Virginia Tech #Hokies RB Coach Elijah Brooks bids farewell after three years with the program. https://t.co/zmJvVwC09t— Matej Sis (@MatejS247) December 14, 2025
Unless Seider is coming in, I believe this is big mistake
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not good. i was hearing just like yesterday he was a lock to return. what happened?
Feels pretty likely he is, given the rest of the staff
I don't see why he would leave Notre Dame for VT unless Freeman leaves for the NFL
Maybe we finally used some of the big boy money
I can see Spencer happening because he's from the Northeast and outside of this stint at A&M has done all his coaching on the East Coast. Seider on the other hand can recruit nationally more than A&M does and ND is not as far away from his stomping grounds at PSU. It's not always about the money, he's likely already being paid top dollar for RB coaches and there's prestige attached to working at ND that doesn't exist in Blacksburg. I hate ND as much as the next guy, but he's got a good thing going there I just don't see him leaving to come here.
But sometimes you just don't like who you work with/for and it just ain't worth the money.
Our big boy money pales in comparison to ND. Not going to pry him away.
I see what you did there....
Oooff only one I definitely wanted back...
Keep an eye on Jeff Overton Jr to the portal now. His dad and Brooks are really good friends.
This will also impact our connection to the The St James Academy as Overton's father is the head coach there. They are recruiting a high number of the top kids in the DMV to play for them.
Unless his dad is the new RB coach. . .
/s
Yeah just saw that hit my timeline. This too
here's hoping it's just about loving the man and not blaming the school. it's in the nature of college football for coaches to change so shouldn't be totally unexpected.
Its also now in the nature of college football to see players follow a coach so if Brooks lands at a P4 I expect Overton to follow along with more future recruits out of The St James Academy which quietly has surged to a destination for athletes in the DMV and around the country. They were a National Contender in their first season this year. Their only loss this season was to St Francis Academy who played in the High School National Championship game.
totally agree and wouldn't expect less. But that's new coaching staffs problem to overcome which is also standard for coaches today.
I know it's not the point of this comment or thread but it is still shocking to see how huge Tyler Bowen is.
There was a clip the other day of Atlanta Falcons players cooking hibachi for a PR event and it is easy to forget that these guys are not normal-sized human beings until you see them in context with regular people. One of the guys looked like a dad playing in a kid's playhouse. He had to stoop to avoid the exhaust hood.
For context, the average American man is 5'9". Tyler Bowen is 6'7" (based on what I could find via google).
6'7" you say?....
Yeah, don't like seeing that. Feels like the kind of connection where he's (JR in this case) gonna follow even if we upped his bag.
Losing Overton would be bad but losing the access to The St James could be infinitely worse. It will be like when Fuente burned our bridges with the 7v7 program from Hampton/Va Beach area.
That timeline feels off to me -- that whole thing was pre-Fuente, no? Quin blanding was high school class of 2014 or something
Yeah I think the 7 on 7 thing was more a couple of pissed off parents plus negative recruiting from UVA in the late Beamer years, but I could be wrong
I seem to remember the same thing.
Probably conflation of the 7v7 thing and fuente's staff never visiting michael vick's old high school
I can't imagine that's their game plan.
Franklin is a lot of things, but he doesn't seem the type to burn bridges unnecessarily.
People say it's all about money, but then you see stuff like this. Relationships still matter in college sports.
This was the only offensive coach I thought was good enough to keep. I hope whoever his replacement is, they are one of the best in the business.
Will reserve judgment until we see who is announced but Brooks was probably the #1 guy I would have favored to keep.
Since ND is more interested in having a temper tantrum than playing Football, if it was Seider it seems like they would have announced already.
VT running backs have been the only highlight we've had. It was the one thing we could hang our hat on say "Yeah, this is good". Better have an upgrade coming and not just shuffling around people on staff to make the pieces fit
To be fair, tuten was there before brooks. So it wasn't like it was just him getting/coaching RBs.
Brooks was at VT 3 years which is how long ago tuten transfered to VT
Brooks replaced Bowen as he moved to QB after Glenn left.
Brooks replaced Holt at RB, Holt replaced Bowen at TE.
