UVA Football: Elliott has 54 new guys on the roster for 2025 season

Remember me sounding the alarm last fall because UVA Football coach Tony Elliott was facing a roster apocalypse?

Elliott had 43 seniors and grad students about to complete their eligibility at the end of the 2024 season, the result of the COVID redshirt year that everybody active in 2020 got, plus the extra redshirt year that was granted to UVA kids due to the Nov. 13, 2022, shooting deaths of three members of the football team.

Turns out, the 43 number was low.

“This offseason, we added 54 new players, 32 of those through the transfer portal and 22 of those being high school signees,” Elliott told reporters at the 2025 ACC Kickoff on Tuesday.

Fifty-four. Wow.

That’s more than your two-deep in new guys, which is just absurd.

The transfer portal class ranked in the Top 25 nationally, buttressed by a reported $30 million investment by the money people, which we cast initially as an effort by the donors to go all-in on Elliott to see what he can do with a big budget.

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ICYMI

• Did the UVA Football money people really give Tony Elliott $30M to build a roster?
• ACC Commish talks up SCORE Act: They’re student-athletes, not employees

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Now it’s starting to look like what was going on there was, getting ahead of the new restrictions on big spending that will come post-House settlement, with a bill in Congress that could put strict guardrails on NIL gaining steam politically.

Questions about the sustainability of that one-year investment could be moot as a result, but in the here and now, Elliott is hopeful to be able to reap the benefits of the warchest.

“Truly grateful to the individuals that decided to support the efforts this offseason and provide the resources for us to be able to go be aggressive and productive in the transfer portal,” Elliott said.

Elliott credited Tyler Jones, who on Wednesday was announced as the general manager for the UVA Football program, and Justin Speros, who was announced on Wednesday as the assistant GM, for leading the internal effort to flesh out the 2025 roster.

“Tyler Jones and Justin Speros did a great job of identifying the guys that we felt like would fit the needs that we had open, and the staff just did a great job of working the phones, trying to build relationships as quick as possible,” said Elliott, noting that the program added 13 new guys in the spring portal season, addressing identified needs in the defensive secondary.