Ok, this is long and all over the place. Sorry about that. There’s a TL;DR at the end.
I started out disagreeing with this. I mean, I don’t think Elijah will beat out Harris (its possible, but I think its unlikely), but he could 100% beat out Taine for effectively the 9th spot. Which seems like it’d be a heck of a lot better than being 12th, but I’m not sure it is. Or, at a minimum, it doesn’t move the probability distribution enough to make it a good thing.
12th means being JAR in 2021 and getting 35 minutes over the entire season. That’s not bad, its disastrous. Literally wasted a year and anyone but a “genuinely just happy to be here” player like McCorkle is an auto-transfer. If that’s even plausibly on the table then there’s a problem because we shouldn’t be a coin-flip away from disaster with a kid as talented as Elijah.
On the other hand, being 9th means being Caffaro last year, Poindexter the year before, and… Caffaro again the year before that. 125-170 minutes over the season, very roughly 5 minutes/game on average but with a wide variance and lots of DNPs. That’s… fine. But its not great. The reality is CTB very rarely goes 9 deep with his regular rotation and #9 is mostly on the outside looking in.
Where you want to be is 8th. Rarely you’ll get a worst-case scenario like Taine 2 years ago at ~150 minutes, but most of the time 8th means Dunn last year with 300+ minutes or McKoy in '21, which he wasn’t happy with but ~230 minutes is respectable playing time.
Sure, Elijah might hit a home run and make it to 8th by the end of the season, but the more likely best-case scenario is 9th. And falling to 11th behind Taine and Minor because of match-ups or lingering injury issues is at least as likely as getting to 8th
So, if there’s a probability distribution of 10% 8th (good), 60% 9th (disappointing), and 30% 10th or worse (bad to utter disaster), then redshirt looks more reasonable. When your best, reasonable-case scenario is “meh, tolerable” then a redshirt feels awful but isn’t necessarily worse than the realistic level of playing time.
Even the absolute best case scenario, in which he figures out the defense and everything clicks about as conference play begins, and maybe someone else in the backcourt gets hurt, he’d still mostly only be playing in blow-outs. Maybe 20-50 minutes played total going into the holidays, depending on how the games go and then hoping to gradually ramp up into ACC play. Is that really more encouraging than a redshirt?
Sure, it depends on the kid, but now might be the single best time in recent memory for a redshirt to work out well. First, part of the issue of being a redshirt is the feeling of being apart from the rest of the team and isolated. Its rough being alone. On its face, its ridiculous we have three non-medical redshirts, but it also means we’ve got a small community of redshirts. They aren’t alone, they’ve got each other to bond with and who know exactly what they’re going through.
Second, they can watch Bond! Sure, Traudt was a sourpuss and is now gone after redshirting. But Bond also redshirted, has a great attitude, and may be turning into a rockstar before their very eyes.
TL;DR - Sure, redshirting sucks. But it takes utter disaster (JAR-like playing time) off the table, its less crappy when you’ve got people you can complain to who understand, and having a model of the process working well right in front of you should help with long-term concerns. I think its actually ok, or at least less terrible than it initially seems.
