How New Redshirt Rule Would Affect Oklahoma State

There is a future college football world that exists in which we could see freshmen play up to four games and keep their redshirts. Sound too good to be true? It’s not. The rule, pending confirmation and implementation, is a semi-response to players like Leonard Fournette and Christian “Ben Grogan benches more than me” McCaffrey skipping bowl games.

Here’s Stewart Mandel of Fox Sports.

The American Football Coaches Association is forwarding a proposal to the NCAA that would allow players to participate in up to four games of a season without burning their redshirt year. If passed, theoretically, a coach could unleash his touted four-star freshman running back in the TaxSlayer Bowl.

“I think that would be pretty intriguing to some of the fan bases,” said AFCA executive director Todd Berry, “which might legitimize some of those bowl games and make them more interesting. [Fox Sports]

I’m all in on this. Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy often talks about how you don’t really know what you have in a player until the lights are turned on. Problem is, once you turn those lights on and put a guy in, his redshirt is gone.

This is especially true of a place like OSU that is reticent to hit in practice and collects so much of its evaluation and knowledge from actual games. Some spillover benefits including me not having to sift through all 45,232 pages of the NCAA rule book to see if Dillon Stoner is eligible for a redshirt and being able to play freshmen at the end of the year (when they’re not really freshmen anymore) if starters get injured.

Ahem, it probably wouldn’t matter because he’s leaving for the NFL anyway, but Mason Rudolph would still have two years of eligibility left. Can you imagine?!

“We really haven’t addressed the redshirt rule in quite some time,” Dana Holgorsen told Fox Sports. “We’re playing way more games than we used to — there used to be a 10-game season. They’re looking at it, and I would support it.”

I don’t think Dana is alone here.