With a deep and talented freshmen class, Rutgers football has some calculating to do when it comes to redshirts for several of their talented first-year players.
Saturday represents the fifth game of the season for Rutgers (3-1, 1-1 Big Ten). As such, any player who has participated in the first four games of the year and plays in one more game would burn their redshirt year. A player can play a maximum of four games in a season and still be eligible for their redshirt.
Players such as running back Ja’Shon Benjamin, wide receiver Ian Strong and long snapper Jake Eldridge are all sitting on four games played. Should they play on Saturday, they wouldn’t be eligible for a redshirt.
The idea of tabulating it all took Rutgers head coach Greg Schiano to a bad place. On Monday, he was asked about the ‘calculus’ of figuring out games played in an effort to preserve the possibility of a redshirt.
“You just said a word that sent shivers down my spine… ‘calculus.’ That’s one I didn’t enjoy. A big, fat red book,” Schiano told reporters on Monday.
“I had to take it in the business program, and I had a tutor every night and got through by the skin of my teeth. So let’s not use that word.”
[lawrence-related id=30484,30466]
After joking, Schiano turned serious to detail how those things are tracked and the calculus decision-making process involved.
“I constantly track who is playing. The day of the redshirt, who knows. I don’t know if you recruit the right players, are they going to stay for five years? Maybe, maybe not,” Schiano said.
“There’s so many things to balance. I don’t think there’s ever a sure thing, though. I think you just have to go with what you believe, but we track it all. I have a list every week, how many games each guy has played in, that whole deal. You know, the rule change, they can play in four, but then they can also play in any postseason games and they don’t count, so that’s a big change. So you don’t have to leave one. That aggravated me last year, though, because you know, we didn’t know if we were going to be in the postseason or not, and you can’t watch it and then retroactively, they said, well, you know what the Bowl game doesn’t count. So hopefully this is what it is, it’s four and then you can play in the postseason.”