AFP sportswriter Scott German, who, good news, is on the mend, after a health scare, wrote a story for us last summer after chatting with Tyler Jones, the GM for the UVA Football program, and Justin Speros, the assistant GM, about the challenges they face in recruiting the transfer portal.
The 2026 class, which is still technically ongoing, has brought in 28 newcomers, the most recent committing on Feb. 2, Patrick Campbell, a defensive back from Dartmouth.
The 2025 class, which included Jahmal Edrine, who was arrested last week on rape and abduction charges, and is being held without bond at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, had 31 new guys.
ICYMI
- Albemarle County: UVA Football player charged with rape, abduction
- UVA Football player charged with rape, abduction: Who knew what, when?
- I asked UVA for a comment on the victim in the Edrine case: You already know the response
Edrine, after his redshirt sophomore year at Purdue, entered the transfer portal on Dec. 13, 2024, and committed to Virginia a week later, on Dec. 20, 2024.
Seven days is a pretty quick turnaround, when you consider how much time recruiting coordinators put into high-school recruits, beginning the vetting when kids are freshmen or, at the latest, sophomores – giving the personnel folks months at the outset of the process, and eventually a couple of years, to not only check out their academic transcripts, but also talk to coaches, teachers, teammates, friends and family.
Here was what Speros had to say last summer about the recruiting process for college transfers:
“A big part in identifying a player is finding out as much about that player as you can. Is he a high-quality guy? How’s he in the locker room? Can he blend with the current roster? It’s called speed dating,” Speros said.
From a few months, eventually a couple of years, you get, in some cases, a day – Jalen McNair, a safety who played at Buffalo in 2025, entered the portal on Jan. 16, and committed to Virginia on Jan. 17.
How can we rightly expect the personnel people to find out if a guy is a “high-quality guy” in a day?
Your HR department wouldn’t hire somebody in a day, which is barely enough time to run a basic Google name search, much less run their academic records and do a criminal background check.
ICYMI
This isn’t an indictment of the process at UVA Athletics; I’m getting at the bigger issue of what the NCAA has wrought on coaches and administrators across the board with the clumsy rollout of a transfer portal process that puts the onus on the decision-makers to put a lot of faith in their gut instincts, with what the folks at UVA Football are experiencing right now in the Edrine case as a cautionary tale.
The records searches on Jahmal Edrine would have come up clean; I’m speaking there from having run his name through court databases in Florida, where he played high-school ball and a year at Florida Atlantic, and Indiana, where he spent two years at Purdue.
I found one traffic infraction from 2022 in Palm Beach County.
The front office at UVA Football would have had time to track that one down in the week between Edrine hitting the portal and his decision to commit.
Was there time to track down high-school and college coaches, teammates, the rest, to get a deeper read on, to borrow from Speros, in his description of the “speed dating” process, “Is he a high-quality guy? How’s he in the locker room? Can he blend with the current roster?”
Seems that what we’re getting here is, we check the academic credentials, run the background check, and hope for the best, fingers crossed.
Jones and Speros were 29-for-31 in that area of the box score with the 2025 portal class.
The other strike against them was Wallace Unamba, an offensive lineman who was dismissed from the UVA Football program for a “violation of team policy.”
Unamba entered the transfer portal on Jan. 12, and at this date, is still a free agent.
ICYMI
Whatever Unamba did to get dismissed, we now know that the criminal case involving Edrine involved a report made to Albemarle County Police on Aug. 25, five days before the 2025 season opener, on Aug. 30, a 48-7 UVA win over Coastal Carolina, in which Edrine had three catches, one of them going for a TD.
Meaning: Edrine, second on the team in receiving yards, third in receptions, key player on an 11-win team, played the entirety of the 2025 season with this matter involving an alleged rape and abduction sitting out there.
Going forward, the personnel people can’t afford another miss like that one.
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Chris Graham
