Monday was a busy day in the UVA Football offices, with the NCAA transfer portal formally opening, and a bunch of guys from the 2024 roster officially putting their names in.
The number, at this writing, is at 13 – and counting? – which is in line with the total that we saw in each of the past two years.
Third-year head coach Tony Elliott lost 15 players in the 2024 cycle, 14 in 2023 and 19 in 2022 – the higher number in 2022 being the result of the coaching change, after Bronco Mendenhall stepped down following the 2021 season.
The roster churn in the 2024-2025 offseason could be historic, with the 2024 roster including 20 student-athletes listed as seniors, and 23 more listed as grad students.
Some of those will have a year of eligibility to use in 2025 because of medical redshirts, but we don’t have a precise number, for myriad reasons – even Elliott himself is still working to get a handle on what he will need in terms of numbers to flesh out his roster for the 2025 season.
“Right now, we’re in the process of meeting, having exit meetings, with all of our players on the roster, and, you know, it’s, you never know, right?” Elliott said last week, ahead of the formal opening of the portal on Monday.
“Like, there’s, there’s guys that that when I came in the door, I was intentional to make sure that we did the right thing by them. And now they’ve gotten to a point of graduation, and we’ll have conversations, which opens up some spots,” Elliott said. “And then I’m sure there’s going to be some guys that I’m wanting to come bring back that feel like they want to another opportunity. So, in terms of the size of the portal class, that’ll be determined over the next, really, few days, as we finish up these meetings.”
Top-line losses
The biggest loss to the portal, by an order of magnitude, is sophomore quarterback Anthony Colandrea, who started 17 games in his two seasons at Virginia, and was being counted on by Elliott to be the quarterback of the future.
The offensive line room is reeling a bit as well. Elliott was already going to lose center Brian Stevens, who logged 1,651 snaps over the past two years after transferring in from Dayton ahead of the 2023 season.
Grad student Ugonna Nnanna (455 snaps, 55.7 Pro Football Focus grade in 2024) and senior Ty Furnish (504 snaps, 59.7 PFF grade) entered the portal on Monday, along with senior Charlie Patterson (59 snaps).
Senior left guard Noah Josey (777 snaps, 68.7 PFF grade), who has a redshirt year left, has the most experience among those still in the program at this writing.
Other names to watch from the O line group the next few days:
- Junior right tackle Blake Steen (736 snaps, 66.5 PFF grade)
- Senior right/left tackle Jack Witmer (476 snaps, 55.0 PFF grade)
- Junior left tackle McKale Boley (469 snaps, 63.6 PFF grade)
The defensive line is also set to take a hit, both from graduation/exhausted eligibility and losses to the portal.
The D line is losing grad students Kam Butler (692 snaps, 74.0 PFF grade), Chico Bennett Jr. (604 snaps, 67.1 PFF grade), Jahmeer Carter (581 snaps, 63.3 PFF grade) and Ben Smiley III (235 snaps, 52.8 PFF grade) via the graduation/exhausted eligibility route.
Losses to the portal include seniors Michael Diatta (311 snaps, 62.4 PFF grade) and Bryce Carter (35 snaps).
So, that’s your starting QB, four guys from your O line two-deep, and six guys from your D line two-deep.
Other key guys among the seniors/grad seniors
Offense
- QB Tony Muskett (seven starts at QB over the past two seasons)
- WR Malachi Fields (55 catches/94 targets, 808 yards, five TDs, 73.6 PFF grade)
- WR Chris Tyree (24 catches/38 targets, 136 yards, 201 kick return yards, 56.1 PFF grade)
- TE Tyler Neville (37 catches/54 targets, 394 yards, two TDs, 67.2 PFF grade)
- RB Kobe Pace (510 yards rushing, 20 catches/27 targets, 184 yards receiving, 71.5 PFF grade)
Defense
- S Jonas Sanker (796 snaps, 70.7 PFF grade)
- S Corey Thomas (665 snaps, 75.7 PFF grade)
- S Antonio Clary (295 snaps, 77.0 PFF grade)
- CB Kempton Shine (695 snaps, 76.5 PFF grade)
- CB Kendren Smith (553 snaps, 59.7 PFF grade)
- LB James Jackson (403 snaps, 54.8 PFF grade)
- LB Dorian Jones 192 snaps, 58.6 PFF grade)
Special teams
- P Daniel Sparks (44.6 yards per punt/41.8 net yards per punt, 62.2 yards per kickoff, 64.4 PFF grade)
- PR Ethan Davies (91 punt return yards)
Elliott’s approach
It’s pretty much every position group that we’re talking about here, right?
“I think there’s potential, need and opportunity at all positions, and some, some more so than others,” Elliott said. “We’re going to evaluate every position and be ready and prepared for a run at some of the best, you know, in the country. And I think that we’ve laid a foundation for the last couple years, and I think that we got a great nucleus of guys that will be returning in ’25, and now we need to go kind of we’ve gotten our nose bloodied a little bit, now let’s go fight some more battles and see, can we supplement?”
The big issue here is the large number of seniors and grad students, which is a function of two things – the extra redshirt year given to everybody who was active in 2020 for COVID, and then the extra redshirt year given to the Virginia guys resulting from the premature end to that season, in the fallout of the Nov. 13 shootings that took the lives of UVA Football players Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry.
That, in effect, made it so that the 2024 roster had the equivalent of two senior classes, so your normal 20-25 guys basically doubled in size.
The 2025 signing class, announced last week, brought 19 guys into the program, but in a perfect world, you’d only play a handful of those guys as true freshmen, redshirting the bulk of the class to aid in their development down the line.
That’s going to make it so that Elliott could end up needing, most likely, as many as 30 or even up to 40 guys to come in off the transfer portal ready to contribute, which will be a challenge, just in terms of getting that many guys through the admissions process.
The sleepless nights for Elliott, his assistants, and the folks in the admissions office, have just begun.
“We’re going to do it right, like, so, we’re prepared and ready, getting all of our information and all of our background work done, so that when the button is hit, we’re ready to go. I can’t say that that’s the case everywhere, but I know how we’re going to do it, but we got to be, got to be ready,” Elliott said.
“We got to be ready and prepared and so, we got to plan for a plan, I guess, you say, we got to have a plan for a plan, I guess. I don’t know what the right way to describe it is, but we just got to be ready, because it’s just the nature of the business right now,” Elliott said.
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Chris Graham
