The Hokies have added UCLA transfer Collin Schlee to the roster, and in doing so shored up their QB depth. I focused on three of his games. The first was when he was still with Kent State; early in the season he put on a tremendous effort against #7 Oklahoma and almost singlehandedly kept the Golden Flashes in the game for a while. The Sooners looked like they didn’t know what to do with him as he ran over/around the front and dropped dimes on the secondary. I’m sure a lot of coaches watched that tape and started thinking about throwing some NIL dollars at him.

The next two games we’ll focus on were his only two starts at UCLA, versus Arizona State in the regular season and Boise State in the LA Bowl. He was caught in a quarterback slurry at UCLA, and it looked like the coaching staff didn’t trust him to do much more than run the ball and fire off a few screens. He was uncomfortable in the pocket, locked in on receivers, and didn’t look as dynamic as he did at Kent State. UCLA was favored by 18.5 over an injury-ravaged ASU team that resorted to swinging-gate plays on offense…and the Bruins ended up losing 17-7 at home. Schlee was hurt at the end of the game and missed the rest of the regular season. In the LA Bowl, Schlee wasn’t confirmed as the starter until he took the field, where he completed 70% of his throws, had one TD and zero picks, and still only grabbed a 43 passing grade from Pro Football Focus. He got banged up, left the game down 16-7 in the third quarter, and the returning early-season starter led the Bruins to a 35-22 win.

Across the two seasons of play I looked at, the biggest constant in Schlee’s game is his running ability. At 6’3, 225, he’s lankier and not quite as powerful as Kyron Drones, but he can still pack a wallop:

ASU is absolutely clogging the A-gaps here, but Schlee’s cool as a cucumber, and when his keys tell him to take it up the gut, he gets there. At Kent State, he tended to slide, but in his running-specialist role at UCLA there was more powering through contact.

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