The one caveat to that might be it might hurt us in the future. Eventually the ACC seems doomed to break up or at least break down into a lesser league. To appeal to any better league football needs to be better. If not the influx of money pouring into other sports will crush everything even the non revenue sports. Already we see that in Lacrosse where the BIG 10 has 6 of the top 25 teams now. So we need football to get a better deal in the not too distant future. But no we will never win a championship in football.
ACC football is not getting a better deal anytime soon. It’s just not a good fall Saturday product compared to the alternatives and it is falling further behind. Clem is pretty panicked about it. They MUST have a top15 football program or stuff starts sliding off across the board for them.
Is 6 more than they used to have? Don’t only like 6 ACC schools even play lax?
How blunt do we think end-of-season player meetings are with regard to Tony’s intentions on playing time?
I’ve always imagined the conversation with guys went something like this: “We want to see you succeed here and think you’ve got some work to do. It’s our intention to go out looking for a transfer at your position. We hope you’ll stay but understand if you decide to go.” In my head, guys like Justin Mckoy knew that Tony was going to go out looking for Jayden Gardner. Morsell knew we were going to look for a scorer like Armaan Franklin. Maybe ditto Shedrick and Traudt. It’s ultimately because they know exactly where they stand with Tony, and it’s not exactly ideal.
5 total. 3 are ranked in the top 4 and UNC is 12th lol Cuse has been a mess lately
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There were 6 the years after Syracuse joined, but before Maryland left. Might’ve only been 1 year now that I think about it.
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This is a great piece, @Cuts_from_The_Corner. You managed to address all the message-board potholes (“But he chose the redshirt,” etc.). It’s a well laid-out case, and I love to see it all put down in one place.
I pick only one nit. You briefly mention the benefit of coaches “seeing the guys on the floor against outside competition”. I think coaches will see little value in this; they have too much practice footage already to care. It’s the players who will benefit most from seeing themselves on the floor. They need that “reality check.” A guy thinks he deserves minutes? Then give him minutes and let him see how wrong he is. (Or if it turns out he plays great, well, great.) A poor game performance should improve his practice engagement as well. The player now sees just how valid the coaches’ feedback is (I really do need to work on X and Y), and he’ll also work harder if he knows he’ll play again at some point, bc he doesn’t want to embarrass himself a second time, or let his teammates down. (That last clause is key to retention too, bc that’s how team bonds form, through mutual reliance.)
Related to that, I’d emphasize that “eliminate the redshirt” can’t just mean “give the guy garbage-time only.” I think that’s the worst of both worlds. You need to give the guy occasional “real” (e.g. first-half) minutes to capture the benefits. Exactly how much… a lot goes into that call. But it has to be some.
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One of my best friends is a Carolina fan (I feel like the beginning of a 12 step program)…
He used to talk about how frustrated he’d get in November when some random bench player would get 5-10 mins of first half run in a game (Platek is a good example) and play badly. But inevitably, sometime in Jan/Feb that player would have a great game that helped them when they needed a spark. There is real benefit from getting selective run in November to help March. Even for folks that that year aren’t breaking into the real minute rotation… And definitely helped those players the next year.
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Thanks for reading!
It’s a little hard because I haven’t made my case for playing time yet which will come in piece 3 - so, in a way, this one was incomplete. I agree about not just garbage time, though, and I also feel as though my piece seems to have confused some, so I probably could have written it better, in that I’m not intending to say “eliminate the redshirt entirely.” I am saying that for players like Traudt or most of our highly talented guys who it could be hard to find an equitable ceiling or superior replacement for in the portal/could end up progressing and leaving early anyway. I’m saying we should err on the side of caution here if we don’t want to risk losing them if they aren’t one of these gung ho “I WANT the redshirt” guys, of which there are very few as evidenced by what they all say but also in how it’s being utilized nationally. I’m sure there will be a couple of one-offs over the years to come, though.
I completely agree with your second paragraph and wasn’t an angle that I included but I think is a great point.
