was right for the value and for our needs. I want guys to come here and earn it. We’ve had guys do that.”
I tell him I spent 11 years working as a writing instructor at Virginia Tech. The joy there was that the students were amazing.
“It’s a motivator,” I say of working with the young people there, athletes or not.
“We got great kids,” Pry tells me.
“Do you see it changing kids?” I ask about the financial circumstances.
He answers hesitantly: “I would say the last two cycles… I don’t know if it’s the kids, because we can’t blame them… We jacked this all up…
“And then a lot of times it’s somebody else in their ear. It was the parents. And now it’s the agents. Very seldom do I think it’s the young man.
“Half the time they don’t even know what those conversations look like,” he said of the financial negotiations needed to sign a player. “They’re not having them. It’s somebody else having them with our collective (the organizations that popped up around schools to make money off the making of money).
“When you recruit a high school kid you get to know a lot,” Pry observes. “When you recruit a transfer, you dig deep. You try to know as much as you can by association. But I think we’re a pretty good judge of character here and we’re very transparent, so kids know what they’re going to get if they come here. If you choose this place, you know exactly what you’re going to get and what it’s going to look like.
“If things that are important to you are what you see in us, you got a chance not just to be successful here but to be damn happy, to leave here lovin’ it like I do. That’s what I want for you.”
That, as much as anything, defines the strategy of love in the time of NIL.
“I just believe that’s how you win,” Pry said. “If we identify the right skill set and then we learn that they have the right character traits and home training, and if we pour into them, which is what Virginia Tech’s all about, the wins will take care of themselves.”
Having interviewed and written about coaches at all level of sport for years (and coached hundreds of games in public school and youth sports and AAU for years myself), I ask him his advice for young coaches in these crazy times.
“You’ve got to stick to what you believe in,” he answers swiftly. “Be with people who will allow you to do that.
“You don’t want to conform to what’s not right about our game right now and let that be okay. But you got to keep investing in these young people. Keep doing it the right way. Stay competitive as heck.”
He pauses, then says of the current state of coaching, “There’s got to be a little bit more open-mindedness. Guys get into coaching because they love the game. They get to still keep getting to do that. You got to love to compete.”
He says “compete” with some grit. Almost like he’s chewing concrete. It strikes me that Brent Pry sounds to me just a bit like Kobe Bryant, who I had the pleasure of spending considerable time with during his formative years as a young NBA star. Bryant sort of gritted his teeth in the same way talking about competing.
“You get to develop,” Pry says. “You get the brotherhood. That’s why you coach. You still have all that.”
As he speaks, I can hear him resonating the values of his own father, a longtime coach. It runs deep with Brent Pry. He is correct. He does not have to fake it.
You could see that when he was grinning from ear-to-ear greeting Metallica.
“Who are your best advisors?” I ask. “You’ve done all this other work, and then it can come down to a split-second decision on the sideline. Coaching is a search through experience in the game moment. It’s not like you can just program this in. Well, sometimes it is.”
His immediate answer is his friend, Jeff Monken, the head coach at the United States Military Academy: “Jeff Monkin has been a great resource for me. I got a tremendous amount of respect for Jeff. And he’s probably in depth on things I’m struggling with growing as a head coach. I probably talk to him more about that than anybody.
“I told somebody the other day I learned more this past year than I did the first two years,” he says of his experience coaching the Hokies. “I’m not saying I made more mistakes. I’m just in a better place, had better perspective on what things needed to look like. I think it was about going through it for a couple of years and being able to recognize where things weren’t right, where we needed to be better. It was more clear.
“Growing up as a coach’s son is invaluable. My dad was around a lot of good coaches and had good successes at different levels. Division II. NAIA. All the way to the Big 10 and to the Rose Bowl. Obviously talking with him. I don’t know that I get into the weeds of things with him. But generalities about how we’re doing this. Certainly bouncing things off him. He watches the games. I get some feedback from him when I have questions.
“And then having Bud (Foster) here. Bud and I talk a lot. A lot of time it’s more reinforcement. And occasionally it’s me asking something… And I rely a lot on Whit. I trust Whit a bunch. He’s got good perspective and is very smart… Ultimately the decision is mind, but there’s members of this staff that I trust that have experiences also. And so, we have a pretty open forum here. I just ask it to be well thought out before you answer or before you step up to the plate, make sure you’ve thought through things.
