[washingtonismoney]

1) You have super talented freshmen (eg Alabama) and you know the players won't stay on the team for all four years, let alone five.
2) You have a bad team, and the upperclassmen just aren't really good enough to beat out the freshmen.

Tying these two points together -- as well as CTCard's about year-to-year variation -- it seems to me Stanford is (likely) uniquely predisposed to not playing freshmen:

1) It's consistently a good team, which means its freshmen have better players to beat out.
2) It consistently recruits best at OL and QB, the positions that generally require the most experience to excel in.

And then there are other various idiosyncratic factors. Like I suppose in an alternate universe Kaden Smith never tears his ACL and is a valuable third TE in 2016.

[washingtonismoney]

1) You have super talented freshmen (eg Alabama) and you know the players won't stay on the team for all four years, let alone five.
2) You have a bad team, and the upperclassmen just aren't really good enough to beat out the freshmen.

Tying these two points together -- as well as CTCard's about year-to-year variation -- it seems to me Stanford is (likely) uniquely predisposed to not playing freshmen:

1) It's consistently a good team, which means its freshmen have better players to beat out.
2) It consistently recruits best at OL and QB, the positions that generally require the most experience to excel in.

And then there are other various idiosyncratic factors. Like I suppose in an alternate universe Kaden Smith never tears his ACL and is a valuable third TE in 2016.