Story Links
Feb. 6, 2004
| Name | Pos. | Ht. | Wt. | Hometown (High School/Prep School) |
| Branden Albert | OL | 6-7 | 310 | Glen Burnie, Md. (Glen Burnie) |
| Kevin Bradley | FB/LB | 6-1 | 220 | Fayetteville, N.C. (Seventy First) |
| Ahmad Bradshaw * | TB/CB | 5-10 | 180 | Bluefield, Va. (Graham) |
| Devonta Brown | LB | 6-2 | 225 | Charlottesville, Va. (Charlottesville) |
| Philip Brown | CB | 5-11 | 188 | Hampton, Va. (Phoebus/Hargrave Military Academy) |
| Theirrien Davis | RB/DB | 5-11 | 182 | Bowie, Md. (Eleanor Roosevelt) |
| Scott Deke | QB | 6-3 | 207 | Pacific Palisades, Calif. (Loyola) |
| Chris Gorham | CB | 6-0 | 175 | Pottstown, Pa. (Pottstown) |
| Chris Gould | PK/P | 6-1 | 190 | Lock Haven, Pa. (Central Mountain) |
| Olu Hall | LB | 6-3 | 220 | Fairfax, Va. (Robinson) |
| Jamaal Jackson | WR/S | 6-3 | 204 | Chesapeake, Va. (Deep Creek) |
| Jon Kirchner | DE | 6-4 | 258 | Lexington, Va. (Rockbridge County) |
| Chris Long | OL/DL | 6-4 | 265 | Ivy, Va. (St. Anne’s-Belfield) |
| Nate Lyles | DB | 6-0 | 195 | Chicago, Ill. (Hubbard) |
| Cedric Peerman | TB | 5-10 | 185 | Gladys, Va. (William Campbell) |
| Tom Santi | TE | 6-5 | 225 | Nashville, Tenn. (Montgomery Bell Academy) |
| Clint Sintim | DE | 6-3 | 250 | Woodbridge, Va. (Gar-Field) |
| Zak Stair | OL | 6-6 | 280 | Manassas, Va. (Osbourn Park) |
| James Terry | FB | 6-2 | 220 | Stafford, Va. (Woodbridge/Fork Union Military Academy) |
* addition to list released Feb. 4
Head coach Al Groh
Signing Day Quotes
Opening statement:
As every coach in the country’s going to say today, and everycoach in the NFL is going to say in April, I’m very pleased with thenew talent coming on the team. It’s consistent with the talent levelof the three groups that preceded it, particularly in the positionswe targeted as primary positions to up the talent pool.
on cornerbacks and safeties:
I think there’s some real good talent in those spots. Wetargeted that as a major area- both spots, corners and safeties. Wegot most of those players we targeted as primary guys. They werepriority positions for us, and I feel very good about both thenumbers and the skill coming in at those positions. As a group, bothcorner and safety have significantly increased the raw speed andoverall athletic ability of those positions.
What can you say about OL Branden Albert?:
Some guys better buy some new radar. He’s from the same highschool that Ron Darden came from, and the circumstances are somewhatsimilar. He moved down from Rochester, N.Y., to live with hisbrother. He only played two years of high school football. He’s avery good basketball player. We’ve seen him do that; he’s light onhis feet; he moves well. He would have some opportunities as a lowerlevel, lower division basketball recruit, but he’s got size, he’s gotathletic ability. I’ve watched a lot on him. He’s got toughness,and he’s certainly a guy who’s got his future in front of him. He’sgot potential, and he’s got work to do, but that’s a good project tohave at 6’7″ 300 plus with feet and toughness to develop into anoffensive lineman.
With you missing a couple of receivers, is it more likely that WR/SJamaal Jackson will start off over there?
No, not necessarily. That’s what our receiver coach wants, butone of the projects in this class was both a corner and safety.Jamaal was in our camp, so we’ve seen him both on tape and we’ve seenhim in-person. I know he can do things in catching the ball, butthis is a 6’2″, 6’3″ safety who’s team won their event at the PennRelays last year who’s got ball skills and who’s going to grow up tobe 210, 215 pounds. If that’s where he ends up, start havingsafeties like that, then that’s what you want to make your defenselook like. We want to score a lot of points around here, but as youheard quite a bit in the weeks preceding last Sunday’s game, you sawin the paper a lot, people were saying ‘defense wins championships.’You’ve got to make an investment in that, and you’ve got to stay thecourse. A number of these players could end up at other spots tohelp the team out, but that’s the plan going into August.