But we’ve got some experienced guys that know me well.
“The last piece I would say is this, I have the good fortune to walk into Frank Beamer’s office to see him in this building once or twice a week. It’s surreal for me. I have the utmost respect for him. I used to be intimidated to walk in his office. I just never wanted to disappoint him. I still feel that way. You want to make him proud. That’s a constant reminder of making sure the moral compass is where it needs to be and we’re doing it the way he would approve that would be right. That’s a great advantage, I don’t get too far off when I see him, when I’m walking in here… So, I probably see him some weeks once, some weeks three maybe four times. And there have been times. When I was struggling with an assistant coach that was potentially leaving, I grabbed (Beamer) in the hallway and we talked a few minutes about his philosophy with a few things on his staff. There’s been some things he’s reinforced for me.”
I point out the tough decisions Pry has faced with players and with assistant coaches.
“And he’s made some tough ones,” Pry says of Beamer. “He certainly had to make some. Not that I was asked to make some, I needed to make some. Those are tough.”
Among several key staff changes, Pry has added a new defensive coordinator in Sam Siefkes and a new offensive coordinator in Philip Montgomery.
Matt Moore, the new offensive line coach who previously served in that capacity for West Virginia University, has made a notable impact, as has former Hokies player Jarrett Ferguson, who was promoted to run the program’s Football Strength & Conditioning efforts, among other changes that have left observers with the sense that Pry will be better served by his assistants this season.
Courtesy of Virginia Tech
Wide receivers Ayden Greene and Cameron Seldon, along with tight end Harrison Saint Germain, are part of the receiving corps for quarterback Kyron Drones.
THE MIAMI GAME
Finally, perhaps the most disturbing and at the same time the most hopeful thing in Pry’s tenure was the outcome of the Miami game last fall.
“The last play in Miami,” I tell him. “Sometimes you got to put things behind you. But wow.”
“And we did,” he says. “I looked at it in the off-season and asked, ‘Could that have changed the trajectory of our season? They were number (seven) in the country at the time. National TV… As much as I can point to that game and said it would have made a difference… It would have been another win for us, which would have been nice. And a big win. And a signature win. And our kids played their hearts out that night.
“We got to coach a little better, I think,” he admits in a lowered voice. “It was tough sitting in here… If you know me at all, you know I’m very transparent and genuine and just try to do everything the right way.
“I can have any conversation with anybody, a coach, a player… If I believe it’s the right thing.”
The Hokies were down, 38–34, but on the last play of the game Kyron Drones threw a strike in the end zone and Da’Quan Felton rose up in the crowd of defenders to pull the ball in.
Here is how ESPN reported the ending:
“Officials originally determined that Da’Quan Felton made the catch and Virginia Tech stormed the field in celebration. After a long review, referee Jerry Magallanes — the same referee who worked the Miami-Duke game in 2015 where he and other officials were suspended two games for ‘a series of errors’ on the play where the Hurricanes used eight laterals to win as time expired — announced the call was overturned.”
The context was beyond strange. Rules say you have to have conclusive proof to overturn a call on the field. Virginia Tech already had two losses while Miami was undefeated. Did the ACC, in its urgency to remain relevant in the national playoff picture, allow its officials to go against the rules and give the game to the arch-rival Hurricanes?
It would seem so, and if so, it’s an early sign that the new economic chaos and its uncertainty could have an influence on how things are addressed on the field.
"It's a completed catch," Pry said in his press conference that week. "It's called a catch and the video says nothing different. If it was called incomplete, the video says nothing different. We don't have the vantage of those officials that went running to the pile and called it a catch, and they called it a touchdown. That was the sequence. Again, like I said after the game, I hoped that they got it right. I can't stand here and say that they did."
“The context for the conference was huge,” I told him in our interview. “Top ten team, the conference struggling in the horse race against the bigger conferences. The context was huge for that call.”
“So,” Pry replied, “when I sat there on the phone and had asked the head of officials to send me the video that he watched that said it needed (to be) overturned… I said, ‘I just want to understand. I want to feel better about it. I want to support you here. And I watched the video and you couldn’t tell anything. I said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand. I don’t see it.’
“And the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘It’s hard to see, Coach.’
“And I said, ‘You took liberties, then, is what you’re telling me,’ because if this was called a catch or not a catch, there’s nothing on this video to overturn it. I mean it’s hard to even suggest it.’