Brooks started at Tech Spring of 2023 so coached Tuten through Spring ball before his first season but more look at Tutens jump year over year. 863 yards year one in 13 games to 1159 yards in 11 games in year two. Improved almost 50 yards per game and scored 5 more TDs.
Needs to be a major upgrade to account for losing the sync Brooks and Moore seemed to have too.
As has been stated in multiple threads about the new staff - "In Franklin we trust."
If there's one thing Franklin did extremely well, outside of recruiting, it is that he always had a tremendous running game with NFL caliber backs.
Eh...yes our RB room was a strength of the team last year, but we went 3-9 last season and got blown out by UVA. I'm down with whatever changes we need to make and if that's overhauling most of our offensive skill coaches then so be it.
I tend to agree. Honestly we've already kept more staff than I expected. Not taking issue with it but I thought there'd be more of a clean break.
I was all for cleaning house 100%, through and through. Franklin keeping so many current coaches has taken the wind out of my sails in regards to my excitement for next year. What happened to having big dawg money to bring in an amazing staff and lots of them? Then we rehire Pry so we have even more money for staff, and we're still keeping people around. These aren't Franklin's guys that came to VT with Pry.
Moore is exempt from this. OL needs continuity.
Mines as little as we have seen from his WR was someone Franklin had targeted several times in the past for his recruiting. Pry, Mines and Moore are the only coaches returning.
We had 'big dawg money' by 2024 standards (at the start of 2024). Price of the brick is always increasing, and quickly. I hopeful that it is top 25 money by the time we kickoff in 2026.
That said, I don't think money is the issue here. Seems like Franklin wants Franklin guys, and after a few failures, doesn't trust outsiders:
Or he's prioritizing recruiting:
I get the apprehension that VT fans have. But we gotta wait and see.
Franklin has realized and accepted the keys to modern CFB success:
Off-field
-Primary: Sufficient NIL $$$
-Secondary: Great recruiters on staff
On-field
-Primary: Jimmies & Joes
-Secondary: Xs & Os
Fastest Revival
-Primary: Portaling, Recruiting, & Retaining good talent to create a well-rounded team with depth.
-Secondary: When possible, hire successful coaches you know.
I will believe the portal part when it happens. Thats my last major concern on Franklin. He was almost as bad as Dabo at using the portal.
His portal classes:
2018: No Transfers
2019: 42nd
2020: No transfers
2021: 21st
2022: 82nd
2023: 53rd
2024: 53rd
2025: 41st
That history is telling, but the situation is WAY different this time. I'm not expecting insanity, but a respectable portal class is likely.
Penn State brought in 8,6 and 7 players the last three years. They had six starters on this years team including all three receivers
Clemson brought in 4,0 and zero since Dabo just started
Time will tell in the next 30 days but we need at least double what Franklin was used to. He said this would be a different approach than years past. I expect 15 in the two deep from the portal this year
There is no way Franklin looks at this roster and thinks, yup we good. He needs to portal to get talent.
He's been able to recruit and develop players so that he did not need as many from the portal in the past.
He can, and looks like he is, raiding the current PSU roster. I'd argue theirs is better than ours and if he can get a sizable number, it would be great, while also limiting the scouting he'd need to do on other portal candidates.
I confess my post was assumptive... I hadn't researched his past classes.
It was based on his statements about "doing things differently', and about VT's hiring offer standing out because they had made the "NIL needs" realization and done the work to raise the funding bar significantly.
I think he knows the game has changed, and to win he must adapt.
I know we all anxiously anticipate his demonstration of that.
My concern is that using NIL to get portal top players has been something he was resistant to and was one of the top public battles between him and PSU AD Kraft. Kraft wanted to go get top guys with their NIL pool and Franklin wanted to show loyalty to existing roster with the pool. The next three seasons I dont see that being a successful path if he wants to 180 this program. Hopefully he adjusts and maybe having Pry around who did use the portal to get key pieces will help.
Well other than the recruits he brought in, he has zero loyalty to anyone else in the roster. And those recruits are probably a year or more away from really contributing, so I expect he'll portal heavy this year and probably next. And it if works, he probably is smart enough to continue.
