At the beginning of each school year, Virginia Tech’s compliance department runs through a laundry list of NCAA rules and guidelines for its athletes, doing so with the football team in an hour-long educational meeting on PowerPoint. That meeting didn’t change under the new regime at Virginia Tech, where coach Brent Pry’s initial August camp was about to kick off.

One slide in the presentation hit Hokies linebacker Alan Tisdale like a crackback block — the one mentioning FanDuel, the popular gambling app.

Position meetings that night prevented him from immediately seeking out Pry, but the senior made a point to find him at sunrise the next morning before practice got underway. Tisdale walked into Pry’s office with a tone of regret and a mea culpa.

“Coach, I think I screwed up.”

A couple of months prior, Tisdale, who’d misunderstood the NCAA’s rules on gambling, had toyed around on the FanDuel app, betting on the NBA Finals. He did so in Virginia, where online sports gambling has been legal since January 2021. He was 21 at the time, about to turn 22, of age to legally participate in online wagering. And he had not at the time, nor has he since, been a professional basketball player in the NBA.

It doesn’t matter. Gambling in any form is an NCAA no-no, among the organization’s cardinal sins. Tisdale self-reported, not wanting to harm the team in the future with forfeiture should his bets be discovered. He hoped his confession would lead to leniency from the NCAA.

Instead, he got a nine-game suspension, reduced to six games on appeal. Before returning against Miami on Oct. 15, he missed half of his senior season for placing a little more than $400 in bets on a professional sport he doesn’t play that produced $41 in winnings, he said. The winnings were subsequently donated to charity after the violation was reported.

“We try and do things right,” said Pry, who grappled with the issue of going public with Tisdale’s situation, not wanting to further jeopardize his eligibility for any reason. “And even though the kid was wrong, he didn’t know he was wrong. And as soon as he realized he might be, he came forward. And I just don’t think there was enough consideration given for how things shook out.”