Love in the Time of NIL

The story below is from our September/October 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you! 

Can Pry and his Hokies find their way?

Editor’s Note, 9/15/25: Since our 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: Don't miss our exclusive sit-down interview between Coach Pry and Roland Lazenby as they delve into even more details of VT football and the NIL impact! Read it HERE.

The entire thing is a mystery, filled with no small amounts of anxiety. And unbridled joy. Plus cash. Lots of cash. All of it swirling together dramatically with serious consequences for an entire region that draws much of its stability and financial identity from higher education.

So please don’t think this is just about mere games. Except that it is.

Oh, yeah. The story is set in a year in which Virginia Tech president Tim Sands has questioned ominously if the whole sports thing is “sustainable.”

While Sands was among the first to be so frank, he’s not alone.

For the most part, it is not sustainable. College athletics these days threatens the financial health of a lot of schools unless, of course, they happen to have a few oil wells in the fan base.

Due to a Supreme Court ruling a few years ago, college sports has been paying its players for a while now in a new and rapidly evolving system.

What was once considered “amateur” sports (and tightly regulated as such) has become a full-bore professional enterprise with few clear rules and regulations.

I guess it’s always been about the money in college athletics, but these days it’s really about the money.

The Supreme Court basically ruled that college athletes can’t be denied the opportunity to sell their Name Image Likeness rights. Thus, the age of NIL.

It wasn’t too long after the ruling that photos appeared online supposedly showing the parking lot for University of Texas football stars. It was filled with Lamborghinis.

Which is the perfect reminder of just how insanely competitive college football is in America and how that drives the madness. It ignites something in the white-collar ego of successful alums everywhere. It always has.

Which brings us back to Virginia Tech, a school that has long struggled to realize its athletic ambitions.

Which means the school has never faced a football season as consequential as the tricky schedule it must negotiate this fall.

And it’s not just about winning and losing. Except that it is.

Not only are athletes getting paid, but they can now transfer at almost any time, come and go as they please, to maximize those payments in what is now called the “transfer portal,” which allows leaving one school for another, i.e., “hitting the portal,” like they’re characters in an old “Star Trek” segment or something.

So, maximize, they have. Stories abound of quarterbacks in the Southeastern or Big Ten or even the Atlantic Coast conferences collecting millions via a bidding war to compete for talent-ravenous schools.

In basketball, Duke University’s 18-year-old Cooper Flagg was rumored to have been paid tens of millions to play a single season for the Blue Devils.

Overnight, the entire ethos and value system of major college sports changed. These days it’s unrestrained free trade for the quarterbacks and linebackers and other moving parts.

Which has left guys like Tech head football coach Brent Pry and their university athletic staffs juggling an array of coaching and financial and emotional decisions on the fly.

“It’s the wild, wild west,” Pry tells me when I ask about it.

But let’s set all of those headaches aside for the moment and get to the joy.

Metallica

Never mind the brutal, slow-rolling jams that backed up traffic on Interstate 81 better than 40 miles the day of the show, the unprecedented Metallica concert in Tech’s Lane Stadium in early May quickly became something of a worship experience, one that echoed the big fun that has come to mark game days in Blacksburg in recent decades.

That’s because of “The Entry,” of course, that crescendo of a moment on game days when the event staff strikes up on the stadium sound system a thunderous recording of the metal band’s guttural anthem, “Enter Sandman,” right as the football Hokies emerge from their locker room tunnel and run, flags waving, onto the field, which ignites the entire joint, the tribe of sixty-some thousand.

Everybody in the place starts rhythmically jumping up and down in what seems some sort of totally unhinged mass pagan ritual.

It’s like the entire ravenous crowd is literally ready to consume the opposition, to cook their poor souls in a huge bonfire and suck the marrow from their charred bones.

Yeah, it’s that kind of raw college gridiron vibe.

It’s no wonder the cameras of sports cable giant ESPN have grown to love it so over the years.

If you could somehow translate the spectacle into words, it’s the sort of moment that leaves alums and fans young and old revived and energized and awfully proud to be whatever in God’s name a Hokie is.

More importantly in this rapidly aging century, these moments are THE signature, THE brand, of the university that helps feed us all. It is the very first thing you conjure up at the mere mention of “Va” Tech, inspiring visions of youthful excess and Game Day drinking and good ol’ red-blooded American rowdy behavior.

If you listen closely as the blaring power chords fade, you can also hear the chirping of cash drawers at packed bars and restaurants and hotels on home game weekends, all populated by the thousands of Hokies called home by none other than Metallica.

Which is just what college football has always been, a spectacle to draw alums back to campus. In the research I did to write a history of the VT football program in 1986, I discovered that not too long after the school played its first football game in 1891, alums were indeed showing up in horse and buggy rigs displaying ribbons with the school colors.

In fact, funds were quaintly raised for that very first season by the wife of a faculty member, a soprano, giving a concert, long before Metallica’s power chords came to hold their perch in the place’s identity.

So, there are long-running themes here, a history designed to feed the future by virtue of allure.

Indeed, if prospective students go to the school’s website for admissions, the first thing they see is a video of that pagan ritual.

