Still, it wasn’t enough. The only offer from an FBS school came from lowly Buffalo — within hours of signing day and only after another player had decommitted.

“They were like, ‘Oh, crap. We gotta sign this guy now,’?” Tyler joked.

Convinced he was overlooked, Tyler chose to walk on at Virginia Tech. Three years later, the redshirt sophomore is one of the Hokies’ rising stars. When No. 17 Virginia Tech (11-2) faces No. 13 Michigan (10-2) on Tuesday, Tyler will be in the starting lineup, providing evidence that recruiting is an inexact science.

So how did Tyler go from walk-on to blossoming star?

It wasn’t so much a leap of faith as it was following a roadmap laid out for him by Cody Grimm, another former Oakton linebacker and Virginia Tech walk-on who now plays for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

During Christmas break three years ago, Tyler and his father, Tim, sat in a Glory Days Grill peppering Grimm with questions about Virginia Tech. Grimm, the son of NFL Hall of Fame guard Russ Grimm, told the Tylers what they needed to hear.

“He said, ‘If you come, they’re going to treat you like everyone else. You’re going to get a shot,’?” Jack Tyler said. “That kind of stamped it right there.”

It wasn’t a hard sell. Tyler already was a “huge fan” of Virginia Tech dating from Michael Vick’s days in Blacksburg. It also helped that Tyler idolized Grimm, the player with whom often he was compared as he grew up a star in the Chantilly Youth Association and later at Oakton.

If Grimm could make it at Virginia Tech, then Tyler — 25 pounds heavier and just as fast — could, too.

“It helped a lot that we came from the same background,” Tyler said. “I felt like the things he was capable of doing I was capable of doing. It also motivated me to accomplish those same things.”

It also helped that Virginia Tech has a long history of recruiting and developing walk-on players, many of them from Northern Virginia. NFL draft picks John Engelberger (Lee) and Will Montgomery (Centreville) began as Hokies walk-ons.

Virginia Tech recruits roughly a dozen walk-ons every year. After they spend a redshirt year in the program, Hokies coaches know who will pan out. Late in his first year in Blacksburg, Tyler was called into the office of coach Frank Beamer, who told him he had earned a scholarship.

Why would a school such as Virginia Tech, which can recruit at the highest level, be so invested in developing walk-ons?

“Tech does a great job hedging its bets,” former Oakton coach Joe Thompson said. “It’s basically a numbers game.”

According to Thompson, many lesser college programs failed to recruit Grimm and Tyler because they lacked prototypical size.

“For example, I had several schools tell me, ‘We don’t scholarship an outside linebacker unless he’s 6-3 or better.’ It’s arrogant, but that’s what they do,” Thompson said. “There has to be a way to measure performance and production versus the calculus of how big they are and how fast they run.”

Other schools discounted his potential. But Tyler, now 230 pounds, has rewarded Virginia Tech for the opportunity. Last year in the ACC Championship game, Tyler produced three tackles for a loss and seven overall filling in for an injured starter in a 44-33 win over Florida State. He then started vs. Stanford in the Orange Bowl.

Tyler got his first start this season in a 37-26 win over Georgia Tech, notching a team-high 12 tackles. Two weeks later in a 38-0 shutout of Virginia, Tyler ended two Cavaliers drives in Virginia Tech territory, making a fourth-down stop and recovering a fumble.

“I knew I could do this if I got the chance,” Tyler said. “Coach [Bud] Foster always says, ‘It’s a performance business. The best players always play.’ There can’t be a better school to come to if you’re a walk-on and you’re determined to prove that people were wrong about you.”

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