Have you been happy with the way you did in-state?
Well, we are. We’re trying to get the very best players inthe state and not just going out trying to grab numbers. We feelthat happened again. For the third year in a row, we got the No. 1player in the state. Whether the player was rated or not, it didn’tmake any difference to us. We didn’t recruit against that objective.We recruited for the players that we need to have on the team to makethe team better. We’re very pleased with that. The threelinebackers that we had targeted as our top three rated linebackers,we got. You know obviously in Chris Long we got a defensive linemanwith terrific potential. We got the three safeties, two-pluscorners, so we liked the way that went.
Has recruiting gotten easier since you’ve done it for four years?
I think we probably have continuity within the organization.Everybody knows what the plan is and how we evaluate players and theprocess with it, but really each class is its own entity. The cyclestarts all over again. When the clock strikes midnight tonight, thehunt starts in earnest for the next class if it hasn’t already. Infact it has, but officially it starts.
Did adding DB Nate Lyles late like that lift the class?
He was a very desirable player to us right from the start.This is a real football school where there’s a player signing atOklahoma, there’s another one signing at Purdue. They’re going tohave, I’m told, six players to sign Division I scholarships out ofthat school. Some real good football players there. In this case,Corwin Brown’s contacts there helped immensely, his being fromChicago and his school not being too far from there. We were veryaware of Nate as early as last spring. He’s a very versatile player.He’s got legit speed; he’s a contender for the 55 meters championshipout there this winter; he’s a real contact player; played somequarterback, played some running back, played some corner, playedsome safety. He’s a real versatile kid, an excellent academic kid.When we can go out like that and augment the talent that’s availableto us closer to home, that’s a big plus for us.
How is this class academically?
It’s a very strong class. There’s a lot that should be ableto set the example.
You’ve made reference to LB Olu Hall and WR/S Jamaal Jackson. Bothof those players are coming from schools that have been consideredVirginia Tech pipelines in the past. Do you see these pipelinesgetting broken down?
Each year is a year in itself, but if you recruit the playerin the proper way, that’s responded to on all levels whether it’s theadministrative level, the coaching level, or the player level inschools. So we’ve tried to be extremely thorough in our approach,very attentive to the schools, and certainly try to make a player atevery school feel that he’s a priority guy for us. Obviously thoseplayers felt that way. We got another terrific outside linebackerprospect, Olu [Hall], as well as Clint Sintim, so we kind of have ourbookends there. We should be pretty set there for awhile. We got abig, fast safety who also has the skills to be a receiver so thoseare two important gets for us.
How did you follow Philip Brown?
Well, we followed him, as you might expect, very closelythroughout the course of last season and watched him when they hadtheir Combine down there. Obviously he’s gone against a littlehigher level competition. He did take a step up, an intermediatestep up, responded to that very well. The great thing about Philipis one, he can’t wait to get here and two, he can’t wait to get outthere on the corner. He’s got all the ability that a guy needs toplay on a corner, but most particularly, he’s got that corner’smentality.
The tight end position is obviously one of your strongest positions.What do you see coming from Tom Santi?
He’s got the same kind of skills as the guys we have rightnow. He’s got height, he’s got vertical speed, and he’s got ballskills. Obviously Heath has got that. We’re very encouraged by whatwe saw all along in Jonathan Stupar. We think Tom Santi’s got that.I don’t know how to make this comparison, but you know Lemming writesup Santi as the best vertical receiver in the country this year.Whether he is that or not, he’s got vertical ball skills. He’s playedin an offense very similar to ours, his coach Jeff Rutledge was withthe Giants during the timeframe that I was with the Giants, so heknows what we’re looking for. He knows the picture that we have ofwhat players should look like. When he was at Vanderbilt, he coachedwith Rod Dowhower who’s a good friend of ours and has spent manyyears in the league and ran much the same offense that we run. SoTom has been exposed to a lot of the things that we do, and we lookedat the tape. We could see him running many of the same routes thatour guys do, so it really gave us a good opportunity to evaluate hisskills and potential. Even with that, I think we’ll be looking fortwo in next year’s class. We know that for sure.
What do you like about QB Scott Deke?