Literally, it is the honey that has been drawing the youthful bees for years now, since the first seasons after electrifying quarterback Michael Vick thrilled fans and TV audiences in 1999, prompting a surge in the sweet spot for any institution of higher learning. That would be applications from out-of-state students paying that juicy fat out-of-state tuition.

By example, the University of Alabama Crimson Tide with what seems like acres and acres of tailgate parties on its game days rakes in tens of millions each year in out-of-state tuition, to the point that now better than 57 percent of the student body is from somewhere other than Alabama.

So, it’s not hard to understand that the circumstances weigh like an anvil these days on coach Brent Pry as he swims furiously against these swirling tides of the rapidly changing financial forces in college athletics.

Which is the crux of this story as well as the upcoming season.

It’s not just “can he stay afloat?” Can Virginia Tech football stay afloat?

Because if you’re going to get all those folks to make all that noise and do all that jumpin’ around, you better have the kind of team that’ll rattle your teeth and knock opponents right out of their jockstraps.

After all, that’s the kind of teams that former favorite son coach Frankie Beamer and his longtime assistant, Bud Foster, used to give ’em.

As if all of this is not pressure enough on Pry, both men are retirees still strolling the halls of the Virginia Tech athletic department many mornings and there to greet the Hokies coach as he toils away at what has become the astoundingly complicated job of coaching college football.

Did we mention that Pry’s first game at the end of August is a big TV event in Atlanta with the Hokies taking on the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, coached by Frankie Beamer’s son Shane? By the time you read this the Hokies will have faced that first big hurdle in this historic season.

At least a couple of the several websites covering Virginia Tech athletics are already on the record that Brent Pry and Whit Babcock, the longtime athletic director who hired him, need to go.

In college athletic jargon, Pry entered the campaign on the “hot seat,” based on the fact that his first three seasons in Blacksburg rebuilding the program have produced a decidedly mediocre 16 wins against 21 losses.

Long an observer (I’ve written two books about Tech football and spent my first season as a sportswriter covering the team for the old Blacksburg Sun in 1978, the first season of coach/athletic director Bill Dooley), I took notice of Sands’ dire proclamation and decided to spend some time around the program during spring practice to check out Pry and his Hokies up close.

My approach was to observe without asking so much as a question.

Yet before I could address my curiosity about Pry, I was confronted with the mystery, as usually happens when I write about any sports team.

That would be the silent, almost ponderous presence of quarterback Kyron Drones.

Group Therapy

I am often reminded of the observation from the great Sonny Jurgensen that playing quarterback is “like holding group therapy for 50,000 people a week.”

Which, in turn, reminds me of my very first season covering the Hokies in 1978 when Bill Dooley used a converted defensive back, David Lamie from Bristol, as his starting quarterback. Today, athletic publicity officials have learned to take great care in limiting the media exposure for athletes, but you still can’t protect them from the realities of competition. Lamie was playing his heart out that fall of ’78 but had to suffer the chorus of boos raining down from long-frustrated Hokie fans.

In my conversations with Lamie, I quickly recognized his bitterness because I had already seen it in 1970-71 in my lone season playing college football as a walk-on at VMI, a bitterness born of wildly unrealistic expectations in the fan base.

One of the most disheartening features of this new time of NIL is the supposed erosion of traditional values such as loyalty. Yet it’s hard to blame anybody for changing jobs via “the portal” for a better paycheck. Pry has seen several key players move on for more scratch.

But not Drones.

“Kyron could have made twice the money he’s making at Virginia Tech,” Pry tells me in June when we finally sit down for a one-on-one (You can read an edited version of that conversation here at TheRoanoker.com/VT).

“We got several guys who could have hit that portal and made more money,” Pry told me.

A gifted figure with both size and speed, Drones is a quiet leader whose work ethic and example have drawn the loyalty of teammates and coaching staff alike. I was quite eager to visit with him during spring practice only to show up one day and see him standing forlornly alone on the far sideline of the team’s indoor practice facility.

The sight set off my instant alarm, and sure enough, the next day, the team announced it was shutting down Drones in spring practice because he needed another medical procedure to deal with the leftovers of his injury-plagued 2024 season.

The news brought a setback, yet was soon enough followed by word that Drones would be fully healthy for the road ahead, a report that prompted some college football analysts to suggest the Hokies just might have a good 2025 season, despite the considerable challenges on the schedule.

Even so, it all only served to deepen the anxiety for the crowd that so loves its leaping mayhem.

Truth is, Tech fans better hope that it all somehow works out for Pry, because he shows in so many ways that he gets it, gets Virginia Tech, gets and loves the place like few others possibly could. After all, he’s a son of Virginia (from the old Lexington High School) through and through. And the cold truth is that the last thing the Hokies need is to spend millions buying out a coach doggedly learning on the job only to spend millions more on another coach in the hope that he will learn the same expensive lessons that are much a function of the time of NIL.

You may disagree and want to fire the guy. Be my guest.

To do that, you’ll likely have to look around these pristine, pastoral Southwest Virginia hills and hope to spot an oil well or two silhouetted against the evening sky and pumping away for more high hopes on the horizon.

Which brings us to my last bit of advice. Never blink at a mirage.

The story above is from our September/October 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!