Virginia Tech lands two highly touted quarterbacks out of transfer portal
The transfer portal can be a double-edged sword for college football teams. Sometimes the transfer portal can take away players from a team, sometimes teams can acquire prospects from the portal. On Thursday afternoon, the Virginia Tech Hokies landed two quarterback prospects out of the transfer portal, Jason Brown (South Carolina) and Grant Wells (Marshall).
It had recently been reported that Wells was trending to the Hokies during the past few days and on Thursday, the former standout for the Marshall Thundering Herd made it official.
In just his freshman season for the Thundering Herd, the Charleston, West Virginia native completed 66.3 percent of his passes, throwing for 3,532 passing yards, while tossing in 16 touchdowns and 13 interceptions.
At Virginia Tech, Wells will be reunited with former Marshall defensive line coach J.C. Price. Another Marshall connection for Wells is Mike Villagrana, Virginia Tech’s senior director of player personnel. Villagrana had previously served as Marshall’s general manager under first-year head coach Charles Huff.
In December, Marshall landed a commitment from the son of Thundering Herd legend, Chad Pennington. Cole Pennington, a three-star signal-caller out of The Sayre School (Lexington, Kentucky) decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. He’s currently rated as the 77th best quarterback in America for the 2022 recruiting cycle, according to the On3 Rankings.
Jason Brown comes to the Hokies from the South Carolina Gamecocks. In 2021, he completed 55.6 percent of his passes for South Carolina, while throwing for 721 passing yards and tossing in eight touchdowns with six interceptions.
With former Oklahoma quarterback Spencer Rattler transferring to the Gamecocks, Brown made the decision to spend the final year of his college football career with the Hokies.
Below is the official announcement from the Fredericksburg, Va. native’s Twitter page.
Both quarterbacks will compete for the starting job at Virginia Tech in the spring after former Hokie signal-caller Braxton Burmeister entered the transfer portal this off-season. Burmeister has not yet announced what school he will be playing at next. There are currently over 1,400 prospects in the transfer portal for the 2021-2022 cycle.
It’ll be interesting to see how the quarterback battle plays out for Virginia Tech during spring ball and fall camp.