I think this a valid concern.
But, my gut is saying Franklin is pissed at the world and wants to win.
My sneaky feeling is that he will drastically change/improve the roster with the portal and then get back to a mix of high school recruitment/development while looking at the portal as opportunity....
We're gonna find out in about a week.
He needs to do it this year. We barely have enough to field a team right now let alone have a winning season
If we are winning as much as Penn State has been and being a game away from championships while being ranked low in the portal doesn't thst count as a good thing? I take it as meaning we have recruited, developed and kept players at a high rate and have needed less NIL for portal moves which I am sure are costly.
I'm all for that. Now maybe he could have been more savvy to pick off a few game changing portal players but still. seems like a win to me. what am I missing?
While I agree with most of what you're saying, I'm not sure we save NIL money. Those players we keep at a high rate aren't staying for free. So the NIL might be a wash, but the benefit is in the continuity.
you're probably right. I was assuming that if you have high retention on the team then NIL is likely leveraged already so getting portal transfers would be costly either in raising new money or clearing for existing pool.
I couldn't disagree with this more. The best teams in the country build their rosters out of high school and supplement where needed from the portal. There are some exceptions, notably Ole Miss, but most of the "portal teams" are either a result of a coach bringing his players from a previous job (Indiana) or inconsistent (FSU, VT, LSU, Auburn). The 247 portal rankings aren't as good as the HS recruit rankings. 4 of the top 10 teams made the playoffs, the other 6 are LSU (fired coach), FSU (back-to-back losing seasons), Mizzou (8-5), Auburn (fired coach), UNC (dumpster fire), Kentucky (fired coach). I don't give a rat's ass where we're ranked in the transfer portal rankings.
Here's who Franklin has brought in via the portal
2022 - Chop Robinson (now with the Dolphins), Hunter Nourzad (now with the Chiefs),
2023 - Dante Cephus, Storm Duck (two high quality college players among 5 other transfers)
2024 - Julian Fleming (former 5* WR), Nolan Rucci (former 5* OL who started for 2 seasons), AJ Harris (starter, one of the top guys in this years portal), 6 person transfer class
2025 - Amare Campbell (one of the best LBs in the country this year, led the team in tackles), Trebor Pena (was PSU's leading receiver this year), King Mack (58 tackles and 1 int this year), Devonte Ross (2nd on the team in receiving), Kyron Hudson (3rd on the team in receiving), TJ Shanahan (started at RG), Enai White (in the 2-Deep at DL)
Franklin recruits well enough from high school that the portal classes don't need to be big, but he uses it to strategically fill holes. He knew this years team needed WR help so he went out and got 3 guys who ended up being PSU's top 3 receivers this year.
The best teams in the country get the guys they need because they're already the best teams in the country. I would expect top teams to do well in the portal because they will take the top talent out of it too, just like high school recruiting.
Correct:
In my mind, it's just a pure numbers game:
Now, of course, some bluechip players bust, and there are a few 3-stars are underrated and/or developed into 4-stars, but the point stands: If you have the ability to recruit high school classes are that are majority bluechip players, you should pursue that route.
If you are not able to do that, then by definition, you will have the opportunity to upgrade your roster via the portal each season. And as we've seen historically, only 12-18 programs in any given year can have a bluechip ratio above 50%.
So there is a fundamental question each head coach must ask themselves: "Given the infrastructure/resources/reputation of my school, do I think I can land >X% bluechips out of the portal?" If the answer is yes, then you lean heavily in high school recruiting, and take a handful of portal guys each year. If the answer is no, then I think you should plan to turnover 30%+ of your roster each year.
Indiana is busting this historical trend and I'm on the hype train
oh 100%, these last 2 years of CFB would have been amazing if tech was 9-4 both years. So many great things as a fan of chaos induced football.
His point was countering the low rankings for a portal class. Since class portal rankings rely somewhat on volume, pulling in just a few strategic players will result in low rankings, but doesn't necessarily mean you weren't successful in getting the pieces you needed.
Bingo!
