It’s been two weeks since the season ended, and with the FCS playoffs now in the quarterfinals I want to quickly put a bow on the 2025 season and start looking towards high school and transfer portal recruiting. Congrats to soon-to-be Patriot League rival Villanova knocking off Patriot League champ Lehigh 14-7.

Season long question

Are we built to replace a significant amount of lost production through talent developed within the program? – Before I get into the numbers, this was the question I posed in August to begin the Lehigh preview. I felt like this question would define the year more than any, and I figured it would take all season to answer.

While a 4th straight playoff appearance would’ve been great, truthfully it was unlikely. Not much was in our favor after our portal losses the previous winter. The weak schedule left no room for error, facing Lehigh on the road in week 1 was an extremely difficult task, and you don’t simply replace 10+ starters without some drop-off. A 3-4 inaugural season isn’t what anyone wanted and it’s in no way the standard we should come to accept. We do have to keep things in perspective, and in the grand scheme the Spiders saw plenty of younger guys fill the void well.

The easiest way to show this is the number of close games we played in. 10 of 11 FCS games resulting in one-score games is not an accident. The Spiders were in every game, giving #5 Lehigh their closest regular season game and nearly pulling off a Senior Day win against bubble team Lafayette. Most importantly, there was never a game where we looked completely outmatched. The young Spiders went toe-to-toe with every single team and if we called our offense like we did throughout 2nd halves in November I imagine we grab a couple extra wins along the way. The replenished Spiders showed we could be competitive with our own recruited talent.

Now there’s two sides to every story, and unfortunately the other side of this is hard to ignore. Yes, we played in a lot of close games, but against pretty bad competition. Our strength of schedule 82nd in the FCS, we beat zero playoff teams, and only one of our seven wins came against a team with a winning record (7-5 W&M). Add in losses to 7-loss Bucknell and 9-loss Holy Cross and this isn’t the type of schedule you want to be “competitive” against. If you’re going to play into December you need to be controlling the game against most of these teams and we simply weren’t at that level.

Did I necessarily expect that given our offseason departures? No, and that’s why this question remains unanswered. We did a nice job of steadying the ship but returning to a playoff caliber team is the necessary next step. One down year doesn’t derail recent progress, so how well the Spiders can respond in 2026 will be the true indicator of our roster management.

Final numbers

Numbers in green are top 1/3 in the FCS, numbers in red are bottom 1/3

I don’t need to spend much time on a season recap. The charts are just so you can see where we stood across the entire FCS, with not many surprises. Plenty of struggles on offense, pretty good everywhere else.

Offense

The Spiders’ strategy often looked stuck in the mud. A heavy dose of power rushing and short passing was ineffective out of the gate (27 offensive points our first three games) and never truly evolved beyond that. We saw a complete 180 in a couple of games, however the Spiders ultimately never found an identity they could build on, scoring 30+ points just twice. We had some great flashes in November, with excellent 2nd halves against Georgetown, Lafayette, and William & Mary, which leaves more questions about our early season offense while hopefully (optimistically?) showing some promise moving forward.

Defense

Hard to not like the nickel defense we saw from Justin Wood. With Tayshaun Burney playing full-time as a 5th DB our coverage was much improved. We gave up more on the ground as a result, however our overall numbers still remained near the top of the league. I imagine we’ll see the Spiders stick with that personnel in 2026, with an emphasis on improving both 3rd down and redzone defense.

Early Signing Period

Always fun to officially have new Spiders on board, as we inked 14 players for next year. There are so many roster updates between now and August that I’ll wait to dive more into the new freshmen leading up to the season.

An admittedly smaller class, as the Spiders aim to be more active in the portal come January. Five of the 14 signees are from Virginia, with Bristow (Hanover) and DeFrancesca (Trinity) from local high schools. If we’ve shown anything the past few seasons it’s that we’re excellent at high school recruiting and this class looks to fit that mold.

The interesting part is four cornerbacks with zero safeties. The official team account is stating cornerback (rather than DB), however I wouldn’t be shocked if at least one guy slides to safety at some point. I do think this coincides with us playing a more Nickel focused defense, as secondary players that can guard man-to-man will continue to be extremely valuable.

Transfer Portal

And now for the not so fun part. We’re currently in the “all subtractions, no additions” phase of the portal so it wasn’t a fun end of November/early December in terms of personnel.

As of Sunday eight guys announced their intentions to leave through various social media postings. (Keep in mind no one can officially enter the portal until January 2nd.) Trey Gray and Donovan Hoilette have their X accounts showing agents/eligibility so I imagine they’ll enter at some point (but no official announcement yet).

Sadly it looks like the question of winning with our young, recruited talent in set to play out again in 2026. I stated above that 2025 was a fine year for steadying the ship however consistently navigating this level of impactful turnover could change everything. With seemingly another 10+ Spiders entering the portal that either started or played significant snaps, something in our approach has to change. The current “portal landscape” we are in has flipped college football and Richmond needs to adapt, both in recruiting and in retention.

We can’t expect such a high number of inexperienced Spiders to constantly fill voids the way they had to this season. I know it will be extremely rare to have impactful players stay for 3+ years, but how we develop relationships to keep guys past that “breakout season” is becoming paramount. Losing guys that are getting high value Power-4 money will continue to happen (and frankly it’s a nice recruiting pitch to high schoolers). What’s alarming are the number of players that burst onto the scene and then immediately depart the following offseason to destinations where money wasn’t the primary reason.

I completely understand every person’s circumstance is different and will never fault anyone for making what they feel is the best decision personally. No matter what the driving factor is it’s on the staff (and the University) to carve a path to keep our roster more intact on a yearly basis. I know Coach Huesman plans on attacking the portal more aggressively this offseason however I hope he addresses the increased departures and our plans to alleviate that in the future. We’re always going to lose players, especially those that have earned their UR degree, but it’s unrealistic to consistently make the playoffs without increased roster continuity.

Next Post

Outside of the games the most common question I got was how the CAA and Patriot League stacked up, so I’ll put that comparison together in late December. The first roster update will come in early January, once guys have officially entered the portal and offers/commits start coming out.