The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Scholarship Playaz

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Here’s an interesting post from NittanyNick over on in the premium board at FOS detailing the number of scholarship players on the Penn State squad, the years they were recruited, and their star ratings. I thought I’d re-post it here without permission because it’s widely available information, except for Nick’s synopsis, which is better than anything I could write. This demonstrates how hard we’ve been hit and will continue to be hit by the NCAA sanctions — not only in terms of the scholarship reductions imposed by them, but also because of the potential top-notch recruits driven away by them.

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Lot of talk about the impact of sanctions and our talent level compared to other teams. As best I could I looked back at our recruiting classes. Below are the players still on our team from the 2009-2013 classes. The star ratings are from 247. Just used them because you can do a couple of different sorts with their rankings.

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Carson 4* Baublitz 4 Zettel 4 Lewis 4 Hack 5
Gress 4 Zwinak 3 D. Smith 4 Wilkerson 4 Breneman 4
Urschel 3 Bars 3 Barnes 4 Lynch 4 Sickels 4
SOA 3 Diff 4 Belton 3 Wartman 3 Nelson 4
Howle 3 CJ 4 Kline 3 Gaia 3 Ferguson 4
Gilliam 3 Kenney 4 ARob 3 A. Johnson 3 Hamilton 3
Willis 3 Daq. Jones 3 Carter 3 J. James 3 Mahon 3
Felder 3 * Amos 3 Dowrey 3 J. Smith 3
Shrive 4 * Matt Z. 3 Daq. Davis 3 Bell 3
* * Alosi 3 Lucas 3 Cothren 3
* * Mangiro 3 Golden 3 Cothran 3
* * Wooten 3 Williams 3 Anderson 3
* * * Laurent 3 Hartman 3
* * * Kiley 2 Gaines 3
* * * Warner 2 A. Smith 2
9 7 12 15 15

That is a total of 58 players brought in on scholarship. We are red-shirting 8 players and we have 2 out for the year, which leaves us 48 scholarship players for this year. To make matters worse from the 2009-2011 classes we have 28 players. We barely have enough scholarship players to field a 2 deep. Plus just like every team we have our share of busts still on the team (Shrive and Kenney for example)

For most teams the 2 deep is made up of players who have been in the program 3-5 years. We only have 28 scholarship players who have been in the program 3-5 years. Freshmen often don’t play not because they don’t have talent. Some need to mature physically and mentally, it takes time to learn the system and sometimes there is someone better playing ahead of them. We may have more “star” talent then some of the teams we lost to but more goes into that than just looking at the stars.

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So what do you think, hot shots?