Freshmen Participation in the Harbaugh Era: 2015-2021 (2020 omitted)

Interesting post, OP.  a LOT of players on those lists that didn't finish their careers at Michigan regardless of playing or not playing. Seems like the new "normal" of college football will see more freshman playing and burning redshirts for most position groups. i think the 5th year player will become increasingly less common. Unless you're MSU, they'll still get their guys a 6th year.

Great post. I loved seeing that reminder of which guys were in which class.

Is Carter Selzer the only guy from the 2017 class still on our roster? Oliver Martin and Dylan McCaffrey are still playing for other teams.

It may just be recency bias and how the first two games have gone, but it sure seems like a whole bunch of the '21 Freshman have played way more than some of the other names from years past. Regardless if this is true or not, it's good that a lot of these guys have seen the field early this year. Bodes well for the future. 

I think Harbaugh’s approach is as follows.

1. You’ll earn game time through preparation.  When you’re ready to go, you’ll see game time - all things considered - e,g, Solid leads permit more player participation.

2. Enroll early, if possible.

3. Maintain Academic progress. If so, you could complete your undergraduate degree by the end of your third year on campus.

4.  There is no concern about saving - or burning  - a redshirt.

5. if you’ve followed your academic plan - and redshirted - and are “lower” on the depth chart, there are two options.  After three full years - A) begin your graduate studies at Michigan, or B) be a grad transfer  to another program with two full years of eligibility (who has their degree from Michigan).

I appreciate the that larger leads provide to get more players on the field.  Nothing replicates game experience - nothing.  As has been said - “You get better at football, by playing football.”

The only one that stood out as maybe being incorrect is Hinton getting a DNP in 2019. He was a 5* and I swear he saw a few snaps; particularly in the bowl game vs Bama IIRC

Still, goes to show that he left way too early. Basically no time as a freshman, was a disaster in 2020, and was decent playing alongside two 1st round pick ends and an emerging nose. 

Thanks for putting this together. It’s cool seeing guys who didn’t even see the field once as freshmen yet emerged into good players for us (i.e. Runyan, Hayes, Vadtardis, McGrone (for a minute)

Thanks, great post.  Transfers make it hard to know for sure, but I'm honestly surprised by how few of the burned redshirts seem like mistakes in retrospect.

I'm tempted to say this is a good sign. It seems like stronger teams have correlated with higher participation rates, which makes sense, because the way you get to the deep bench (freshmen and walk-ons) is to take care of business early against the bad teams at home. (Which coincidentally is a large part of why we beat Rutgers so badly in 2016--since we were on the road we could only dress 70 players, which meant that the true deep bench players didn't even make the trip, keeping better players on the field through the end of the game).

Somewhat mitigating this however is remembering that Don Brown seemed to love keeping his starters in even in blowouts; MacDonald/Minter seem much more willing to pull the starters early, allowing a lot more defenders to get into the game.

Very interesting.  Maybe this should be moved to Diaries?

To me there is The Horror and The Horror 2020.  No more be said.

Thanks, Mr. Steak, fascinating stuff.

Am I interpreting it right that only two burned redshirts in 2015 means the cupboard was empty when Harbaugh arrived?

Can someone remind me how they were able to have 41 freshman in 2017…?

So Hutch burned his redshirt in 2018 and Ojabo got a DNP in 2019. Two of the greatest DEs in recent memory took much different paths to the NFL.

Very striking how freshman participation correlates to how well the overall college career goes

I know this is obvious, but I enjoyed going through the list

Greg Crippen burned his redshirt last year?  I wonder if they try to get it back this year with Olu manning the center position.  Only having 2 years for our "center of the future" doesn't seem great.