Red is a roster subtraction, green is an addition. Both have slightly different shades based on if they're a transfer, commit, or graduating. Players with an asterisk next to their name are confirmed to be early enrollees.
The table is sorted by position, outgoing, incoming, and lastly by most recent on3 grade. I don't feel like waiting for the composites to come out and on3 has been quicker about getting players' grades updated. Scroll to the right for the roster total and breakdown.
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A tally of VT Offers and their Commitment for 2025.
Player details at 247sports VT 2025 Football Offers
Man things are more dire than I thought.
Edit: for clarity I posted this before the chart was embedded and the page had a Beamer 404 error
My bad y'all, I hit the save instead of preview button way before I had the spreadsheet organized the way I wanted and then everyone in the house started yelling so I just slapped something together.
Edit: this is what was running through my head once I realized I hit the save button
We were just giving you a hard time, lol
I just wanted to contextualize things for those that missed my SNAFU, so the first few posts make sense to everyone.
Great GIF selection, so we could enjoy the explanation.
How many years of eligibility remaining?
Edit: also will Drew Harris crack the 2-deep this year?
Man, I screwed that up.
Anyway I have another spreadsheet going to track the roster changes. I am forever a visual learner and thought this would help me. I hope it helps other TKPers as well. I will get it sorted by position and have totals eventually. I know I have some eligibility errors, due to those that walked, but can come back as graduates.
My toddler just got home, so you all will have to deal with what I have put together so far for the time being.
Really appreciate your time. Look forward to sorted by position. Thanks
More of my favorite players are out of eligibility than I realized.
I sort of knew it, but I had sort of voluntarily forgotten, I think.
Gulp.
Hmm...Safety is looking not great.
Only guy slated to come back with significant snaps is Reddish (Alves played a bit but probably more of necessity than anything else).
We already can't defend the run and we are gonna be replacing the entire secondary...I'll go ahead and take the under on 2025
So, the two deep as of this moment (5:40 pm Eastern, 12/9) in no order, whatsoever.
QB: Kyron Drones, Pop Watson
RB: Jeremiah Coney, Tyler Mason
WR: Holloway, XTB
WR: Wiggins, Heath
WR: Greene, Fitzgerald
TE: Gosnell, Saint Germaine
OL: Ghannam, Garrett
OL: Ricard, Lynch
OL: Schick, Cunningham
OL: Hammer, Smedley
OL: Meadows,
DE: Burgos, Jo McDonald
DL: Copeland, Johnson
DL: Gilliam, Hanchuck
DE: Abbey, Dandy
LB: Woodson, Ja McDonald
LB: Keller, Johnson
LB: Spencer, Clatterbaugh
CB: Delane, Johnson
CB: Lovett, Pennix
S: Reddish, Childress
S: Fleming, Jenkins
Star: Williams
K: Love, Lowe
P: Veltsistas
I'd put Brodie Adams somewhere in that two deep at WR. He will absolutely start for us next year.
Maybe over Heath?
Scratch B. Moore
Didn't XTB swap to DB at the end of the season?
Who's Williams on OL? Lance Williams is in the portal now.
That means 3 freshmen and 2 walk ons in the two deep
Are we expecting Gabe Williams back from injury for the start of next season at STAR?
The WR and TE group looks very solid and a CB duo of Delane and Lovett is also above average. I think Woodson earned his spot at LB and Spencer had flashes as well. OL IS SCARY. The RB room plus Overton and Prileou will be dangerous. So the place to watch in the portal is both lines. AGAIN.
Secondary, OL, and most of the playmaking DL all looking to be near total-rebuilds. Not exactly ideal.
This could come unraveled completely. 2025 may be the end of Pry.
Bob Schick coming back somehow
Come on now... it's only his 6th year
Schick was granted another year of eligibility
At this point, a warm body is a warm body on the OL front.
Also, we have really taken eligibility to the limits of sanity when we can't even describe how someone remains eligible.
That's it. Brent Pry ultimately failed at VT because he did not enact a working plan to rebuild the O Line. The biggest position of need when he started and every subsequent year he was coach
I'm sure he had a plan. The problem is he didnt hire an OL coach that can recruit, develop or coach OL to execute that plan. And it doesn't look like there will be any staff changes. Pry's failure to hire the right people and failure to recognize that and correct it will ultimately be his downfall.
