Bradley Weaver, John Motton and Toby Adensaya all hop in today. Again I have no idea how you plan and coach in this environment? Ohio's punishment for being talented I assume?
It's clear that being a successful coach in this era is going to take different skills than being a successful coach took 10 years ago. What skills will be the most important? People skills, to keep players happy and motivated? Recruiting skills to be able to identify and recruit replacements for those who leave? Fund raising skills to be able to raise a stack of NIL money? Organizational skills, in being good at juggling the ever changing group of players and assistant coaches that you work with? An indefatigable attitude, so that no amount of personnel changes wears him out?
Where will this end? That's easier to answer, I think. It will end when too many players who leave end up with no chair in this modern version of musical chairs. Right now is a special case, though. Because of changes, there are probably 35% more players in the system now competing for each spot than a few years ago, and not all of them will get to play as much as they would like. How do I compute that? Under the old system, each player had 4 years of eligibility, and some of them got a redshirt year, while others had their careers end early due to injury, probably netting out to about 4 years in the system per player.
1. Due to Covid, all players got an extra year of eligibility. Thus, until 2026, each player can be in the system for up to 6 years (4 playing, 1 redshirt, 1 covid). This adds a full year to the number of players in the system per spot.
2. Previously, playing even 1 down cost a year of eligibility. Now a player can play in some number of games without losing eligibility. This means that virtually every player gets to count some season as a redshirt.
3. The ability of medicine and rehab to restore a player to playing condition is always improving. This means more players returning from injury. At the same time, the NCAA seems to have liberalized the frequency with which they award extra years due to injury. Those used to be rare, but now seem to be pretty automatic.
All told, now, instead of having 4 years of recruits in the system, I'm going to guess that there are 5.4 years of recruits in the system, an increase of 35%. That means that a lot of players are going to be stuck in the system, and not see a path to get them the playing time they hope to get, and that's going to mean a lot of transfers out. On the bright side, it's also going to mean that there are a lot of players out there in the available transfer pool that you can recruit to transfer in.
It's a new system, and it's going to be with us, so we just as well get used to it. That said, once we get by 2026, there won't be players in the system anymore who had a covid year, so things may get somewhat better.