Football Newcomers Expected to Play Leading Roles

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The University of Virginia football team will open training camp next week with a roster that includes 54 players who were not in the program last season. Thirty-two of them are transfers who arrived on Grounds this year.

If there were any lingering doubts that this is a new era for college athletics, those numbers should help dispel them.

Tony Elliott spent 16 seasons as a college assistant before taking over as Virginia’s head coach in December 2021, and there was no transfer portal and no NIL when he entered the profession. Back then, nearly all of the newcomers in a program were recent high school graduates.

“The way it is now, it’s completely different,” Elliott said Monday in his Hardie Center office. “It’s something that I have had to adapt to, just getting used to, because in this profession you become a creature of habit. We’ve had the same rule structure for so long. That’s just what you know, and this is different. But it’s been a positive offseason.”

Nineteen of the transfers enrolled at UVA in January and were able to take part in spring practice, which concluded April 12 with the Blue-White game at Scott Stadium. Elliott indicated after the spring game that the Cavaliers would look to shore up their depleted secondary when the transfer portal re-opened later that month. They did that and more, adding seven defensive backs, three offensive linemen, one tailback, one defensive lineman and one tight end.

Also new to the program are 22 freshmen, six of whom enrolled in January and participated in spring ball.

“I’m excited about all of the 54 guys we brought in,” Elliott said. “About 50 percent of our roster is veteran guys, and 50 percent is younger, developmental guys.”

This transfer class is by far the largest in program history. By comparison, between the end of the 2023 season and the start of training camp last summer, the Wahoos added 14 transfers.

“To be honest with you, I don’t know what the future is going to look like,” Elliott said. “I think we’re still in a little bit more of a reactionary state, where in the past you were a little bit more proactive because you knew  what the attrition was going to be or you could predict or plan for the attrition. Now you don’t know what the attrition is going to be.”

For several reasons, the Hoos had an unusually large group of seniors and graduate students in 2024, and “that created more opportunities for us to be able to bring some transfer guys in,” Elliott said. “I don’t know if the natural attrition will be as high in future years. I don’t anticipate having as many seniors [as in 2024]. However, in this day and age, you don’t know what the attrition is going to be. We’re trying to plan as close to natural attrition as possible, but we’ve got to be ready to react in case we have more.”

In December, Elliott’s program received two multi-million dollar gifts from anonymous donors, and that gave the Hoos significantly more financial resources to help in their pursuit of players in the transfer portal.

UVA deputy athletics director Tyler Jones serves in a general manager capacity for the football program. Justin Speros, the program’s director of recruiting, functions as assistant GM, and Scott Pioli, a five-time NFL Executive of the Year, provides valuable guidance. Their efforts helped the Cavaliers land one of the nation’s most highly regarded transfer classes.

“If you just look at how we finished with the class that we were able to put together collectively, I feel really good, especially with it being the first time that we were heavily involved in the portal,” Elliott said.

“In years past, we had smaller numbers and we were targeting a different profile player. I think with the increase in the profile of the player that we were targeting and the number of guys that we were able to actually secure, I’m very pleased with this first go-round, and we identified a lot of things that we can continue to improve upon as well and we got a lot of work there. So I’m excited about the future. There’s a lot of things behind the scenes that people aren’t privy to, but what I was most pleased with was our ability to establish relationships as quickly as we could with all of the individuals involved in the process, which is I think the key to success moving forward.”

The landscape of college football has changed dramatically in Elliott’s three-plus years as head coach, but he still wants players who come to UVA straight from high school to form the foundation of his program. On this year’s team, such players include tailback Xavier Brown, offensive linemen Noah Josey and McKale Boley, tight ends Dakota Twitty and John Rogers, wide receivers Kam Courtney and Suderian Harrison, defensive linemen Jahmeer Carter, Anthony Britton and Jason Hammond, linebackers Kam Robinson, James Jackson and Trey McDonald, safety Antonio Clary and kicker Will Bettridge.

“We’re intentional on the guys that we recruit,” Elliott said. “We try to get guys that fit our system, that fit our culture, that fit the University, so that we can maybe get ahead of some of that potential attrition. But with the way the rules are and the freedom of movement, you’ve got to be ready for your high school guys to contribute [by their second years].”

Elliott is headed to Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday for ACC Football Kickoff. Also representing Virginia at the league’s annual preseason gathering will be four players: Josey, Carter, quarterback Chandler Morris and defensive end Mitchell Melton. Morris and Melton are transfers who came to UVA from North Texas and Ohio State, respectively, at the start of the spring semester.

With so many newcomers in the program, accelerating their assimilation into the team culture is a priority, Elliott said. He praised the efforts of the strength and conditioning staff led by Adam Smotherman, as well as the program’s sports medicine, nutrition and equipment departments, all of which have worked extensively with the newcomers this summer.

Along with the team’s returning veterans, those staffers have helped the transfers “understand the way that we do things here at the University of Virginia,” Elliott said.

“The next thing will be in fall camp identifying the right spots for the guys that we got in. Obviously, we got a good idea with the nucleus of guys that were here in the spring, but we’re adding those 13 additional guys, and we’ve got to figure out the right seats on the bus for them. And then the biggest thing is finding a way to play them all, with so many guys coming in with that much experience. And now you’re also up against time, because some of them have only got six months left in their college careers, and they want to play. A lot of them came here because they believe that they could get the remaining development that they need to prepare them for the NFL, and we’ve got six months, and the only way you can develop is to play.”

Challenges abound in this era of player movement, but the “biggest thing for me is trying to maintain the relational approach in a world that is becoming more transactional,” Elliott said. “I still believe that this is college football. There’s a lot more to it than just the football piece, and I want to make sure that as a program we maintain as much of that as possible. So, yes, we’re still going to do the Cavalier Circle [mentorship program]. We’re still going to invest in their career development beyond the game of football. We’re going to invest in their character development. So it’s still going to be a holistic approach as we adapt and incorporate some of the more transactional pieces to the business, but not losing sight of why we’re really here.

“At the end of the day, we’re here to help build champion men, right? And some [players] we’re going to have for four years, and some of them we’re going to have for six months. It doesn’t matter their time here; we’re still going to be intentional with helping to make sure that they walk away from here holistically better than they came in the door.”

Of the 32 new transfers, 13 are linemen: seven on offense and six on defense. Their struggles up front have continued to many of the Hoos’ losses in recent years, and the newcomers figure to bolster both lines.

“The game is won in the trenches,” Elliott said, “and this is coming from a skill guy that played wideout and has coached skill guys for my entire career. But especially when you become a coordinator, you learn to appreciate the guys up front. It sets the tempo for your team, it creates the identity, and then it provides leadership from those guys.”

The battles on each line should be fierce this summer, Elliott said. “There’s no penciled-in starters, because we’ve got enough competition at every position along the offensive front and the defensive front, and that’s what we’re after.

“In particular on the defensive side of the ball, I don’t care who the starter is. I want 12 to 13 starting-caliber guys, because you want to be able to roll those guys in. And then depth-wise on the offensive line, to be able to go out at practice and feel confident that you can have 15 guys to rep three different groups in preparation for the season, that’s a feeling that we haven’t felt around here in a while.”

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