Having 2 in 3 seasons didn't help. Firing Crook now would be disastrous.
Not sure about disastrous - our OLine was a disaster. And in the Presser, Pry mentioned things like ability to recruit and develop. If Crook wasn't doing those things well, it would be disastrous to keep him!
Reading between the lines from the TSL podcast and other message board traffic, sounds like the situation with Crook just became untenable. Was not recruiting well at all, the players were not happy with him, and he may not have even been staying in Blacksburg full time. The lack of development and relationships within his room was starting to show, and I think Davis was increasingly being asked to go above and beyond to keep the ship afloat. Based on all I've heard, he absolutely needed to go ASAP.
That would be insane.
This comment did not age well, but turkey leg anyway for identifying a needed change.
You could say this about 60+% of my comments between Thanksgiving and this past Thursday
Lol! True, it didn't, but I can't recall being happier about being wrong!
Which one of those was he able to do, if any?
Awesome work, thanks for putting this together!
It's now sorted by position. I changed the incoming players positions based on where they're projected or what they are listed as on the 'crooting services. If someone has better Intel on what they will be playing let me know and I'll update it.
Not to make more work for you because this is amazing and incredibly helpful, but any chance transfers could be a different shade of red than eligibility exhaustion? Just for further differentiation. Same with the inevitable incoming transfers?
I actually toyed around with that already, but tabled it because I was wasting time getting the shades to not clash and I just wanted to get it functional first. I will add that in once we start getting incoming transfers, if not sooner.
Totally understandable! Again, appreciate the effort on this one
Unpopular opinion... but the OL room is not in as bad shape as I had thought. Losing Moore and Chaplain (I believe both are 'testing the waters' for lack of a better term) is bad. But we have a hefty stable of young linemen. Now Crook needs to develop them.
8 of the OL on the roster are either freshmen or redshirt freshmen, which means they only know one OL coach. Crook has a track record of developing linemen at every P5 program he's been at. It's basically all his guys now. Let's see if he can do it a fourth time 🤷♂️
OL is bad. But also it's like mega cognitive whiplash to hear about how we should cut them all and fire them into the sun week after week only to then have a trillion comments about how it's bad they're going to the portal and there's a good chance we have 0 returning starters and so forth.
The amount of criticism they have received the last 2 years had to play a small part in their decision.
I was surprised at how many O and D linemen we still have on the roster. That makes me feel a little better. The caveat is it's not broken down by position on the line, I think we only really have one player at center as it stands now.
Worth noting that the roster is at 105 by my count, so we will need a few more portal entries to add to our roster.
Definitely a problem.
The other thing that is concerning is that - yes, it's great that we have 10 underclassmen, but in the new world of college sports, even if we do develop them, we can't guarantee that they are going stay for even 3 years.
I keep thinking back to the Godfrey quote about the existential crisis VT may soon be having, and this is another thing that is just concerning.
One thing Pry seems to be doing well is keeping the players we WANT to stay. Who have we had that left that's wound up being a good contributor at another P4 school? People leaving due to tough conversations isn't a bad thing.
We all know Bob Schick is not the level of talent we need to have a successful O Line, but if the Moore and Chaplin don't come back he will be the 2nd best lineman on the roster.
Here's the remaining linemen in order of starting readiness:
Johnny Garrett - starting ready
Bob Schick - mediocre starter
Layth Ghannam - career backup
Brody Meadows - career backup
Montavious Cunningham - minimal snaps
Hannes Hammer - minimal snaps
Aidan Lynch - r-Fresh
Tommy Ricard - r-Fresh
Webb Davidson - r-Fresh
There are reasons why a program goes 12-12 in their last 24... and this might be the biggest one.. You can't pass block, so you ram your QB into the line on 3rd and 6 and he gets hurt. You play your backup- on a mid/rebuilding team- probably not Joe Montana- and you lose games. You can't pick up stunts, so you lose early in the year to P4 teams and once film gets out, you lose ACC games. It is a HUGE issue the G5 type talent we have in the OL room. And of course we didn't really address it in the 2025 HS class we just signed.
its bizarre to me that VT has really struggled to get OL here for the last 20 years - I just don't get it. It seems like we're the only school in the world that really can't get a decent OL
We are not..by any means...tons of schools are struggling and it's getting worse with the extra scholarships. OLine is one of the most injured positions so schools are piling them in.
