You essentially take blue shirts for two reasons - the guy is good enough to play for your team and he fills an immediate need. You can argue a couple of other angles here, but in general this is why you are taking blue shirts.
So by now, I am sure people are sick of hearing how bad the roster situation is. Something to consider, though, is how blue shirts would impact roster numbers. Counting only guys who received scholarships out of HS/JUCO and Joe Gibson (since he is young), I count 70 guys on scholarship this upcoming season assuming everyone qualifies, nobody leaves the team, and not counting any blue shirts. Splitting this into groups based on eligibility (assuming no SR/JR/SO redshirts, which may happen), it looks like:
SR - 13
JR - 19
SO - 16
RS FR - 6
FR - 16
So the initial thought is probably "Hey, it doesn't matter what year a blue shirt is as we have relatively low numbers in every class." That isn't true at all. We want to get back up to 85 as quickly as possible. Taking a full 25 man class in 2015 would get us back to an 82 scholarship number, but counting usual roster attrition we are probably looking at the upper 70's which isn't bad. However, if you take even just a couple of blue shirts with only two years of eligibility, we are still likely in the upper 70's when considering attrition and possibly lose ground.
That's why I have been preaching the importance of taking blue shirt guys with three or more years of eligibility left. It's somewhat why I am low on Roberts out of USCe, but at the same time understand why they pursued him given we need bodies at LB bad. It's also why I am a little bit higher on Gonzalez and Gill.
In another post a few days down the road, will take a look at blue shirts by year and their importance for these guys, but the idea here is I don't see a lot of benefits next year with these guys, but down the road I do. For now, I think the important thing to realize is that blueshirts help make our numbers better immediately, but at the same time it is important that these guys like Gonzalez and Gill have three or more years left as they also do not put the roster into a similar situation we saw under Weis where we would potentially lose ground on growing the roster instead of gaining...which 3+ year blue shirt guys do...
So by now, I am sure people are sick of hearing how bad the roster situation is. Something to consider, though, is how blue shirts would impact roster numbers. Counting only guys who received scholarships out of HS/JUCO and Joe Gibson (since he is young), I count 70 guys on scholarship this upcoming season assuming everyone qualifies, nobody leaves the team, and not counting any blue shirts. Splitting this into groups based on eligibility (assuming no SR/JR/SO redshirts, which may happen), it looks like:
SR - 13
JR - 19
SO - 16
RS FR - 6
FR - 16
So the initial thought is probably "Hey, it doesn't matter what year a blue shirt is as we have relatively low numbers in every class." That isn't true at all. We want to get back up to 85 as quickly as possible. Taking a full 25 man class in 2015 would get us back to an 82 scholarship number, but counting usual roster attrition we are probably looking at the upper 70's which isn't bad. However, if you take even just a couple of blue shirts with only two years of eligibility, we are still likely in the upper 70's when considering attrition and possibly lose ground.
That's why I have been preaching the importance of taking blue shirt guys with three or more years of eligibility left. It's somewhat why I am low on Roberts out of USCe, but at the same time understand why they pursued him given we need bodies at LB bad. It's also why I am a little bit higher on Gonzalez and Gill.
In another post a few days down the road, will take a look at blue shirts by year and their importance for these guys, but the idea here is I don't see a lot of benefits next year with these guys, but down the road I do. For now, I think the important thing to realize is that blueshirts help make our numbers better immediately, but at the same time it is important that these guys like Gonzalez and Gill have three or more years left as they also do not put the roster into a similar situation we saw under Weis where we would potentially lose ground on growing the roster instead of gaining...which 3+ year blue shirt guys do...
