By Jerry Ratcliffe
For the first time in his career, Tony Elliott held a team meeting not long ago and half the team was missing.
“It was crazy,” Elliott said. “I got a bunch of the guys on Zoom, and literally, some of them committed the day before, so they were back home in their respective areas on Zoom.”
Such is life for football coaches restocking their programs via the transfer portal.
Elliott said that Virginia’s success in the portal for the 2025 season helped the Cavaliers prepare for the recent portal, but the new two-week window was so different than the past, there was no way to realistically handle the “flood” of players available this go around.
“In the 2023-2024 cycle, there was a total of 4,500 [players in the portal],” Elliott said. “2024-25, there was a total of 4,500. So that’s 9,000 over two years.
“We had 10,000 in one year (this year). We had 4,500 in one day. There’s not a whole lot you can do with that. In a two-week window, you really don’t have the time to be able to vet all those guys.”
Virginia officially announced the additions of 43 new players on Wednesday, 14 high school players and 29 transfers. You can check out each transfer player’s bio here.
Among them, there are 16 undergraduate transfers and 13 grad transfers. Thirty-four of them are mid-year enrollees (27 transfers, 7 high school). The 34 is a UVA record, besting last year’s mark of 25.
Fourteen of the transfers have multiple years of eligibility, not by design.
“I think that it’s just a credit to the university or their willingness to work with us, to be able to allow us to target some more undergrad guys and then the staff having a better understanding of which undergrad guys have a shot. Because the big thing for me is that I don’t want to bring a young man to the University of Virginia without a clear path to graduation,” Elliott said.
There’s a ton of experience entering the program via the portal:
- 710 combined games played among 29 transfers
- 286 combined starts among those transfers
- 22,953 combined snaps at the collegiate level
- 9 transfers that have received all-conference honors
- 66 combined career games played among 4 wide receiver transfers
- 130 combined starts from defensive back transfers (10,000-plus snaps)
Elliott said the identity of the team will form over the next six weeks or so as the strength and conditioning continues to build and bleed into spring practice.
The success UVA enjoyed last season, a program-record 11 wins, a regular-season ACC championship and a spot in the Gator Bowl (a win over Missouri), convinced Elliott that the portal can be a good thing.
“That last class made me a believer in terms of ‘Okay, this can be done,’ because there was some apprehension at first,” the coach said. “It’s so different than how you were trained in this business on how to build a roster.
“We brought in 54 new guys (last year), and it’s like, ‘Man, that’s almost half the team.’ But they were able to prove that it can be done. So the key for us going into this cycle was making sure that we understood how we were able to do it and what it takes to be successful and try to replicate that formula as best we can.”
