The NCAA's June rule change regarding redshirts came as a relief for Northern Arizona's coaching staff.
"It will be a different challenge for us to integrate, but I think it is better for the student-athletes, it is better for the quality of the game and it is better for the safety of young men," said Lumberjacks head coach
Jerome Souers.
Previously, a single play would nullify a redshirt season and count as a full season against an athlete's eligibility. Now with the NCAA's decision to allow all players to play in up to four games, a freshman can get game experience in his first collegiate season and return for his second year with four seasons to play.
"Those kids can stay in developmental form and we don't have to make the decision, nobody gets penalized for playing two games at the end of the year. Before a true freshman lost that entire year for two games and that is tragic," Souers said. "We have tried to always avoid that, but there have been times where that really would have helped us in November having those extra bodies."
With just 63 full scholarships at the FCS level, Souers said it is inevitable that schools will have true freshmen on their depth chart whether the team intends to play them significantly or not. Typically, Northern Arizona's coaching staff would make the call as it entered the first week of the season and either redshirt a player or place them on the two-deep with the expectation they would lose a year for just a handful of games.
For players who had seen significant playing time in high school, the prospect of waiting an entire year to play in a game could be daunting.
"Kids turn out to play in games, they really like to play in games," said
Andy Thompson, Northern Arizona's defensive coordinator and associate head coach. "Practices can be tough on younger guys. When they had been the man in high school and then they try to come up here, now it's go practice for a year and we will see you again."
The rule provides a way for coaches to both incentivize practices and reward sticking through a long season of practices helping prepare the team's starters for each week's opponent.
"Home games in general, to be able to reward a guy who is on the scout team and allow him to go run down on kickoff," said offensive coordinator
Aaron Pflugrad. "There's a lot of different scenarios that play into it, but I think it helps each individual student-athlete and then our football team to develop our guys going forward."
One of the most glaring positions on Northern Arizona's roster, where the rule change would have helped in the past, is the Lumberjacks' offensive line.
All five of the Lumberjacks projected starters on the line redshirted during their time at Northern Arizona, leaving a hypothetical 20 games combined worth additional experience on the table. While
Malik Noshi and
Jamison Pruitt have started a combined 26 games in their careers, the five together have just 52 games played across nine seasons.
Depending on how the offensive line shakes out as the season progresses, Northern Arizona could immediately take advantage of the rule. The current two-deep includes three junior college transfers who still retain their redshirt seasons, and could either play sparingly as they transition to Division I or start late in the season while retaining a full year of eligibility.
"Gaining that continuity and experience of being able to play up to four games... We feel really great about it, Pflugrad said. "We are still in talks on how we are going to mamanage that, but definitely we are going to have a plan going forward of getting those guys experience."
While the coaching staff sees advantages for both themselves and the younger players in terms of game experience, additional benefits could come for some of the upperclassmen at the top of the depth chart.
From 2010 to 2016, Northern Arizona played three members of the Division II Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference early in the season. In the six games combined, Northern Arizona outscored its opponents 351-44 with the smallest margin of victory being a 36-point win in 2015.
Though the Lumberjacks won't play a D-II school in 2018, just as they didn't in 2017, a 12-game schedule in 2019 includes a home game against Western New Mexico and another potential lopsided second half.
"Players don't have to play because there nobody else in a game that you are well ahead and you run risk of injury by trying to finish a game out that," Souers said. "We are able to use somebody that is new. I think it is better for the game, it is better for the student-athlete, everybody wins."
Additionally, players will see an easier road to recovering a year missed due to injury. Previously, an exception to the redshirt rule included a player missing two-thirds of a season due to an injury. Recently,
Wes Sutton,
Case Cookus and
Emmanuel Butler all played in four or less games due to injury and had a season of eligibility added back.
However, the NCAA required schools to submit a hardship waiver in order for the season missed due to injury to be ignored. Now schools will be able to write off similar seasons as redshirt years should players still have them available, as Sutton, Cookus and Butler did when they missed significant time.
On the opposite side of injury issues, Pflugrad said positions like quarterback or special teams where one player likely takes every snap throughout the season would be aided by the change as wear and tear occurs through a long season. Now the backups at the positions wouldn't see wasted seasons with just a handful of snaps taken if the starter needs to miss a few plays through the year.
All three of Northern Arizona's top coaches also stressed the usefulness of saving an 18-year-old player to debut later in his freshman season, or simply get a game or two of experience against a group of players likely to be three or four years older, after he is further into his transition from high school .
"It is just 18 and 22 is a big difference," Thompson said. "There's a freshman team in high school, JV and then you play varsity. College football, you have got one team and they expect everyone to be at the same level, but it is not always the same."
