With GM in place, UVa football embraces a modern approach

UVa’s new-look roster is just a few weeks away from taking the field, hoping that a large class of transfers can help spark a turnaround for a program that hasn’t played in a bowl game in six years. While head coach Tony Elliott will be in the spotlight and will be accountable for results, he didn’t build the roster all on his own. UVa football is moving towards a more modern personnel approach, and will lean on two key figures that helped shepherd the Hoos through the 2024-25 portal window to lead the roster building efforts going forward. 

Virginia announced last month that Tyler Jones, whose previous title was Deputy Athletics Director for External Operations, a role he had served in for two years, would be named General Manager for both football and women’s basketball. He will also have a role overseeing men’s basketball and baseball’s CAP, which is basically their budget for player acquisition, and compliance for funding components. 

While Jones officially has the new title, he’s been doing the work of a GM for some time now. 

“It hasn’t changed a ton,” Jones said of how his new role compares to the old. “We’ve been working in the shadows and doing the work. It does help us firm up roles with designations. And then it allows Carla to backfill some responsibilities that Justin and I are relinquishing. It’s more about the structure than specific job duties.”

Jones will partner with Justin Speros, who has led UVa’s football personnel department since he was brought over from USF by Tony Elliott in 2021. Speros, like Jones, now has a new job title as the program’s Assistant General Manager. The two of them will lead UVa’s roster building efforts, in conjunction with Elliott and the coaching staff. 

“We are built for the short term and the long term. I have to constantly be thinking about not just July 2025, but July 2026 and even further down the road,” Speros said of his role. “I want Kevin Downing focused on coaching the defensive tackles he has in his room today, let me worry about the future. That’s how I see my role.”

“In our roles, we have to continue to think ahead,” Jones said. Just as an NFL GM would, Jones focuses on the chessboard and moves to come, while the coaching staff concerns themselves more with the present. “Justin (Speros) and I are talking about ‘what are we doing next year?’ And that just our roles, it’s different than the coaches, who are coaching for now. But on the front office side it’s our responsibility to think about the future and make intentional and strategic decisions that effect the now and the future. So I have to live in two worlds.”

While Jones and Speros head UVa’s roster-building efforts and all that happens behind the scenes to put a team together, nothing happens without the consent of the head coach. That’s a slightly different dynamic than how a lot of pro organizations would run, but college sports are set up in more of a coach-centric model. For as long as college football has existed, coaches both identify and recruit talent, and then coach it. In the modern era, there are more support levers to help a coach get the roster building done, but with money involved, having someone like Jones in a GM role is a new reality. Still, he sees his role as serving the needs of the coach and his staff, rather than working around them, or towards his own goals for the roster.

“We’re on the phone daily, multiple times a day,” Jones said of Elliott, who enters his fourth season as UVa’s head coach. “My wife knows when I’m on the phone, it’s Tony. That helps, and hopefully gives him the confidence that we’re doing things for the betterment of the program. He trusts me and I trust him. I’m not making any decisions that he’s not in on. Our job is to bring prospects for consideration and we talk through it but ultimately he’s making the decision because it’s his program.”

“We have discussions and we may have a differing perspective but ultimately it’s his decision on who is a part of his program, because I don’t coach them,” Jones continued.“I’m not in the weight room with them; they’re embedded with the coach and it’s his responsibility to get them ready to play.”

According to both Jones and Speros, the process has been a collaborative one between the staff and the new front office, rather than an adversarial one. 

“Sometimes there can be a divide between personnel and coaches. But for us everything we’ve done since we’ve embraced this new model, everything we’ve done, our coaches have been in lock step with us,” Speros said.

Jones is in a new role, but really his new role is also within a new reality within an ever-changing college sports landscape. While the 2024-25 portal window appears to have been a big success for the program, there were plenty of lessons along the way. 

“We learned a ton in the first portal window in December,” Jones said. “We made some mistakes, figured it out and were in a better position in the spring, which also informed how we treated baseball and basketball.”

It’s good to remember how chaotic the first few weeks of the portal window can be. The staff identifies needs, then thousands of players flock to the portal, and the personnel team has to identify fits, determine whether there’s mutual interest, and then decide how to move forward, all while trying to compete with other schools for those players. A thousand micro-decisions have to be made all at once to ensure a quality roster can be assembled. 

UVa landed talented North Texas transfer QB Chandler Morris in December, and Morris is set to start Virginia’s season opener against Coastal Carolina later this month. Morris had connections to the UVa staff through his father, Chad, who coached with Elliott at Clemson. Morris visited Charlottesville, but had other options and didn’t commit right away. UVa’s staff had to both keep pushing for their guy, but make sure they weren’t left out in the cold as other quarterback targets came off the board. When Morris publicly committed to UVa, at that very moment, Virginia’s staff was hosting transfer QB Billy Edwards from Maryland, who had a lot of interest from other P4 schools. With Morris onboard and UVa’s QB issues seemingly solved, Edwards, like UVa had to pivot again and was committed to Wisconsin within a few hours. All of that chaos has to be carefully managed by the personnel team, and it’s clear that there are so many different permutations for what a roster could look like. 

“I think it went as well as it could,” Quarterback coach Taylor Lamb said of UVa’s QB pursuit in the winter. “A lot of stuff happened in that two and a half weeks in December. It could have went a lot of different ways, and we’re extremely happy with how we came out of it.”