And if you recruit out of high school well, develop well, and are good at retention there's less need for you to go into the portal. The fact that Franklin only slightly dipped into the portal but kept winning 10+ games shows elite retention & development which equals amazing culture.
There's been an interesting debate going on for the last month over on the Sabre.
While they all admit their HS recruiting has been shit, most are trying to justify by saying that's an outdated model and the Hoo's are part of the new wave of building by portal.
There is a small group that continues to try and point out the fallacies of this approach, but they are definitely outnumbered.
The rationalization on the penn state forums is quite entertaining as well.... schadenfreude Is my pal.
Trading consistency, cohesiveness and money for developed players with limited eligibility.
Yeah, I've seen this over there as well (I have a guilty pleasure of cruising over there from time to time as it can be quite entertaining). It's an impossible way to build a program. You can find immediate success and create some great seasons, but the variables are so ridiculous... you're always chasing, always working on team cohesiveness. It puts an incredible amount of extra work on the staff.
I understand these types of things exist regardless, but when you completely ignore high school recruiting (what UVA does to a large extent) and rebuild your roster every single year with the portal I think you're playing with fire. Additionally, how long will donors continue to purchase a $20+ Million to have moderate success (that is what making it to the ACCCG and losing to Duke is)?
May they continue to do this year after year. We'll own them.
One of the issues I see is at the uva/VT level of programs is that we arent going to get the top of the top transfers, so you are getting P4 players looking for playing time and lower level players thay weren't evaluate correctly by everyone. But you are largely still expecting development by other staffs which as we move more into the portal era there are more players and less development going on. Once everyone is just portaling and not developing then then you can't build via portal either. So then it will be some weird scheme where you hire coaches so their players follow them so that they get developed but thats only going to increase coaching salaries which are already insane.
The game, including NFL, will suffer as the college games moves more away from developing players. I see this in industry all the time, software engineers that move projects so quickly that they never seen their design choices in production so they keep making the same issues because it "worked" before. They rise up in the company or jump companies as they resume pad but have no real understand of their craft and then they are making company wide mistakes because they have so many projects and buzzwords on their resume that the entire company is tanking because your server less architecture is running slow because everything is coded in python and Scala and they have left the company so making arguments against "the architecture" isn't an option because the ex employee was the anointed one and you can't convince any one differently.
I think this is a good analysis of the situation, it is in flux. Short term, I think there are teams that will build a new team each year from the portal. If they have the finances, are good at portal recruit analysis, and have a coach who excels at instant team chemistry then it is the right thing to do. However, long term this approach will fail if nobody is developing the kids.
Another weird scheme might be that we end up with a single power conference with divisions for a reasonable championship path. All the teams which don't make P1 become developmental teams, sources of developed payers for the P1 teams. In order for this to be attractive, the P1 school would *also* pay the developmental team when they come get a player.
But how many programs have the resources, infrastructure, and coaching expertise to do all three of those things?
That's a very fair question that I don't think has an answer yet. The other factor in that equation is culture (I'm interpreting "coaching expertise" as technical development coaching skill). Is you culture good enough that kids both buy in to the process and stay even if they're not receiving top dollar?
Yea I think you're hitting on my point...
Not all teams have coaching/resources/infrastructure to build 80%+ (or whatever threshold you chose) of a roster from high school. But it's not binary; rather it's a spectrum - can you recruit 60% from high school? how do you define that 60%? What if you recruit only 40% of your roster from high school, but that 40% is really solid?
I'm interested to see how teams will adjust over the next 5 years. I'm sure there are going to be some teams that develop some really interesting roster building techniques.
Not many, teams that do that well consistently are called blue bloods.
Eh not completely true (source: The Athletic) - five of the twelve playoff teams (allegedly these are the 'best' teams) and 11 of the top 25 teams have transfers taking >50% of snaps.
Now, I understand that # of snaps <> roster construction, but if you go to the athletic article, you see that 4 CFP teams (ole miss, IU, and the G5s) were outside the top 20 of team talent composite (indicating that they pulled a bunch of transfers developed elsewhere, because it's impossible for one coach to have a hit rate like that), with a few more between 10 and 20.