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I think you were clear; I should have said “take off” the redshirt (from an individual) rather than “eliminate” (the entire practice). I took your point to be something like: “Redshirting increases retention risk, although the size of that risk varies by individual, in particular due to game-readiness issues acknowledged by the player (“project” players) and the expectations that were set during the recruitment. Importantly, this risk is substantially larger in an instant-transfer environment and adjustments should be made accordingly, especially when it comes to Top 100 players, who have more expectations of playing, more demand at other schools, and low likelihood of playing 5 years anyway.” But that doesn’t fit on a T-shirt.
Actually, small enough font… I’d buy that shirt and wear it to JPJ.
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Really great piece @Cuts_from_The_Corner . You hit the nail on the head multiple times. I think a lot of people are quick to accept the line of “he CHOSE to redshirt” because it provides them comfort over a really damaging transfer. Common sense tells us he was nudged heavily in that direction and it was obviously not what he anticipated doing when he committed to play for us. Common sense also tells us that any feeling of betrayal, coupled with the isolation of not playing, is likely to exacerbate “home-sickness.” We’ll never know how true the home-sickness reasoning is, but no decisions we made regarding IT helped him feel more at home in C’ville.
Anyway, great piece.
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Sometimes it takes big setbacks for CTB to start rethinking things. Looking back from the future, this might turn out to be the offseason that catalyzed a change in the approach.
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The roster optimization exercise is very complicated - it is a bit like running a stock portfolio. You want spots 1-8 working and spots 11-13 are almost always developmental positions (e.g. working towards earning PT). I have heard Tony state that roster spots 11-13 are almost always non-contributors (and 13 scholarship spots is an artificial construct). This supports his view to always have a scholarship available for transfers, etc (e.g. maintaining optionality). The big issue that I had with the IT redshirt decision was that (1) he had a skill-set that we needed (shooting) and (2) redshirting reduced our optionality of using him later in the season (i.e. if someone got hurt). The optionality is a very important consideration as the future is inherently uncertain and he had a skill set (shooting) we needed - this was different than many other redshirt decisions where there was a clear need to bulk up. Ironically redshirting was in Isaac’s best interests if he was not going to play but clearly not in the TEAM’s best interest. I suspect Tony misread the room on this one as I thought IT would have been a contributor later in the season when our shooting disappeared. I was wondering why Tony did not reconsider IT’s redshirt when we went small and BVP’s back seemed like an issue. IT was a unique redshirt decision and likely one we will not make in the future…
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In truth he probably didn’t have the option; IT was checked out and would have refused to take off the redshirt. But even if he did have the option, a lot of coaches are locked into “My team is on the floor” by then. Tony probably more than most.
I just read an article about Ashley Owusu (women’s player for VT, transferred in from Maryland last year, has tons of accolades: former #1 PG, former third-team All-American, on preseason national POY lists, on and on), who has been DNP since Feb 26. She was injured midseason, and in her absence the team “formed its identity,” and coach felt it was too late to shake things up by trying to work her back into the rotation. It probably helped his decision that Owusu has already used up her one free transfer…
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In the preseason presser, Tony said we had X guys ready to go and Y guys right behind them. But in game 1, we played (X+Y) - 2.
There are always going to be mitigating circumstances and exceptions, but if what Tony said was correct, then we should probably, in most circumstances, be playing X + Y in the early going. In the opinion of me, guy on the internet.
(Obviously, I forget the values for X and Y, or I wouldn’t have written this like your middle school algebra teacher).
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I’m imagining this comment coming up in the JWilly show and Jay responding with his dumb-guy act. “Is that algebra? I think that might be algebra. Or calculus. I don’t know, man. How do you even add letters? It’s crazy.”
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This sums up my thoughts entirely. well done. This is pretty interesting that the staff stands out like this (my question spurred this response on the board) “Of ALL of the top 100 composite ranked recruits within the 2022 class, the ONLY two players who didn’t see any playing time outside of a religious mission, legal issues, or injury, were Isaac Traudt and Leon Bond. The ONLY two”
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I sort of feel like this was JAR in the Gonzaga game.
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