Almost every quarterback that was on our main list of guysafter we called it down, except one kid from the midwest, we werefortunate enough to have come through the camp. Obviously that’s aposition that’s so vital to our team, and besides all the tape thatwe scrutinize, we really believe that you’ve got to see quarterbacksin person. You’ve got to see the ball in the air; you’ve got to seethe quickness of the release; you’ve got to see the quarterback’sability to move within the pocket and avoid all the things that it’shard to get a fix on those things exactly on tape. So, we were luckythat all those quarterbacks, other than the one from the midwest whowe thought was a very good player, were in our camps. We had achance to see everyone in person. This is the player that we likedthe best, and not that we were letting outsiders make the decisionfor us on this, but the camp has gotten so large that obviously wecan’t handle it all by ourselves. We have a number of coaches fromother schools come in and help us and a number of high-school headcoaches who come in and help us. During the week that Scott [Deke]was in the camp, the last day when we were having the championshipgames out in the stadium, there were a number of them who came by.They didn’t really know that we were evaluating everybody else. Theyjust said, ‘Coach, I really like this kid. I like the way heconducts himself, I like the way he throws the ball. We had alreadymade our decision by that time. In a lot of ways, Scott is really aVirginia quarterback in that his dad is on the Board of Visitors atVMI, and the family is originally from Roanoke. Much the same as wasthe case with Ian Cunningham last year coming from Texas. I thinkthose two players certainly at least felt halfway in their heartsthat they were a Virginian when the process started.
Can you talk about OL/DL Chris Long a little bit?
As you might expect, this just does not make him unique to hisclass but we’re saying this specifically about Chris, he’s a realfootball guy. He likes the whole deal. He likes lifting weights; helikes going to practice; he likes playing in the games; he likeswatching games. He’s got high energy personality. You want to havehigh energy on your team, you get high energy people. He certainlyis that way, and if you see him right now, he’s imposing in his sizeand when he gets here, this is going to be an athletic 6’4, 6’5ish285-pound defensive end for us in the future. He’s got toughness;he’s got skills; he’s got a real football mentality; he’s a realsolid student.
How do you feel about your offensive linemen?
Good. Every defensive lineman who’s on the depth chart willbe on it again next year unless they decide they don’t like footballor get hurt. Nobody’s graduating other than Elton (Brown). We havelots of guard candidates on the team. Now we have two tacklecandidates. One of the things we want with these tackles, obviouslyour tackles get out and run a lot. They get out on the edge on theperimeter plays, they get out there on the screens. I was listeningto a game, actually I was watching the Green Bay vs. Seattle game andthe commentator said that he was talking to Monte Kiffen. Kiffentold him that Green Bay runs the best screens in the league, becausewhen their offensive linemen get out there, they don’t miss. That’spart of the criteria. We want that athletic ability in all position.That’s one of the reasons we’ve been a good screen team; we want tocontinue being a good screen team. Both of these tackle prospectscoming in are guys who are going to have size to them. One of them’s6’6″, the other one’s 6’7″, but they’re tall, lean guys. They’re notbig, thick, blocky guys. They’re going to be able to get out and runand do those things. That’s where we project both of those guys, andthey’ll have time to learn to do that. Hopefully when we’re ready togo with the next batch, they’ll be in the competition to move up.
on TB Cedric Peerman:
He’s one of the most productive and dynamic players in thestate of Virginia in the last two years.
How high could you have gone with numbers in this class?
For the right players, we were prepared to go into themid-20’s, but only for that circumstance. We also had some targetnumbers per position. That was the most important thing, to get thetarget numbers per position. Having done that, if it was to betop-shelf talent, we were ready to go beyond that. That would havekind of reduced our slots for the future. We got the talent. Wewould have liked one or two more receivers in this class, verydefinitely, but outside of that, we really got talent the spots thatwe wanted it by numbers. We’re going to go back after the same kindof guys next year, and that just leaves us plenty of spaces to dothat.
How many of these new recruits will play next year?
When they show they’re ready, I’m ready. At a point that theycan make a contribution such that it would significantly increase ouropportunity to win, then we’ll play them. We’ve got to use goodjudgement in that too. If it’s going to add up when the season’sover that the kid played 35 plays and that’s going to cost him a yearat the other end, then we would have to make that judgement. As Ihave said, it was more imperative when we were talking about theBrooks, Parham, Blackstock, Johnson, Lundy class that the addition ofthis talent only improves the team when it plays in the game.Therefore, there’s so many players in this class that I’m reallyexcited about their talent. I’m anxious to see them play in a game,so whenever they’re ready to help us win, I’m ready. We’ll just haveto make a judgement at that particular time. We’re also hopeful herethat maybe the NCAA is going to adopt the five to play five rule, andthat will allow teams to use the talent on end to win games. You gotthem, you put all this money into recruiting these players, you oughtto be able to use them.