If you look at the Elligibility chart listed here:
https://www.canesinsight.com/player/eligibilitychart.php?team=5 all you really need to do is shift the players over (like jrs becoming srs, 2018 recruits becoming freshman) and pretend that when it says senior it means "1 yr elligible". When it says Freshman it means "4 yrs elligible" its a little off with not showing guys like gerald willis. But as of right now we have 78 on scholarship, we are looking to finish 2018 class with 7 more which puts us at 85.
For planning a roster there's basically 3 thing to know:
1. We can have 85 scholarship players per year. No matter what we can not go over this limit. We definitely want to be at 85, But if we are at like 84 or 83 one year and get back to 85 the next its not a big deal. At ALL times this limit must not be exceeded.
2. Every player has 4 years of eligibility. Meaning if you play at all, you are using one year of your eligibility. But there are some circumstances, like an injury waiver, allowing you to retain you eligibility even if you played in like one game. The other way to retain a yr of eligibility is by redshirting. If you redshirt you can NOT play that season, but you still get to keep the 4 yrs of eligibility. One example is Nkosi Perry, who didn't play this yr, so he still has 4 yrs eligible, but corey gaynor who played sparingly this yr only has 3 yrs remaining.
3. The most you can sign in a recruiting class is 25 "initial counters". This basically means that in any year you can only get 25 new players who are being put on scholarship. This is an absolute limit, However there is one kinda cheat to this, and its if a player enrolls early. The way the initial counter works is fluid due to the school year being 2 semesters per year. So because an Early Enrollee enters school for the first time in the second semester his "intial counter" can be used for the previous recruiting class or the class he currently is in. (example is Lorenzo lingard, who is an EE. His scholarship can technically count as part of the 2017 recruiting class' limit of 25 instead of the 2018 class's 25 limit) What this does is allow you to sign more than 25 in a recruiting class, while still technically only using 25 new scholarships per year. This is why our max class this year is 27 or 28 not 25. However, you also have to stay under rule 1 the entire time. So for example if we had 85 scholarships being used this past season, we would be unable to apply any EE to the previous yrs class because that would mean we had 86 scholarships for that year. This would mean 25 would be our absolulte max and not 27/28.
Now if you are planning a roster where you can have 85 scholarship players and each of those players can play 4 or 5 years, then just by simple math you'd want to recruit an average of between 17-22 players per year (even though the limit is 25 per year). However attrition can mean players leaving early via the draft or just transfering out. To account for that most schools try to recruit 25 per class and stay at 85 total every year. However you can see if you get 25 per year and they all played 4 years, by the 4th year youd have 100 players which obviously cant happen since the limit is 85. Thats how attrition can help a team, because they bring in more talent than they should, but dont actually ever surpass 85 total because so many players leave for the draft or transfer out due to being lost on the depth chart.
Attrition can hurt the depth chart just by simply leaving little depth. And thats what we saw these past couple years. We played with like 74 total scholarships this year. So depth was bad purely based on the amount of scholarships, but when you add in that Mullins left, Walton, got hurt and the rest of the injuries, it was really bad depth. Now its pretty clear how you fix that, you just take classes of 25 or more like we are currently doing. Basically we've been undergoing a 2 year fix of the roster to get us back to 85, which looks like it will finally happen next season once we get 27 in the 2018 recruiting class. The effect oversigning has, is it usually means a smaller class the next year. So because we will be signing a max class in 2018, that means no EEs for the 2019 class can be applied to the 2018 class. So 2019 has a maximum of 25 players (if we get 28/28 this yr which is the plan). Thats no matter what happens with attrition. Then you gotta factor in that if we are at 85 limit, and only have 15 seniors graduating, that would mean without any other attrition, we could ONLY get a 15 man class in 2019. So thats why guys who definitely wont get PT like Bar Milo, George brown, knowles, finley, etc should transfer out. ever person that leaves via attrition lets us sign one more than 15 up to 25.
