The First Bank & Trust Friday Q&A: Future Plans At Running Back, Staff Building, And More

Virginia Tech, Brent Pry, Greg Schiano
College football coaches everywhere, including Brent Pry at Virginia Tech, have to figure out how to use the extra 20 scholarships. (Ivan Morozov)

1) If everyone who is eligible to return next year does return (this does not factor in potential early draft declarations), we have 79 scholarship players when including the 16 verbal commits thus far. With the scholarship limit increasing to 105 next year, how do you see the remaining 26 spots being filled? How many more high school commits do we go after? Walk-on “promotions”? Huge transfer class? — breid07

Chris Coleman: It will end up being more than 26 spots because you can bet that all 79 eligible scholarship players won’t be returning. That’s just how it works in college sports these days. For the record, I haven’t run breid07’s numbers to see if they are 100% accurate, but the point still stands: Virginia Tech, as well as all other schools, will have a lot of spots to fill. How will it fill them?

It’s a great question. High school recruiting news for the 2025 class has been pretty dead recently, and I expect that’s partly because Tech is waiting things out to see where their roster stands when the transfer portal opens. How many current players will hit the portal? What will be the team’s biggest needs in the portal? However, I think it’s mostly because the Hokies are going to use those extra spots on incoming transfers.

Another place they’ll use them is on special teams. With the entire roster being scholarship guys now, that means the backup kicker, punter and long snapper will need to be put on scholarship, which takes away three spots. Deserving walk-ons who the staff believes could have a chance to work their way into the mix — or at the least be very good special teams players — could also be put on scholarship. Redshirt freshman linebacker George Ballance is the best example, but there could be others. I don’t know how many guys this will apply to, however. Ultimately, we could see the vast majority of the current walk-ons be cut.

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