I'll also admit that schools like UVA, Arizona, Vandy, North Texas, etc don't exactly have staying power here - these teams are here for a year, not for a decade (unlike UGA or OSU). In the same vein, Texas Tech shelled out in the portal this year, but they're hoping that this jump starts high school recruiting, so in a couple more seasons, they can have a roster make up that more closely resembles UGA.
As I mentioned above, if you can have a roster constructed like UGA, obviously you want to pursue that. But so few teams can.
We can eliminate Tulane and JMU from this conversation, they are not top 12 teams in the country and comparing us as a P4 school to a G5 isn't equal. We can also eliminate Indiana, as I said in my post that theory of roster building doesn't include coaches who moved and took a bunch of players with them.
Most of the best teams who are consistently at the top of the sport are building primarily through high school. The ones that don't are either going to in the future (Texas Tech as you mentioned) are in my opinion outliers among the "portal teams" (Ole Miss). The rest of the teams that live in the portal are inconsistent.
That isn't to say you shouldn't go portalling, especially for QB, but your bread is still buttered at high school recruiting and development.
I didn't quite know who to respond to in this sub-thread so I'll leave it here out of respect for your always calculated takes...
I'm at the ripe old age of 47 (lol) these days. I've seen the ugly, the bad, the good the great and then the bad and ugly again with VT football. I was as frustrated as anyone that Fancy Gap Frank couldn't quite get us over the hump after the magical '99 season. However, I long for the days of that frustration... the offseason talk of a top 10 team that could make a run, only to see us stumble along the way or not be able to win the "big game".
I would absolutely LOVE to see us build a roster the way Dabo does at Clemson with the obvious uptick in portal success. I just can't imagine how taxing it must be on a staff (here's to you Texas Tech and UVA among others) to have to completely rebuild a roster every single year. Chasing that must be exhausting on all fronts. Give me a really good "regional recruiting" roster with some key guys in the portal to fill the gaps. If we can do that I think VT will have great success through the ACC and a solid chance in the CFP in the years to come.
Additionally, I don't think we should underestimate the chip James Franklin has on his shoulder right now. That man is a freaking competitor and to get fired after having been one of the top 10-15 coaches in the country the last 15-20 years has to have put an absolute fire up his butt.
I hope he can go all in on whatever he needs to do this season and next as he slowly recruits for the foundation of our football program. But long term, I don't want to be the program that has to rebuild the roster every single season from top to bottom.
You're looking at the portal in a vacuum, which I'd argue you can't do. The portal is one part of overall team recruiting, the other being recruiting from high school. Because our high school recruiting has been not great, we've almost been forced to go to the portal to get recruits.
But let's look at Franklin's recruiting classes (well, plus a couple years before 2018 to get an idea of what may have already been on the roster at that point). Rankings according to 247.
2016: 20
2017: 15
2018: 6
2019: 12
2020: 15
2021: 21
2022: 6
2023: 14
2024: 15
2025: 15
I'd argue that if we had those kinds of recruiting classes, we probably wouldn't have hit the portal nearly as hard. So, like I said, it may not be that he's not capable, it may just be that he was filling his roster through recruiting. But then the question is, can he make use of the portal to turn over this roster? Will he try to coach up what we do have and just continue bringing in good recruiting classes? I guess we'll see.
I think that Franklin was a bit late to the portal, but i think that was hubris or dedication to his guys (he thought he had the guys he wanted/needed), not that he was against the portal. Last year showed he was willing to portal guys in to fix needs and i hopefully he will continue that mindset.
taps sign
let the man work
Ok, I'll shut up now.
Except Pry IS one of Franklin's guys. Pry has been with Franklin a long time. The only other two guys were pointed out below. Just because he wasn't a good head coach doesn't mean he won't be a good coordinator and defensive coach.
Just want 10 win seasons every year. Not too much to expect, is it?
I mean, I want all wins every year. So your lower bar is not too much to ask for, in my opinion!!
Let the man cook
Pretty well out of our typical recruiting range and profile. Hope he does well out there with recruits we don't want.
USF is expected to fully fund their rev share this year - which is an incredible feat for a G5 team.
I hope he absolutely cooks down there! Nothing but the best of wishes for this man.