I think our biggest issue has been scheme fit personnel and development.
Have you watched this season? Everyone is struggling to get good OL. OU can barly field 4 decent linemen. Bama, even UGA are struggling to field more than 5. OSU loses two of their starting 5 and they lose to 6-6 Michigan scoring a single offensive touchdown.
Everyone is struggling to find linemen, and the portal + NIL has meant that no single team is stockpiling more than 5-6 quality OL. It's why there's a bidding war for Chaplain right now.
OL is a problem everywhere, even at the NFL level. Bill Belicheck on one of the Manningcast MNF games said that there just aren't any OL coming out of college that are even close to ready like they used to be able to get.
I wonder if anyone has done a deep dive on this looking into potential causes.
Sounds like this should be a Jon Bois video titled "where's the beef?"
I'd guess it has something to do with more and more parents not letting their kids play football because of all the chatter around head injuries
I think the pool of players is just shrinking across the board and we're seeing impacts in the OL positions first because that's the most uncommon group to find talent
I'd say that's the start of the problem compounded by guys bouncing from school to school that may all run different schemes and they never spend enough time in one spot to actually get good at any of it.
Now this is speculation on my part, but I think the kids that have the size to play FBS OL are probably bigger than most of their competition and can get away with not having good fundamentals. Then once they get there they spend a year or two in their first stop learning the basics and if they show any signs of being good, they bail for $$$ and stunt their own development for the NFL.
But wouldn't size differences always have been a thing for huge OL? What has changed now?
Sure but in the "olden" days you would go to one school, probably redshirt and be a backup for two years. That would give three years in the system to kick bad habits, learn the fundamentals as well as whatever system the coach wanted to run.
Blame Mike leach.
Found Craig James's TKP burner account.
#CJK5H
We have had a few good ones- Darrisaw, Teller, Nijman, Hoffman, etc. And we have tried seemingly everything- big name OL coach in Rudolph, Proven P4 guy in Stacy Searls, Vance Vice actually recruiting that position vs. a "territory", zone blocking/man blocking etc. Beamer was successful with the Joe Bugle Redskins model- just draft/find mean guys that can move and teach them how to be OL.. We've tried all of that. I think that the OL looks worse because of the scheme too. We never have a good quick passing game for example. Never.
so we need an OC who can scheme around deficiencies in the OL to protect them? Well, maybe that's what we've been missing. It just seems to me that our OL is always getting blamed for our offensive ineptitude. And our offense has been inept far more than it hasn't over the last 25 years.
Honestly this season I thought our line did a great job run blocking but in pass pro, Parker Clements got beat like a drum and as mentioned elsewhere our offense has been extremely slow developing in our RPO.
Yes, speaking of Rich Rod and Brian Kelly- once upon a time at WVU and Oregon, you could drive a truck through holes their OL opened up. Mysteriously neither team had Anthony Munoz or any great NFL prospect O lineman. They were making bigger holes than Bama was doing in the early Saban years running the I formation WITH a bunch of NFL OL. Of course it's the scheme. WVU and Oregon- at the time- were not signing 5 star OL, but their lines opened up huge holes in the run game. We should find something remotely similar.
Ghannam was the opening day starter and got hurt. Why do you say he's "career backup"? I kinda get that you put Meadows as a backup, but career backup? You don't think he can improve? He's only in his 3rd year, plenty of OL don't click until their 4th or 5th year. What's the difference between him and Garrett? Garrett was a backup this year as well and probably has fewer snaps overall.
Career so far I should say. Garrett looked good when he stepped in so I was generous enough to say starter. Ghannam frankly looked pretty bad most of the year, but he is still young of course.
There's no proof of a higher ceiling there is what I'm getting it, we haven't seen it with him we've only seen backup level play. With Garrett you can see it. Taking stock of the line however you want to put it, the room is looking pretty thin
Awesome work this is really helpful
Is there a legend for what the colors mean?
Green is a new addition, red is a departure. Slightly different shades if the player is a transfer, commit, or out of eligibility/declaring.
This is great. Couple things I noticed:
1. Josh Hand is in the portal
2. Nick Gallo. Only played in 1 game this season so I guess he could apply for medical hardship and come back for season 7(!). I would be pretty surprised though.
3. Turner-Bradshaw is on defense now. Not sure if that is a full-time switch or just for this season? Assuming the former.
