The UVA Football coaching and front office staff went into the 2025 recruiting cycle with a ton of NIL money, but the limitation of back-to-back-to-back losing seasons.
Their hard work paid off with a school-record 11-win season that ended up a series short of the College Football Playoff, and what you would assume would be headwinds going into the 2026 recruiting season.
“I think we went into it thinking that 11 wins would make life a whole lot easier for in all phases, in retention, in portal acquisition, in high school recruiting. But, you know, there there was still a certain set of challenges,” said Justin Speros, who was elevated to the position of general manager in June, succeeding Tyler Jones, who left UVA to take over as the chief operating officer of the athletics program at Stanford.
Speros met with the media on Friday to talk roster construction in the 2026 offseason, which in the end worked to Virginia’s advantage – On3 ranked the UVA portal class 22nd nationally, fifth in the ACC, and looking at the roster position group by position group, there’s more talent and depth across the board.
It was work getting there.
“Every recruitment, really, is not easy to be honest with you,” Speros said. “I think the success on the field helped, but it was still very challenging. It was, you know, heavyweight battles that we were still fighting in. So, maybe a little bit easier, but still, a high level of difficulty there.”
Where we’re still (way) behind: High school recruiting
It continues to make absolutely no sense that Tony Elliott, heading into Year 5, coming off an 11-3 season, had a class that barely ranked in the Top 100 nationally (96th) in On3’s rendering of the 2026 high school class.
And I don’t like it that Speros doesn’t acknowledge the struggle there head on.
“I think it’s important to say the high school recruiting will always be very essential to what we do,” he told reporters, assuming, what, that the people with pens and notebooks don’t have access to the internet?
Ditto for his remarks on recruiting the home state.
“Here in the state of Virginia, particularly, we want to make sure that we have you know great presence here in the immediate footprint,” Speros said.
OK, so, 247Sports tells us that UVA didn’t get any of Virginia’s Top 10 high school recruits from the Class of 2026, and Elliott has one Top 10 Virginia kid for his tenure to date – Kam Robinson, the 10th-ranked recruit in the Class of 2023.
Looking at 2027, that trend appears to be continuing.
“We’d be doing ourselves a disservice as a program if we didn’t take advantage of all avenues and explore all avenues, and you know, high school recruiting is going to be super important. But transfer recruiting has been very fruitful for us,” Speros said.
And it will need to continue to be fruitful, because our staff is not getting the job done at the foundational level.
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Chris Graham
