James Franklin is still adding to the operation in Blacksburg, and the latest addition comes from the personnel side of the building.
Virginia Tech is expected to hire Georgia State director of player personnel Maleak Bryant as a member of its personnel and recruiting staff, according to CBS Sports.
Bryant has spent his early career on the recruiting and roster-building side rather than the field. At Georgia State, he ran the director of player personnel post under head coach Dell McGee, helping manage the Panthers' recruiting board, high school evaluations and the transfer portal traffic that now shapes every roster in the country.
Before he got into the personnel space, Bryant was a tight end at UAB. He came to the Blazers out of Mays High School in Atlanta at 6-6, and his path through college football was not a smooth one. Three days before the 2021 spring game, he caught a pass, turned up the field and had his tibia snap on a low hit. He fought back from that, dropped weight and worked his way into UAB's tight end rotation, appearing in games as a redshirt junior in 2022. He later went on to pursue an MBA at Long Island University.
That combination, a player who lived the grind and then went and got the business degree, is the profile a lot of programs are chasing for their personnel departments right now. The people building rosters have to think like scouts and like general managers at the same time.
Bryant lands at a program in the middle of a full reset. Franklin was hired at Virginia Tech on November 17, 2025, on a five-year deal, and he has spent the winter assembling his first staff in Blacksburg. That group includes offensive coordinator Ty Howle, who followed Franklin from Penn State, and Brent Pry, who returned as defensive coordinator and linebackers coach after four seasons as the Hokies' head coach. As with most Power Four programs, the personnel and recruiting operation is a big piece of how he plans to rebuild the roster in the ACC.
The Hokies and Franklin era get started on September 5th against VMI before playing Old Dominion the next week and then Maryland before starting ACC play with a trip to Boston College to take on Bill O'Brien on Chestnut Hill.
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