Attrition

[denguegopher]

At the risk of being ID'd as a slow learner, I finally better understand the problem with attrition. At UNLV's signing party yesterday coach Bobby Hauck expounded a little on that issue. I was fully aware that if a player leaves and is not on track to graduate that can effect the number of scholarships that a school can award. Another issue is the limitation in the maximum number of players that can be signed in a single year, (he said 25). He also said in his first year at UNLV, because of terrible attrition, he only had 72 scholarship players, even though he is allowed to have 85. Thus, when people make comments such as, "I don't care if this guy leaves the program, he was never going to play anyway, and its better that we can replace him with someone who might be able to contribute," they may be wrong. We can't always just replace people who leave. And if someone who is in academic peril leaves, it doubly hurts the team. Please excuse me if you already understood the ramifications of attrition, or if this comes off as being pedantic. Go Gophers!

 

[Dirk Diggler]

I'm not sure how it works. Neither does anyone else that's why there are no responses.

 

[Sparlimb]

We don't need those guys anyway. Heck, once upon a time 11 guys could be a team. 22, and you get a break once in a while.

 

[Lakeville Goldy]

At the risk of being ID'd as a slow learner, I finally better understand the problem with attrition. At UNLV's signing party yesterday coach Bobby Hauck expounded a little on that issue. I was fully aware that if a player leaves and is not on track to graduate that can effect the number of scholarships that a school can award. Another issue is the limitation in the maximum number of players that can be signed in a single year, (he said 25). He also said in his first year at UNLV, because of terrible attrition, he only had 72 scholarship players, even though he is allowed to have 85. Thus, when people make comments such as, "I don't care if this guy leaves the program, he was never going to play anyway, and its better that we can replace him with someone who might be able to contribute," they may be wrong. We can't always just replace people who leave. And if someone who is in academic peril leaves, it doubly hurts the team. Please excuse me if you already understood the ramifications of attrition, or if this comes off as being pedantic. Go Gophers!

It is slightly more complicated than that, but you touched on the two primary factors:

1. You are limited to signing 25 incoming players a year to scholarships. You can also back charge three additional players to the prior year (if you had scholarships available) to make a maximum of 28 players. You can also "gray shirt" players by having them sign but not enroll until next season, thus counting for the following year's total. However, since they are not enrolled, they cannot participate at all. I don't believe there is any limit on walk-ons other than I believe the total roster cannot exceed 110 players. There are no limits that I know of preventing you from giving as many scholarships to walk-ons after their first year as you want so long as the total number of scholarships is 85 or less.
2. There is a statistic called APR (look it up on Wikipedia for a more thorough explanation) that is based off GPA and player retention. It can be affected both by players leaving in good and bad standing. If your APR drops below a certain level you lose scholarships - I believe both total and per year signings. So this can be a huge detriment. Plus you can lose post-season eligibility. And if the whole athletic department falls below a certain average (even if it's only one sport that is low) there are department wide implications.

 

[Gopherprof]

Like everything in life, the context matters.

-Generally speaking, you will almost always have 57 scholarship players on your team, so the scenario where you sign 28 guys and still don't have 85 scholarship players is somewhat rare. What we saw this year on our own team was pretty close to the limit, but rarely does it get much worse than that (UNLV sounds like a mess).

-I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think the limit on backloading to 25 + 3 is Big Ten rule, not a NCAA rule. In other words, you can only sign 25 guys per academic year, but you could charge 8 players to the previous year, so long as you are still within the limits and your conference allows it. Miami, for example, signed a class of 33 players this year, so there has to be some flexibility there depending on the conference.

-For our own team next year, we will have well under 25 scholarships (looks like 12 seniors on scholarship, depending upon walk-ons like Austin Hahn). So, we could lose 5-6 guys to natural attrition, which is an entirely natural thing (depending upon which players, and why). Just like people looked at our quarterbacks and assumed one of them would transfer (Parrish..and Pride, if you count him as a QB), I think it's fair to look at some other positions and at least see the potential for the same thing occurring.

-We have, for example, 5 sophmore wide receivers under scholarship next year (Crawford-Tufts, Jones, Fruetche, Wilson, Hutton). While the first three seem to have a good shot at playing time, I think it's fair to speculate that the Wilson and Hutton are looking at long odds (not recruited by Kill, didn't play at all last year), especially with the addition of McDonald and Harbison. They may be fine with that. They may change positions. Or they may end up being tremendous special teams players. I want to be clear that if they want to stay, so long as their grades are fine and they stay good with the law, I want them to stay too. I would never advocate kicking a player off the team for performance issues. But, if they want to play, they've got some work ahead of them. You could say the same thing about our offensive line. We will have 12-13 sophmore and freshman offensive linemen next year. Because of the nature of the position, only 7-8 of those guys will ever be part of the regular starting lineup. It's a safe bet that all 13 of those guys won't stick around for all 4-5 years.

-Eventually guys will transfer. It happens in every program. You just hope that they do it under good terms and of their own choosing.