[msqueri]

Yup, I agree. My thoughts are as follows:
1) Given the decreasing likelihood of five year graduation, we might as well burn redshirts with impunity.  If someone can contribute their freshman year, even if it is on special teams or as an Ogre, forget about the six game limit and just play them.  Any benefit that could be anticipated on the back end has to be heavily discounted by the probability that there won’t be a back end.
2) work hard to get potential fifth year contributors on track for a Stanford graduate program early. Stanford’s coterminal degrees are designed to be completed in five years for both a bachelor’s and master’s program, which fits well with the football program.  Plus, a Stanford master’s degree does carry some cachet.  The catch is that planning for it really has to happen during a student’s third year.  So, have that conversation early, work to plan for coterm enrollment, which has the additional advantage of two-way certainty (the player will know they have a spot on the team for their fifth year and the staff will know the player won’t grad transfer). Plus, it looks good all the way around— prospective student athletes can be wooed with the possibility of getting an undergraduate and master’s degree, and touting all the guys who graduate with graduate degrees is something that the program and university can point to with pride.
3) this is an observation… things will change once the COVID year has worked itself through the system. You had a bunch of athletes suddenly looking at an extra year of eligibility, which may have upended some plans.

BC

1) Yes, you and Lex are absolutely right about that. "Redshirt" really shouldn't even be in the vocabulary anymore. Not only are there the factors produced by the transfer portal/NIL/etc., but there's also the four game redshirt rule. Now a player can apply a redshirt any year of their career if they miss two thirds of the season. That's as likely to happen late career as early career. The only criterion for playing should be if somebody can contribute and is the best man for the playing time. That being said, I don't think that changes the competitive disadvantage we're at when offensive and defensive linemen don't play five or even six (happens more than you'd think at other schools, and most of our players have that option due to the Covid mulligan) years. Since linemen generally take more time to mature and be able to contribute, there's still a big place for linemen in their fifth and sixth years. I've gone more in depth showing that in other analyses but fifth year linemen are far from extinct elsewhere. If we have Rouse, Bragg, and Nugent leave after this year, that will really sting.

2) Lots of good thoughts in here about being thoughtful and strategic about preparing/coaching players for Stanford grad opportunities, but it only goes so far. The coaches can't control whether the best laid plans will pan out for the individuals, though coterms seem like they build in more predictability than applying to other grad programs. There's also the issue of the coaches needing to build in some decision space/optionality. For example, under your vision our 2018 recruiting class would have had lots of players who the coaches worked with up front on being able to get a grad degree at Stanford so they could stay for a fifth year....but what would we have done about Loa Kaufusi, Jack West, Andres Fox, Caleb Kelly, Justus Woods, and Donjae Logan? Those are players we not only wanted but needed to retire or transfer out. How do you prepare an academic plan for a player to stay five years when there players you are going to need to leave. Tricky. And the earlier you start that forecasting the more fraught - two/three/four years ago Fox, Kaufusi, and West would have all had a best case scenario in which we would have hoped they'd be around in 2022. I'll be blunt: if we told players they'd have a spot on the team for a fifth year, we'd be a much worse team. I don't want these guys I've named taking up scholarships.

3) Absolutely. I've been trying to game it out to think what that landscape will look like. I sort of have a feeling it will feel like a cliff to us, with the reality (Stanford being a 3-4 year school for players, other teams having that dynamic be much less pronounced AND being able to replenish with the transfer portal more than we can). But the future is murky. I think the best we can do is consistently recruit big, good classes and manage late career attrition as best as we can. In many ways, the 2022 recruiting class and the bad players leaving/good players returning dynamic we saw this offseason were pretty competent in terms of roster management. I have to add almost because Thomas Booker and Dalyn Wade-Perry declaring for the NFL and Gabe Reid and Austin Jones transferring out were detrimental (and I'd say Booker, Reid, and Jones deeply detrimental) and in a perfect world we'd have those two and not have Ethan Bonner and a few worthless chronically medically infirm players. But no coaches can really call all their shots, and we managed the roster competently this offseason.

