The Portal's Impact on Virginia Tech's Defense

Are the Hokies better on net after all the defensive acquisitions?

I’ll be honest with you, even after creating a dataset to analyze all of Virginia Tech’s portal additions on defense, I still can’t remember the names of all the safeties the Hokies signed.

We know Tech was extremely thin at that position last year, but it is still unclear how much depth the team really added from the portal.

Will new defensive coordinator Sam Siefkes employ a defense with three high safeties? How many of these guys will move to what was previously called the whip or Sam linebacker position? Does that position even exist anymore?

Who knows?

Some of those details will probably trickle out in interviews, but I suspect Tech’s coaches will try to keep as much of that information secret as possible.

Make no mistake, beating Shane Beamer and South Carolina is very, very important for this coaching staff.

Following up on a recent article examining the portal gains and losses on offense, in this article I will turn to the defense and what is knowable at this point - how the Hokies fared in the aggregate.

Did Virginia Tech emerge from the winter portal period better than it was in the hours before the portal opened?

Read on to find out.

Methodology

The methodology is the same that I used to evaluate the offense.

I created a dataset comprised of each scholarship addition and subtraction from the portal with the following measures:

• 247Sports high school rating

• 247Sports transfer portal rating

• On3 transfer portal rating

• 2024 PFF grade

• 2024 offense/defense snap count (PFF), converted to snap score

The top four measures in the list have as their max a rating or grade of 100. To normalize the snap count, I calculated a snap count rating for each player with 1,000 snaps set as the max. It worked out roughly like PFF grades. Christian Ellis had the highest snap score at 90.0.

I then looked at the average score and the total score (max of 500, although, some players lacked certain pieces of data, e.g., those from DII schools).

This analysis is as much art as it is science, since recruiting ratings are much likelier to be high numbers than PFF grades and snap counts, so missing data can really throw off the projections.

My reading is that players lacking data in one or more fields are simply less “known” quantities, so we should take a wider confidence interval approach with them.

Finally, informed by their quantitative scores, but without observing hard cutoffs, I assigned each player to one of four groups for the 2025 season:

1. Starter with NFL potential (4 points)

2. Starter (3)

3. Contributor (2)

4. Depth (1)

Obviously, each player is only a breakout spring or summer camp away from becoming a starter or starter with pro potential, but based on the information we have now, this analysis quantifies the portal’s impact on Virginia Tech’s defense.

Player groups

Although the Hokies have in the past rotated a lot of defenders onto the field, the amount of playing time incoming transfers saw at their previous stop remains an excellent proxy for the likelihood that they will play a lot at Virginia Tech.

Starters with NFL potential (net: +4 points)

The Hokies lost one starter who will have a chance to play in the NFL, but gained two in return. The newcomers in this group, Isaiah Cash and Christian Ellis, both have higher average ratings than the one departing player, Mansoor Delane.

While it would have been nice to retain Delane, many expected him to declare for the NFL Draft after last season. Losing him to LSU via the portal is not that different. He’s gone, the Hokies are unlikely to play against his new team (Delane would probably only participate in the playoff; he would probably opt out of a bowl), and in the end, it was a business decision.

For the past two seasons Delane was the #2 cornerback behind Dorian Strong. Had he returned to Tech for the 2025 season, he would not have been guaranteed prime billing at his position, as Dante Lovett looks every bit his equal.

In addition, Cash and Ellis are both safeties, a position where the Hokies struggled mightily the past two seasons. As a result, the net impact of these moves could be an underestimate.

Starters (net: +12 points)

The Hokies brought in five starting caliber players and only lost one. And I’m being conservative with this grouping.

The 2024 PFF grade range for the incoming players was 71.0 to 85.7. The only player in this group who left the program is Mose Phillips, and he earned a grade of 58.3, which is 1.7 points below baseline.

The only demerit here is that the additions are all along the defensive line or in the secondary. The Hokies really would have benefitted from adding a surefire starter to the linebacking corps.

Contributors (net: -4 points)

The Hokies saw a couple of contributors - Sam Brumfield and Keli Lawson - depart. They did not acquire any players of this caliber.

Brumfield was consistent, but limited. Reading the tea leaves on his playing time and PFF grades, I posited during the season that at some point he got hurt, and since 2024 was thought to be his last season of eligibility, the coaching staff decided to go with Jaden Keller the rest of the way.

Once Brumfield was healthy enough to play significant snaps, he split time with Keller, but was only getting about one out of every three snaps at middle linebacker. That he nonetheless ended the season with a much higher grade than Keller was frustrating, but hopefully Keller is the better for it this season.

Brumfield received an extra year of eligibility due to the Diego Pavia court decision. He was never in Tech’s 2025 plan, so he only makes this list on a technicality.

Keli Lawson’s status is currently in limbo. He decommitted from UCF two months ago, but does not appear to have landed anywhere else.

It is very unlikely that Lawson would return to the Tech football team in 2025, but at this point it is not entirely impossible. For the purposes of this analysis, I assumed that he will not.

Depth (net: -2 points)

Tech shed a number of players who had no chance at playing meaningful snaps, while acquiring a couple projects and a couple players who had been highly-rated recruits coming out of high school.

Sherrod Covil could very well contribute this season, but based on his recent history, I do not believe that should be the expectation.

Likewise, Jordan Bass could make an impact if there are injuries at his linebacking position, but he has already gotten in some legal trouble, and it is not like he was tearing it up at Pitt.

Offense overall (net: +10 points)

Although many of the defenders who joined the Hokies out of the portal were unfamiliar to Tech fans prior to their respective commitments, as this analysis demonstrates, they are, as a group, much better than the departed players.

The Hokies still have issues at linebacker, but otherwise, this group of portal enrollees checks a lot of boxes.

That said, the task was arguably taller on defense, with the Hokies losing a lot of their best players due to graduation.

Overall, Virginia Tech netted out positive in the transfer portal on both sides of the ball. The next step is to determine the net effect of all roster changes, including departures due to graduation.

With that information, we will be able to more accurately set expectations for the coaches, and for the overall win-loss record.