What Doth the Portal Bring to the New Offensive Coordinator?
Did Virginia Tech emerge from winter portal window better than it entered?
Whether it is Christian Taylor or someone else, Virginia Tech’s next offensive coordinator will be walking into an interesting situation.
The returning players, many of whom were backups last year, are inexperienced. At the same time, many have higher ceilings than did the players they are replacing.
There is also an influx of transfers coming in. Nearly all of them play along the offensive line or at running back, the two positions with the most acute needs.
In this article, I will quantify the portal gains and losses in an attempt to answer one simple question: Did Virginia Tech emerge from the winter portal period better than it was in the hours the portal opened.
Methodology
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. Tomas Rimac had the highest snap score at 93.7.
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:
Starter with NFL potential (4 points)
Starter (3)
Contributor (2)
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 represents the portal’s impact on Virginia Tech’s offense.
Player groups
One very important consideration is snap count. At this stage, before any of the incoming players have hit the practice field in maroon and orange, the amount of playing time they saw at their previous stop weighs heavily on the likelihood that they will play a lot at Virginia Tech. This is especially the case with the running backs.
Starters with NFL potential (net: even)
The Hokies lost one starter who will have a chance to play in the NFL in Xavier Chaplin. In return, they gained Tomas Rimac, the highest rated overall transfer either coming to or departing from Tech.
I nearly included Braelin Moore in this group, but his 2024 PFF grade (67.5) is not NFL worthy, and his high transfer portal rating reflects high demand and low supply, rather than elite talent on Moore’s part.
Starters (net: even)
Again, at the starting caliber level, the Hokies made a one-for-one trade. Braelin Moore is headed to LSU and Braydon Bennett is coming to Tech from Coastal Carolina.
Bennett seems like an under-the-radar guy. Terion Stewart got most of the press directed toward the running back enrollees, and while Stewart is a powerful back, he is really a one trick pony. He excels at breaking tackles, but that’s about it.
Bennett, meanwhile, has plenty of size at 6’2”, 215 lbs., and he is a better receiver and blocker than Stewart, which is probably why he played nearly 200 more snaps than Stewart did last year.
Reading between the lines on PFF, I suspect Stewart is also more injury prone, which would not be a surprise given the physicality with which he runs.
Contributors (net: +6 points)
Here is where the Hokies made their move in the portal, adding four players who are positioned to be regular contributors to the offense, while only losing one (Malachi Thomas).
Cameron Seldon was a highly rated recruit coming out of high school, and he would stand to gain possibly more than any other player from a Taylor hire at OC due to his positional flexibility.
The aforementioned Terion Stewart should see a lot of action on third-and-short and in goal line formations. Bennett’s late addition to the class will take pressure off Stewart, allowing him to be used in ideal situations and limiting any pressure that might come to overuse him.
Donovan Greene battled injuries at Wake Forest, but he was a four-star receiver coming out of high school and he performed well when he was on the field. As the elder statesmen in an otherwise very young wide receiver room, he has the opportunity to both put up numbers and mentor the younger guys, many of whom were also four-star recruits.
The final acquisition in this group is Kyle Altuner, a lineman who redshirted at West Virginia last season. He is probably a year away from starting, but he was a highly-rated recruit both out of high school and the portal. He could potentially be a three-year starter at Tech.
Depth (net: -3 points)
Essentially, on a net level, the Hokies traded three depth pieces for three contributor pieces.
Overall, five Hokies who had been passed on the depth chart and were unlikely to see any meaningful action in 2025 transferred out of the program.
Two players who will likely be depth pieces this year, Lucas Austin, a lineman from West Virginia, and Marcellous Hawkins, a running back from DII Central Missouri, are unlikely to break into the two deep at their respective positions.
Offense overall (net: +3 points)
This analysis finds that the Hokies emerged from the winter portal window with, on balance, an improved offense.
That does not mean that the offense will be better in 2025 than it was this past season. There are many other pieces (returning players, offensive coordinator, strength of opponent, etc.) that will factor into the product we see on the field.
The running back room is much stronger and deeper. The wide receiver additions are also high-end talents who could both prove sneaky good additions.
On the negative side, Tech emerged with one less starter on the offensive line, where two other starters exhausted their eligibility this past year. Whichever combination emerges up front, numerically, it is almost guaranteed the 2025 starting offensive line will be more talented but less experienced than this past year’s unit.
If Matt Moore can coach that unit up, the new offensive coordinator will have more playmakers at the skill positions in 2025. It is conceivable that all the starting backs and receivers could have higher PFF grades in 2025 than the starters at those positions did in 2024.