Before social media, recruiting services, big media money, etc football was strictly a fall activity. Now fans and players/recruits inundated every day of the year even when it's completely irrelevant.

Football is the de facto branding arm for big universities. Fuente is the image, spokesperson, and highest paid representative of Virginia Tech. He's also completely non-existent/invisible outside of 14 Saturdays in the fall. Recruits clearly don't respond to that, the team has been really up and down during his tenure, and the coaching hires until TnT have been very uninspiring.

VT has far too much reliance on football to afford falling to the wayside