It’s Week 5 and Clemson has finally settled its QB battle. The Tigers are going with freshman Trevor Lawrence, and the way they did it may be a blueprint for the college football position battle of the future.
How the NCAA’s new redshirt rule could change in-season position battles
Some of these roster announcements could’ve been coincidences, but players and teams have interesting options now.
Photo by Scott Cunningham/Getty Images
Though we don’t know how much former starter Kelly Bryant will play going forward, the NCAA’s new redshirt rule — which allows players to keep their redshirt years if they appear in four or fewer games — adds a wrinkle: what if Bryant and Clemson agree on the senior sitting for the remainder of the year, preserving a year of his eligibility?
Theoretically, Bryant could transfer out and find a new starting job elsewhere as a redshirt senior. Or he could stay and end up playing parts of five seasons at Clemson.
(Of course, he could choose to remain as Clemson’s 2018 backup and play in spot duty or if Lawrence gets hurt, concluding Bryant’s college career.)
Even if Clemson and Bryant don’t intend to use the new rule this way, we could see the post-Week 4 roster decision become a trend.
What if the most competitive college football position battles now extend deep into September? Due to the new redshirt rule, when a team has a particularly tough decision to make at a spot, it now has the option of delaying things.
NFL teams get four preseason games to make depth chart decisions. Now, college football teams have four regular-season games to make the call, too — in a way.
In addition to all of the practices Clemson had to work with, look how much in-game data the Tigers had to base their QB decision on:
Jalen Hurts at Alabama has been in a situation similar to Bryant. Before the 2018 season began, one popular proposal amounted to Hurts saving his four games for the Tide’s stretch run and postseason, then transferring out with an extra year of eligibility. Hurts has chosen to play in Bama’s first four games so far, so one more appearance would mean Hurts and Bama won’t make use of that option.
At a national level, this new rule could change things during the season for every team.
Coaches will tell you that Week 1 is basically a crapshoot, and the most improvement a team will have occurs between Weeks 1 and 2 because everyone knows what they actually have to work on. Now players can play in both and truly stake their claim in the position battle and let everyone make an informed decision about the future.
If they don’t make the cut and choose to leave after that, they can, without having blown a year of eligiblity.
This is also good and bad for the redshirted player.
On the one hand, it allows the player to put as much current game tape on the record as possible. A redshirt freshman can actually show what he can do with the lights on, to prove what he can do in actual college football and take a bit of the mystery out of the transfer equation, instead of everyone projecting based on what he did in high school.
On the other hand, it’s an increased risk of injury during a redshirt year.
We appear to have some non-theoretical examples of post-Week 4 transactions as well.
Outside of Clemson, whose timing could just be coincidence, and Alabama, which might not be using the rule at all:
Oklahoma State’s Jalen McCleskey played in four games during the 2018 season, but didn’t feel like he was playing enough. So he’s going to leave after the season is over, taking advantage of NCAA rules that allow graduates to play without missing a year and avoid losing a year of eligibility in 2018:
Similar for Arkansas’ Jonathan Nance. He played in four games this season, per Arkansas’ participation stats, with only one catch. He has also announced after four weeks that he’ll transfer.
As more players realize this is an option, we could see late-September announcements increase.
It’s all well and good that a player plays up to four games, but since he’s pushed his redshirt allowance to the limit, the player will have to announce his intention to transfer after playing that fourth game or risk, well, being played.
Every position battle from now until kingdom come won’t be decided like this.
The majority will still be settled in camp, or after a game or two — like Alabama’s QB was — but it’s clear that there’s a new key date in the transfer cycle to pay attention to.
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