Personnel Strategy and the Transfer Portal
Virginia Tech clearly has a strategy for how to manage the transfer portal, and so far Brent Pry and his staff have successfully operationalized that strategy
I concluded last week’s article with the following:
…we could be in for some average to bad football in the years to come. Unless, that is, the entire recruiting model in Blacksburg has changed. Maybe Tech doesn’t recruit low ranked players any more because rather than have them eat a scholarship for a few years while providing comparatively little in the way of practice competition, they let those players go to G5 or FCS schools, wait for the cream to rise to the top, then pursue the best performers in the transfer portal.
Today’s article will look at the different transfer portal strategies programs are employing throughout college football. I will also look at what Tech’s winter portal class tells us about the strategy the Hokies are adopting, and how well Brent Pry and his staff managed the portal in his first full offseason.
Transfer Portal Strategy
In reviewing the data from winter 2022-23 transfers, there are four clearly detectable strategies for recruiting the transfer portal:
Take only the best transfers from P5 programs
Example: Alabama
Avoid the portal or only accept transfers on rare occasions, focus on high school recruits instead
Example: Clemson
Sign high achievers from the G5 and FCS ranks as well as less experienced, high ceiling underclassmen who left mid-level P5 programs in search of earlier playing time
Example: Virginia Tech and most other non-blue chip P5 teams
Compensate for losing top talent in the portal by signing players leaving higher tier programs who are looking for a second chance or a path to playing time
Example: Most lower tier G5 and FCS schools
As the above suggests, portal management requires coaching staffs to be really good at both eliciting desired attrition and attracting top incoming transfers. If the early data on 2023 are any indication, Brent Pry & Co. are very good at navigating both aspects of successful portal management.
2023 Early Results
The portal has closed (for now), and Virginia Tech is sitting in a good position. Twelve former Hokies have transferred out, including 2022 starters Kaleb Smith (0.91 portal rating) and Armani Chatman (0.89). However, Smith and Chatman’s departures both come with asterisks. Smith needs to be in a better passing offense if he is to have any shot at the NFL, and Chatman was passed by Mansoor Delane last year, so barring injury, he was likely looking at a backup role in 2023. Both players were members of the high school class of 2018, meaning they spent five full seasons in Blacksburg.
So, yes, both technically transferred, but that is only because they get a bonus Covid year and, if they had stayed, they were facing uphill odds at getting drafted in 2024. Frankly, given their solid, but not amazing stats last season, I think it says good things about VT that Smith would land at Notre Dame and Chatman at UNC (dumpster fire and mass exodus aside).
The Hokies also lost the following players, none of whom earned a rating or were expected to play major snaps in 2023:
Keshawn King - Contributor (N/A)
DJ Harvey - Contributor (San Jose State)
Keshon Artis - Contributor (N/A)
Eli Adams - Depth (North Carolina Central)
Mattheus Carroll - Depth (Kent State)
Lakeem Rudolph - Depth (Campbell)
Desmond Mamudi - Depth (Rhode Island)
Jason Brown - Depth (Jackson State)
Tyler Matheny - Depth (N/A)
Jaewon Boyd - Depth (N/A)
Notice, every one of these 10 players either transferred to a school at least a couple notches below Virginia Tech or have not landed anywhere, which tells you they were not ACC caliber players.
Meanwhile, the incoming players all look promising:
Six out of the seven received a rating, and all were 0.88 or above, meaning these guys are, by all indications, ACC caliber players. The one unrated player, Stone Snyder, could be a sneaky good get. He played four years at VMI, was an FCS All-American, has great size at 6’3” and 240 lbs., and is a mike linebacker all the way. There are not a lot of true mikes on the roster at present, and if Alan Tisdale doesn’t prove a good fit there, Snyder would be in contention for significant snaps.
Among the other players, all are from lesser programs. Only one (Drones) comes from a P5 school. Jennings is a direct replacement for Kaleb Smith. Felton brings more size to the outside receiving position. Lane brings quickness and the flexibility to play in the slot or out wide. Tuten might be the most exciting Tech running back since David Wilson. Canteen appears to be an upgrade over DJ Harvey at nickel. And, of course, Drones will compete with Grant Wells for the starting QB role.
All substance. No fillers. The staff did well in the portal this winter. How well? Let’s compare with the rest of the ACC.
Talent In, Talent Out
Since the portal is bi-directional, I created a metric to help illuminate the impact that it has had so far on each ACC team. To determine the Talent In, I summed the rating for all incoming players. If a player is unrated, he counts as a numerical 0. While not perfect, a lack of rating usually indicates a player not expected to play many snaps at the P5 level. By contrast, Talent Out is the sum of ratings for outgoing players. The Talent Delta metric is simply the difference between the two.
In terms of Talent Delta after the winter portal period, Virginia Tech is in third place in the ACC:
Georgia Tech has a new head coach in Brent Key, who was promoted from within after serving as interim head coach most of last season. His ascendancy put him in an unusually strong recruiting position for a new coach. He knew all the current players, their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the high school recruits, and had two-thirds of a season to put together a game plan for how to improve the talent level in Atlanta. Overall, Key and the Yellow Jackets had a great winter in the portal, and Duke, for the second straight year, did themselves a lot of favors.
Virginia Tech is a strong third, followed by Florida St. The Hokies brought in 7 players and lost 12, which seems to be an ideal amount (we’ll see if that changes once all the players with Covid eligibility cycle out).
Miami (20) and UNC (15) lost a lot of players. For Miami, it looks like a culture thing. Perhaps Manny Diaz is not a great fit with the holdover players he inherited. At Chapel Hill, one has to think that the end is near for Mack Brown. Still, at least the Tar Heels netted out positive in terms of Talent Delta and finished mid-pack in the conference. Miami was well in the negative and finished 12th in the 14-team ACC, in front of only Wake Forest and Clemson, the latter of which generally does not take transfers. Overall, 11 out of 14 teams in the conference brought in more talent than they lost.
Takeaways
Brent Pry has been Virginia Tech’s head football coach for more than a year now. The players, most of whom were recruited by and played for Justin Fuente, have had more than enough time to assess the new staff and form opinions about them. Clearly, the players like and believe in this new staff.
The only two players the Hokies lost to the portal that they would have preferred to keep are sixth-year guys who need a precise fit in terms of opportunity and scheme to have any chance at playing in the NFL. For those guys, transferring was simply a career move, and a pretty easy decision in both cases.
The rest of the players who transferred out were not P5 caliber players. The incoming guys all have either long track records of success or highly sought after physical tools. All appear, from the ratings, to be ACC caliber players, and most should expect to log a lot of snaps in the fall.
The spring and summer will bring more attrition. The Hokies are currently over the 85-man scholarship limit. Getting back down to that limit will require more (hopefully targeted) attrition, likely at the running back and wide receiver positions. And there also remains a chance that Tech brings in another guy or two in order to sure up some currently thin positions.