Thanks, I saw someone else post about XTB, but I wasn't sure. I'm assuming he's at CB, but maybe not with safety depth the way it is.
I originally just had question marks next to Gallo.
Looks like he played FS in high school so with our holes at safety, would be nice if he could fit there. Especially if his speed and WR hands have him ball hawking deep zones
Whelp.... Guess not
Thanks, my GoogleFu wasn't working.
Edit: apparently he's portalling now, glad I updated his position already 🙄
This is all I can find on the bird app about it.
No Worries, he's in the portal now
Tremendous athlete but he never really could put on any weight/mass and didn't see him progressing to more than a gadget player. Not surprised.
Guess he didn't want to play defense
Parker Clements was granted another year and will be returning... Or at least I saw a report
Could be a joke. Not sure
As I watched Brock Hoffman play last night on MNF I can't help but think how frustrated he has to be now that you can play for fucking ever and change teams whenever the fuck you want. He must be pissed he got the wire brush treatment from the NCAA. What a joke.
I'm honestly shocked that as of right neither Drones, Watson, or Davi have declared for the portal
Edit: can we get some green on Pop and Kyron?
How I imagine they all look at each other in the QB room for Bowl prep:
Wait till spring. My guess is that we'll see some moving and shaking then. Kind of like how last spring Dylan wiki entered the portal after losing the 2nd/3rd string job to pop.
With opt outs and transfers we are going to save all kinds of money by only having to travel 55 players to the bowl game.
And like 20% of that will be kickers and punters, so we can downsize the vehicles needed. Lol
hope none of them have duplicate numbers! /s
Wait when did Dwayne Lawson leave the team?
(i'm sorry guys)
He and Holland Fisher were a package deal
Weren't they the same recruiting class as Cam Rising? who is playing next year and Trevor Lawrence? yes whose been in the NFL 6 years?
Wasn't Drew Harris apart of the deal as well?
Can anyone help me figure out who the early enrollees are so I can denote them in the spreadsheet? I read or heard that we have 11 in this class, but I have never been able to find a reliable way to figure who they are before the start of the Spring semester.
Updated with today's incoming transfers. The roster still has space for taking
56 OL!Let me know if y'all spot any errors.
Another sad reality of the sport now is seeing these Run it Back posts by guys staying with the team. Ayden Greene is the latest.
This is what you get with the Wild West of college football, one year max deals. Instead of resigned posts like in the NFL, you get run it back. Instead of "signs X deal as free agent with new team" you get "thanks and respect my decision."
Except in the NFL there is much less freedom of movement. You can't just leave your team unless your contract is up.
And NFL players are employees which in my experience change jobs for more money all the time.
Well you would think that transferring schools as much as you want, when you want would benefit someone? The players? very few, sure but hundreds never find a new home. The coaches? Pry benefits from Delane leaving? no. Pry benefits from having to recruit his entire team every year? No. The schools? again - a few, but no school has moved up the food chain considerably except maybe Indiana for one year. This nonsense benefits very very few. It has zero benefit to normal fans obviously. When there is so much lose/lose you hope that the system gets fixed sooner than later.
Read it as the something 2 prove and not the run it back.
I know right lol. Re-recruiting your best players every year must be SO fun for coaches...
Great for fans also, not knowing who will be on the team.
Bowls need to go away, and just have playoffs.
Maybe schools that suck could portal their coach, and let them get picked up. Might as well, new teams every year
Updated table with IBM and Flowers. Also, keep a lookout for a Sam Phillips, slot WR from Chattanooga that received 3 CBs today.
247
Can you add grades to the table?
I plan to once more of the transfer ratings are available.
edit: I started adding on3 transfer rankings. They have more done than 247 and are usually more favorable to the Hokies.
Up to 9 incoming transfers, 2 more than the last 2 years and there could be a few more once the DC is named. Hopefully everyone can gel in the off-season and hit the ground running to start the season.
Need more OL.
I gotta have more OL, baby!
Easy guys. Matt Moore puts his pants on just like the rest of us, one leg at a time. Except, once his pants are on, he make great Offensive lines.
Considering the totals show that we have 105 currently, and I think everyone is hoping we'll pick up 1-2 more OL (Altuner and maybe one other guy) and maybe a couple other players from the portal (LB perhaps?) once the DC is announced, how do we think the roster may adjust to let that happen?