“I struggled with that because I didn’t think they did the right thing. And it was unfair to our fanbase and our kids to rob them of that.
“But we bounced back the next week. I was proud of everybody’s efforts.”
“That single call is a significant thing in terms of how big these events are,” I tell him.
“And that Miami series runs deep and true around here,” he says. “Obviously that adds to it. But at the same time, what we’d like to do as a program. A signature win on national TV. That’s… We keep trying to move the needle and take steps. And that would have helped us. That would have been a big step.”
The great hope going forward is that Drones showed himself to be quite capable of making the biggest throw in that biggest of moments.
“My thought,” I tell Pry. “I would say to him that he made the play. It’s a terrible moment, but it gives you in so many ways something to move forward with. He made that play in that moment.
“There’s no question,” Pry says. “And they (his teammates and coaches) all believe that. I think that’s why we were able to bounce back and go play well… There was motivation obviously. But there was confidence too. We gained a lot of confidence out of that loss.
“And for Kyron… Internally everybody who saw what he went through… struggling early, then finding kind of his true self against Miami, I mean playing a whale of a game, only to lose like that. But then he plays hurt the whole game against Georgia Tech, a true warrior. He sat against Syracuse (because of injury), which hurt him. He comes back against Clemson and gets a turf toe early. Then he gets an MCL sprain. For those of us internally, we certainly understand Kyron.”
I turn to the last question, addressing how the football program and Enter Sandman and the mojo are so critical in attracting out of state tuition for the school…
“Look at all this pressure,” I say of the upcoming season. “Higher ed itself is behind the eight ball. All these things matter tremendously. Enter Sandman. That entire atmosphere… the mojo… is a beautiful thing to see, for the Hokies. But you gotta win ball games to make people wish they hadn’t come in here in Lane Stadium to play against you. You don’t’ create that overnight.”
“That does take time,” Pry says. “I think it’s a lot of things. It’s clearly putting an exciting team in the stadium that’s competitive week in and week out. And we did that last year. You’d have to go back a little bit, when last was Virginia Tech competitive each and every week for the entire season? We’ve talked about that internally as a step in the right direction. Now it’s finding ways to win those close games. You lose a game on the last play, two in overtime and two by three points. Then you got Clemson beat out here in the third quarter, You’re winning and you don’t have your tailback and your quarterback in the fourth.”
He pauses with the bad taste of that in his mouth, then plows back into to his goals for Love In The Time of NIL.
“Having good players that play an exciting brand. Winning a couple of those games... You gotta do those things. But I also think how we treat people…” He pauses. “Is very, very important to me. How we treat our players. How they treat one another. How they treat people in this community. That’s why we’re involved. everywhere we can I say yes. The Big Event. Relay For Life. Whatever it is. That’s why we’re so active with our community service. I want us to reach and touch as far as we can. This may be some idealistic bullshit, but I believe they’ll be enough people, enough Hokies, that appreciate how we’re doing it.”
I look at him. “I was just trying to think, could (former Tech coach) Bill Dooley have contemplated the job you’re doing. Frank had his way of doing it. He had certain allies in the community… but it’s a job that requires a lot.”
“That’s Virginia Tech to a certain degree,” he replies. “It’s about being savvy enough to work that space.
“In the end it needs to be sooner than later. The wins need to uptick. Nobody wants that more than me. I want this fan base and this donor base to be so excited about what’s happening in our football program. I want it for our kids and coaches first but for everybody else a close second, that they understand how badly we want to do this. But I’m not going to cut corners. We’re going to do it in a way we believe is right for this place, what works for this place, how you get a sustainable program back at Virginia Tech.”
“This is a tough fan base,” I tell him, quoting longtime Hokie Dave “Mudcat” Saunders about the psycho nature of the program’s fan base. Sort of the deepest pockets and shortest arms in the biz.
Pry smiles at that truth.
“It has improved some, yes,” he says. “But it can be better still.”
I didn’t articulate my last thought: It’s going to have to improve in a hurry. Which is asking a lot of the Board of Visitors and the entire community, to step forward in a major way, sheerly on blind faith, into a world of uncertainty.
It’s not just the season these young players and their coaches carry on their shoulders. It’s a big piece of the future.
Read our "Love in the Time of NIL" feature HERE or order a copy of the Sept/Oct issue today!