[msqueri]

Yup, I agree. My thoughts are as follows:
1) Given the decreasing likelihood of five year graduation, we might as well burn redshirts with impunity.  If someone can contribute their freshman year, even if it is on special teams or as an Ogre, forget about the six game limit and just play them.  Any benefit that could be anticipated on the back end has to be heavily discounted by the probability that there won’t be a back end.
2) work hard to get potential fifth year contributors on track for a Stanford graduate program early. Stanford’s coterminal degrees are designed to be completed in five years for both a bachelor’s and master’s program, which fits well with the football program.  Plus, a Stanford master’s degree does carry some cachet.  The catch is that planning for it really has to happen during a student’s third year.  So, have that conversation early, work to plan for coterm enrollment, which has the additional advantage of two-way certainty (the player will know they have a spot on the team for their fifth year and the staff will know the player won’t grad transfer). Plus, it looks good all the way around— prospective student athletes can be wooed with the possibility of getting an undergraduate and master’s degree, and touting all the guys who graduate with graduate degrees is something that the program and university can point to with pride.
3) this is an observation… things will change once the COVID year has worked itself through the system. You had a bunch of athletes suddenly looking at an extra year of eligibility, which may have upended some plans.

BC

1) Yes, you and Lex are absolutely right about that. "Redshirt" really shouldn't even be in the vocabulary anymore. Not only are there the factors produced by the transfer portal/NIL/etc., but there's also the four game redshirt rule. Now a player can apply a redshirt any year of their career if they miss two thirds of the season. That's as likely to happen late career as early career. The only criterion for playing should be if somebody can contribute and is the best man for the playing time. That being said, I don't think that changes the competitive disadvantage we're at when offensive and defensive linemen don't play five or even six (happens more than you'd think at other schools, and most of our players have that option due to the Covid mulligan) years. Since linemen generally take more time to mature and be able to contribute, there's still a big place for linemen in their fifth and sixth years. I've gone more in depth showing that in other analyses but fifth year linemen are far from extinct elsewhere. If we have Rouse, Bragg, and Nugent leave after this year, that will really sting.

2) Lots of good thoughts in here about being thoughtful and strategic about preparing/coaching players for Stanford grad opportunities, but it only goes so far. The coaches can't control whether the best laid plans will pan out for the individuals, though coterms seem like they build in more predictability than applying to other grad programs. There's also the issue of the coaches needing to build in some decision space/optionality. For example, under your vision our 2018 recruiting class would have had lots of players who the coaches worked with up front on being able to get a grad degree at Stanford so they could stay for a fifth year....but what would we have done about Loa Kaufusi, Jack West, Andres Fox, Caleb Kelly, Justus Woods, and Donjae Logan? Those are players we not only wanted but needed to retire or transfer out. How do you prepare an academic plan for a player to stay five years when there players you are going to need to leave. Tricky. And the earlier you start that forecasting the more fraught - two/three/four years ago Fox, Kaufusi, and West would have all had a best case scenario in which we would have hoped they'd be around in 2022. I'll be blunt: if we told players they'd have a spot on the team for a fifth year, we'd be a much worse team. I don't want these guys I've named taking up scholarships.

3) Absolutely. I've been trying to game it out to think what that landscape will look like. I sort of have a feeling it will feel like a cliff to us, with the reality (Stanford being a 3-4 year school for players, other teams having that dynamic be much less pronounced AND being able to replenish with the transfer portal more than we can). But the future is murky. I think the best we can do is consistently recruit big, good classes and manage late career attrition as best as we can. In many ways, the 2022 recruiting class and the bad players leaving/good players returning dynamic we saw this offseason were pretty competent in terms of roster management. I have to add almost because Thomas Booker and Dalyn Wade-Perry declaring for the NFL and Gabe Reid and Austin Jones transferring out were detrimental (and I'd say Booker, Reid, and Jones deeply detrimental) and in a perfect world we'd have those two and not have Ethan Bonner and a few worthless chronically medically infirm players. But no coaches can really call all their shots, and we managed the roster competently this offseason.