I think we'll see a few more of the walk on players move on without a social media announcement and won't know the exact breakdown until hokiesports is updated. Also, as I understand it the roster limit doesn't kick in until July, so we might run a little over 105 until after Spring ball.
My guess is that we'll see a couple more guys sign in the next 6 months or so, then in the spring portal window, we'll see a couple more guys leave.
I think the dead period ends Jan 1, so we should start having more recruiting action then, and I would hope something announced on our DC/defensive to coincide with the dead period ending.
Recruiting Calendar. Obviously there are loop holes to all this as I'm sure someone is going to mention.
Didn't we sign APR in June? That's what I'm talking about.
Yes, that still exists. I didn't copy-paste the whole outline because it's overly confusing IMO.
I think we'll try to get some OL before the Spring Semester starts and then have the Spring portal window to find extra pieces depending on when the DC is named and what they think we need. Either way nothing should be happening until after the 1st and realistically until after the bowl.
You guys still think "roster limits" mean anything today? lol. There are no rules and if there were, we would make the 105 anyway by cutting guys you've never heard of.
There are
This is exactly what's going to happen.
There are no rules. I'm suing the NCAA to expand college rosters to 200. I will win. 100%. Can't limit money/trade/entitlements.
The one other thing I've seen, but not often, is medically retiring players, which allows us to honor the scholarship without counting against the roster limit. Not sure if we have any guys who might qualify for that this year though.
I wasn't sure how many guys we'd have who the coaches haven't had a hard conversation with who they hadn't already. Maybe at a position we feel like we just don't want to lose anybody, but might if the new coaches would be bringing some players with them?
Hopefully Gabe doesn't qualify for this.
As for the hard conversation folks. Those have probably already happened and some more might announce after the bowl, like what ltrepeter2000 mentioned happened to Rutgers.
"Evidence of rot":
many guys portalling. But
who even are they?
Based on this comment I think we're going to see a lot of players announce after the bowl game or fall off the roster before and after Spring Ball. I thought that we would give more walk-ons scholarships to get to 105 and Pry leaves that as an option, but I read this as we're planning to bring in a lot of guys to elevate the roster once we're able to have 105 scholarship players. Also makes me wonder if Priester and J. Reddish are scholarship athletes or are getting a trial period before the Summer.
"we're planning to bring in a lot of guys to elevate the roster" Let's hope so. I'd like to be competitive in the ACC again some time soon.
French is about to be very happy
Que?
Do you have sauces or marinades?
As promised, here are consolidated tables showing transfers in-and-out and each position's average on3 rating. I put 2 different ratings for OL, dropping the lowest rated outgoing transfers to get a better comparison of players that would have likely seen the field next year.
If anyone knows the html snippet I need to force column widths please let me know. I tried a couple things and couldn't get it to keep TKP formatting.
Thank you for this, you've done tremendous work here.
This is a huge ask, but I'd love to see someone put together a best-guess two-deep for next season, based on the transfers in and out. I think it would be really interesting to see how many starters/contributors are made up of portal pickups. I'm guessing it's got to be 8-10 new starters.
Don't forget we still have the spring transfer period.
So on paper we have improved most positions with the transfers. But we are short on bodies for LB and OL.
This is awesome! Thanks for doing all this! Any chance of including one or two of the top rated incoming freshmen that may be likely to see the field next year? I'm thinking we might see a true freshman LB for instance.
I'd also be curious about a similar comparison for players who exhausted eligibility and transfers out compared to incoming freshmen and transfers in.
I could try to guess on some of the freshman that'll see the field. I thought about adding in players that exhausted eligibility and were significant contributors, but a lot of them don't even have an on3 grade and I wanted to compare like to like.
Yeah, I was wondering about their grades. Just thought it would be interesting. like I said, I appreciate all the work! It
doesn'tDOES really seem like we've improved over most of the players who left. Even though the OLine grades aren't quite as good, they're close, and hopefully we now have a coach that can develop the entire line and get a lot out of them. I really think Bowen will be able to put a lot of points on the board with a good line.Edit: meant to write DOES. And added "most of"
With the spring window opening this week I am bumping this to see if people want to keep this thread going or start a new one.
New one is a better idea so people dont start replying to months old items as if they're new
🫡I'll throw something together soon.