Jamoni Jones, a former running back at New Mexico State, has reportedly joined the roster at Vanderbilt.
The news of Jones’ addition by the Commodores came on Friday.
Jones spent his first year at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M before joining New Mexico State for the last two seasons.
Jerry Kill, the last head coach at New Mexico State, joined Vanderbilt’s staff under Clark Lea as a chief consultant to the head coach and as a senior offensive advisor. With that, five former Aggies, all from their offense, have since transferred to Nashville.
In six appearances as a freshman, Jones had 73 carries for 279 yards and a score. Then, over the past two years with the Aggies, he played in 28 games with several starts and rushed for 726 yards and nine touchdowns on 198 carries. That was among the best in their backfield in both seasons behind only Star Thomas and QB Diego Pavia, who also happened to transfer to Vandy this offseason.
Jones, a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, played high school football at Memorial as part of the 2019 cycle.
Jones is now joining a Top-35 portal class per On3’s 2024 Team Transfer Portal Rankings. He is the 22nd addition to that group from both portal cycles. 13 of those are for the offensive with him being the second running back to commit along with Makhilyn Young, who was with him at New Mexico State as well.
This comes after the Commodores lost 24 transfers themselves. 16 of those were portal losses from the offense. That included all three quarterbacks who recorded statistics last fall, their second-leading rusher in Patrick Smith, and their three leading receivers.
To keep up with the latest players on the move, check out On3’s Transfer Portal wire.
Clark Lea explains his approach to the transfer portal
During the SEC Spring Meetings in Destin, Clark Lea admitted that the Commodores have not utilized the NCAA Transfer Portal as much as they should have up until this offseason.
After admitting his program has not utilized that tool to its maximum potential, the Commodores’ head coach explained why that is the case.
“Part of it is you come in with a blueprint of program building,” Lea said. “This has become a game of team building and that is what it is. So, when you look at the work we’ve done to overhaul our roster in general, we took a more traditional approach — we wanted to give guys more opportunity to change and improve and we held on to some of the guys that were with the program that when we got there. I think that’s what college football has been.”
“Obviously, it’s been turned upside down. I don’t believe in the total, you know, roster purge. I think there’s reason to have a blended approach where you’re still trying to build a foundation. Because, for me, this has always been about how you sustain success. Now, we unfortunately didn’t continue the progress we made in 2022, and so that set a course for us to make some changes in our approach and that’s what we’ve done. But that’s the reason – it just wasn’t a part of the initial design.”
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