We've taken 3 freshmen scholarship backers in each of the last two years... right now we will have 6 scholarship Freshmen. If you look at the classes ahead of them you have Santos, Anderson, and Roach as the only contributors...We have 3 years left including this upcoming season where we still have Afalava, Brown, Rose, Newby, Love, Banderas, and Santos. With Anderson and Roach graduating after the 2014 season, we can afford to easily take 1 LB this year and 2 the next year...IF we have 3-4 solid contributors out of the 6 freshmen we have now. Now I think there's a good chance Newby gets moved to Safety but that's another story. Take a look at each class of contributors below:
RSFR (Afalava, Brown, Rose)
TrFR (Newby, Love, Banderas).
SO (Santos) Pirman is moving to TE.
JR (Anderson, Roach)
SR (none that play)
I've noticed, If you look at our entire football roster. Each position has a player on team to player on field ratio of close to 20%. So for example... we have 28 OL on our roster for 2013. There are 5 spots on the field at a time... Which means at each position we have about 5 bodies. So 5 bodies competing for 1 spot gives each person about a 20% chance of earning that #1 spot. I've found each position to be about the same. If you look at scholarship players out of those 28, about 16 are scholarship guys.... so generally how it works is we have scholarships for a 3 deep and have enough walkons for a 2 deep. At LB, right now we have 15 bodies. Out of the 15 bodies, we have 8 or 9 if you count Pirman, scholarship players. It seems this trend carries out over all the positions. We want a 3 deep of scholarship players and a 2 deep of walkons. The hope is that we have a solid 60-65% of scholarship players develop like we hoped they would with about 30-35% who dont. Then hopefully out of a 2 deep of walkons we get a couple of guys who end up being diamonds in the rough who step up (like a spencer long or matt o'hanlon) to fill in for the scholarship players who didn't cut it.
So this year there's two linebackers I really like for us... #1 is this guy. #2 is Jimmy Swain. I think either could give us a good solid player for this class.