When the portal window opens, the first thing a personnel group has to determine is whether there’s a fit. Do the player’s goals align with the program’s? Is there a scheme fit and can the player successfully clear admissions? And finally, is there a compensation fit?

“There’s a heavy negotiation piece to it. Neither side wants to show their cards,” Speros said of working with transfer targets and their representation. “But really understanding as quickly as possible what the investment level looks like for a player, helps inform us if we’re going to be in the sweepstakes or not. That’s true for college players and high school players.” 

Defining market value for a player or how far a school is willing to go is another new but critical component in roster building. In the NFL, there are years of available data to review and obvious market comparisons to make when determining what is fair value for a player. In college football, NIL deals are rarely public knowledge and schools likely have widely different valuations on a player or a position. That can create more chaotic and unexpected negotiations with agents, where one school is offering a number they think is fair and another comes in and blows that number away.

“There’s very little variation for the most part on what a player can possibly get on the free agent market, per team,” Speros said, when talking about NFL free agency and how it differs. “But those variations do happen in college. You have to be very mobile and things come out of left field but you have a fiduciary responsibility to doing what’s best not only for our football team but our entire athletic department.”

According to Jones, working with player representatives was a learning opportunity in the first portal window as those relationships can pay off down the road. 

“We were not in that space before. How influential those folks are in this process, that was a lesson learned, that this is not your grandfather’s college football,” Jones said of working with agents. “We’ve had to adapt relatively quickly, which I think helped our basketball and baseball program in the portal. We stepped in a lot of land mines in December that they didn’t have to step in, and that helped us in the spring.”

So does working through an agent, rather than directly with a player, make recruiting more difficult? Jones said while the official nature of a player/agent relationship is different, recruiting still comes down to what does the player want, is UVa going to be able to offer that to him, and who do you have to convince? That’s really how it’s always been. 

“That dynamic is not different than what we manage in high school. There’s a circle of influence for a prospect; sometimes the agent is the parent. When you’re recruiting, you’re trying to find out what is the circle of influence, how much influence do they have, and what’s the strategy to engage with that individual to be able to articulate what the opportunity is. Once you figure that out, you lean on what you’ve been doing your whole career,” Jones explained. “The strategy didn’t change, it was just figuring out who those people were. In some cases, the agent didn’t know the prospect that well, they just met and signed. In many cases they hadn’t even met in person. That part was unique but just figuring out who the circle of influence was isn’t any different though.”

While relationships in recruiting haven’t changed, how a roster is built has changed quite dramatically. UVa added 32 transfers this offseason, a group of older players with track records that can be counted on in ways that high school players simply can’t be with no college football on their resume. All college football players have to come from somewhere first, so high school recruiting is always going to be important, but perhaps there’s no point in taking a class of 25 players like schools used to when they can take 10-15 and keep their options open for the portal. 

One area that recruiting is different now, according to Speros, is that the floor has been raised on the types of high schoolers a program like UVa would be willing to take a chance on. 

“High school recruiting has changed because the players you get from the high school level have to be guys you view as contributors either day one or at least in year two,” he said. “The four-year project, those guys are becoming harder sells to everybody in the building.”

While Jones and Speros are leading the charge, they aren’t doing it alone. UVa has enlisted the help of former NFL GM Scott Pioli, in a consultant role. It has been useful for UVa’s personnel team to be able to bounce ideas off of someone who has helped build Super Bowl contenders at several different professional stops. 

“Scott Pioli has been an awesome resource for me and for us, and just understand what a front office entails,” Jones said. “You can’t carbon copy it; the NBA, the NFL, it’s different. But trying to identify components within their structure that can fit the college space but also fit Virginia.”

Virginia is also leaning on data and science to make decisions. In the post-Moneyball era, most sports and teams use data to determine market value, how much to spend on a position or an individual player, and that takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation and puts up guardrails to avoid bias in decision making.

“One of our core principles is making data-informed decisions. Which is hard to do in a highly-intense emotional sport. Certainly for a coach that’s known a kid since they were a junior in high school, but the data is saying something different than they believe; it’s hard. But we all committed to making data-informed decisions,” Jones explained. 

“You can’t go in blind with just data, you have to watch film and make sure that the scheme fits, but the data helps you make better-informed decisions. It also takes a little bit of the emotional piece out of it, so you can have a conversation with a prospect that’s currently on your roster for retention and say ‘okay, here’s our philosophy. Here’s how we’ve graded and power ranked some things with our scheme and how you fit.’ But we’ve also been consistent. That data keeps you consistent as you’re building a roster. You can get enamored with a player and start to forget about all the things that makes that player unique, absent the data. So it keeps you honest sometimes, and it’s a consistent component in our evaluations.”

With one major portal haul in the rear view and a pivotal season upcoming, we’ll see just how good UVa’s roster building was in the past offseason. But it’s clear that the program and athletic department have come around to embracing their new reality and have taken major steps to become a player in the transfer portal. 

“This is where the industry is going. And I couldn’t give Coach Elliott and his staff enough credit for their willingness to adapt, their willingness to change, and that’s a testament to their humility,” Jones said. “Expectation and pressure is college athletics. When you’re keeping score, you want to win. And this program wants to win more than anyone. Pressure isn’t the term I would use, we want the expectation. That means people are engaged; when you don’t have any expectation, people aren’t engaged. So the expectation is fair. We’re excited about it, we feel really good about the roster. And Coach (Elliott) has indicated to be that he’s excited about the season and the quality of players we have.”