West Virginia LB Tirek Austin-Cave enters NCAA transfer portal

West Virginia linebacker Tirek Austin-Cave has entered the NCAA transfer portal, On3 has learned. Austin-Cave is in the portal once again after starting his career at Miami.

Tirek Austin-Cave appeared in only three games last season, finishing with three tackles, including 0.5 tackles for loss.

The New Jersey native was ranked as a three-star recruit and the No. 485 overall player in the country in the class of 2020, according to the On3 Industry rankings.

Tirek Austin-Cave immediately made an impact with Miami after signing with the Hurricanes for the class of 2020. As a freshman, he played in nine games, mostly appearing on special teams. He finished the year with seven tackles.

In 2021, Austin-Cave was once again mainly a special teams contributor. He appeared in eight games that season, recording five tackles.

After the 2021 season, Austin-Cave entered the transfer portal, before ending up at West Virginia. During his first season with the Mountaineers in 2022, he played in 10 games, recording only one tackle. He once again didn’t contribute much during the 2023 season and is now in the transfer portal for the second time.

It will be interesting to see where he ends up next as he searches for somewhere where he can make a bigger impact.

Neal Brown breaks down how West Virginia built roster entering 2024

Even with the loss of Tirek Austin-Cave, the West Virginia roster is in a good place overall.

The Mountaineers are coming off their best season yet under fifth-year coach Neal Brown, a 9-4 campaign that was capped by a win in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl against North Carolina.

Brown has been slowly building, and he’s seen this developing for quite some time. It took a while for everything to get organized in the new era of NIL, which cost West Virginia initially.

“If you go in reverse, kind of where we were after our bowl game, we lose the Guaranteed Rate Bowl to Minnesota, who was better than us, at the end of the ’21 season,” Brown said on the Andy Staples On3 show. “And we just didn’t have the necessary things in place to hold onto our players.”

Fast forward a few years and Brown thinks that has changed at this point.

“Now we do. Our collective, the Country Roads Trust, we’ve done a really good job of raising money,” Neal Brown said. “I think that it’s very well run. It’s backed. And we’ve got a really good plan and they’ve got a really good plan. So that’s kind of changed and allowed us to retain. That’s been a big piece of it.”