The Virginia Tech Friday Q&A: In-State Recruiting, The Basketball Program, And More

By: Chris Coleman | Lead Analyst and Columnist
Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech sponsors 22 varsity sports. (Ivan Morozov)

1) Clemson recently announced the cutting of their Men’s Cross Country team, Men’s Indoor Track team, and Men’s Outdoor Track team. Clemson already had fewer scholarship programs than VT, and now they are cutting even further. The belief is that they are cutting these non-revenue sports to further focus on football. How do you feel about this “all-in on football” approach? Would it help VT to do something similar? Does VT have an obligation to continue non-revenue sports? What is the value of continuing such programs? Basically, what are your overall thoughts on a robust athletic department with many sports versus a football-centric approach? – Pride_and_Joy

Chris Coleman: From a business model perspective, I think it’s important to compare Virginia Tech to those schools who are similar in terms of overall revenue.  With that in mind, I took the five teams ahead of the Hokies in revenue, and the five teams below them, and did a comparison.  I used this USA Today page for 2018-19 revenue numbers, and Google searches/Wikipedia turned up the number of varsity sports per school.

Here is a list of those schools, with the total amount of revenue, and the number of varsity sports also thrown in for comparison.  But the key number is on the right…revenue per sport.  I’ve sorted the column by revenue per sport, though you can click on the header of each column to sort it by whatever you want.

SchoolRevenueSportsRev. Per Sport
West Virginia$102.7 mil17$6.04 mil
Iowa State$95.4 mil16$5.96 mil
Oklahoma State$95.3 mil16$5.95 mil
Arizona$105 mil18$5.83 mil
Texas Tech$96.6 mil17$5.68 mil
Colorado$94.9 mil17$5.58 mil
Missouri$106.6 mil20$5.33 mil
Utah$99.5 mil19$5.24 mil
VT$96.7 mil22$4.39 mil
NC State$92.7 mil23$4.03 mil
Rutgers$103.2 mil27$3.82 mil

Only three of those 11 schools offer more than 20 sports, with Missouri offering right at 20.  Those three that offer more than 20 are Tech, NC State and Rutgers.  Let me get this out of the way first…I have no idea what Rutgers is trying to accomplish by offering so many sports when they have so little (relatively speaking) revenue.

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