Virginia Tech has long held the reputation of making do with less, a dynamic that recently has consistently had the Hokies looking up from the bottom of the Atlantic Coast Conference, but frugality may be a thing of the past in Blacksburg.
According to Yahoo Sports, citing reporting by 247Sports, first-year Virginia Tech head football coach James Franklin, already set to receive an $8.2 million annual salary, will have a new and renovated office by Aug. 1, and it will cost the university $192,000 in renovations.
"The new office is just one of the luxuries James Franklin will enjoy in Blacksburg. The program is ready to provide him with private jets, a flexible staff budget, and even upgrades to major facilities," Kamran Ahmad of Yahoo Sports wrote. "That is in stark contrast to what Virginia Tech’s previous head coaches got."
After Frank Beamer left in 2015, there were real concerns about Virginia Tech’s infrastructure during Justin Fuente’s tenure, Ahmad added. The program got an indoor facility in 2015, but it lacked heating. It got a new weight room in 2021, but there were no "new weights."
“The motto of the department at the time was, ‘Do more with less,'” a former VT told The Athletic in November 2025. “There were 65 Power 5 teams, and we were one of two that didn’t have [film database] Hudl, which everyone uses to recruit… We eventually got it, but when you’d ask for things, they’d say, ‘Coach Beamer didn’t need this.' ”
Wrote Ahmad, "And until James Franklin’s office renovation, the program didn’t have a dedicated football office, which is the norm at the Power-4 level."
It's all part of a $229 million "Invest to Win" plan in place for the VT athletic department in an effort to catch up with other schools in the NIL race. Time will tell whether that investment will deliver dividends to a football program that last saw a 10-win season 10 years ago, in 2016.
