By Jerry Ratcliffe
Let the madness begin.
Virginia’s football front office has been bracing and preparing for the opening of the new transfer portal since last summer, but there’s nothing that truly simulates what will happen over the next two weeks in player movement.
The NCAA transfer portal opened Friday and by midday, more than 4,500 Division I football players entered their names. Unlike last year, which featured a winter and spring portal, the new portal has been condensed to one, 14-day period, which puts immense pressure on every college program out there to get things right.
“We get one bite at the apple,” said Virginia general manager Tyler Jones, who along with assistant GM Justin Speros pulled off a masterful job in corralling new talent for Tony Elliott’s program in 2025.
Those two talent evaluators and their staff are relying on formulas, lessons learned and relationships with agents to repeat previous success with a philosophy of “production over potential,” and “fit over splash.”
Still, the wild, wild west got even wilder this time around, placing stress on both the retention and acquisition aspects of raising the level of talent in the program, while battling other programs in a mad race to gobble up the cream of the crop.
“We’re anticipating that it is hand-to-hand combat in retaining your players,” Jones said, particularly after the Cavaliers won a program-record 11 games this past season. “It’s the new era of college athletics.”
Speros said that Virginia didn’t wait until the first Twitter notification that somebody was announcing their intent to enter the portal.
“It started for us in the summertime,” Speros said. “We weren’t doing anything that was out of bounds. You’re just evaluating rosters. That’s what teams do in the pros. We have a ton of evaluations just from our opponents that we played, different teams across different leagues, so you already have a good base of evaluation so that you’re not playing catch up so rapidly, especially when there’s only one window.”
Once those notifications did start and have practically gone nonstop since, so has Virginia’s evaluations process, even though lots of work had already been done.
The priority for Virginia has been the retention of its players. As of Friday afternoon, 14 players had entered the portal (see related story on this site), while at least six had announced their intent to stay, including several starting offensive linemen.
That fits well with another of Virginia’s priorities: to continue to build the program from the inside out.
“When you look at teams that have success, that are playing deep into the year, playoff teams, championship-caliber teams, they’ve all been built from the inside-out, specifically up front on offense and defense,” Speros said. “That will certainly be the priority, both from a retention standpoint and from an acquisition standpoint, then adding skill around it. We want to be known as a team that’s built up front on offense and defense and plays a physical style of football.”
Virginia intends to compete for quality football players, but players who fit, not just athletically, but academically, which can be tricky considering some players come from schools on the quarter system as opposed to semesters. Plus, some players may not be able to enroll this month and participate in spring drills because they may not graduate until May from their previous school.
It’s yet another phase of recruiting, with high school signing periods in December and February, with the two-week transfer portal window sandwiched between. Because these players are comparable to pro football’s “free agents,” there’s plenty of competition from other schools to sign these athletes.
That means, as Jones explained, Virginia not only has a Plan A, but also “a Plan B, Plan C, Plan D.”
He keeps track of the madness with spreadsheets and a recruiting board in his “war room.”
“I think that you have to have proper preparation in this environment so that you can be very intentional once the portal opens and you’re not several days and weeks behind,” Jones pointed out.
Because of the limited window, Jones believes it could lead to more mistakes throughout college programs, likening it to having to build a house in a shorter time frame.
In that case, UVA’s front office hopes to rely on the relationships it built with player agents over the past couple of years.
“The other piece is relationships with agents and agencies and other folks who have been really helpful for us, for me and for Justin,” Jones said. “When you’re able to meet and develop rapport with agents and align with who they are, they typically attract a certain type of client.
“So building that rapport with the agents, so they know who we are and what we’re about as a program, they come to us and try to recommend [players] that fit Virginia because they’ve spent countless hours on the phone with myself and Justin about what we’re looking for. So that’s one lesson learned from previous portal windows. That piece has been critical.”
When it comes to acquiring players from the portal and perhaps even retaining players from the money standpoint, it’s perhaps less of a guessing game than one might think. Jones said that because UVA treats its players so well and they fall in love with the culture, some of them likely take “pay cuts” just in order to stay, rather than seek a higher payoff somewhere else.
Still, it’s not the GM who decides the value of players as much as that comes from the outside.
“It’s not really our responsibility to determine what a player’s value is on the open market,” Jones said. “We’re really transparent during the process, but it’s hard for us to tell what their value is on the open market because everyone’s budgets are different. Not everyone has the same revenue share pot, so their value could change in the market.”
Agents usually have a good handle on it, but CBS Sports published estimates on the general value of positions for the 2026 market heading into Friday.
“I feel like the average starter this cycle, the sort of line you have to hit, is $600,000,” one SEC general manager told CBS. “I feel like last year starters in our conference were $300,000. Now it feels like starters are more like $600,000.”
CBS produced a position-by-position projection of market rates for 2026 per USD:
- Quarterbacks: Average $2 million up to $3.5
- Edge Rushers: Average $600,000
- Offensive Tackles: Average $750,000
- Wide Receivers: Average $650,000
- Defensive Tackles: Average $600,000
- Running Backs: Average $500,000
- Cornerbacks: Average $500,000
- Safeties: Average $400,000
- Tight Ends: Average $400,000
- Inside Offensive Linemen: Average $400,000
- Linebackers: Average $375,000
UVA’s Speros said numbers can vary from conference to conference, school to school, depending on philosophies and frameworks.
“I think just having our own internal framework about how we value certain positions, certain pieces is critical,” Speros said.
Let the madness begin.
