Yesterday Pro Football Focus’s Vinnie Ronca tweeted out the top ten true freshmen snaps by team this past year.
With #NSD17 upon us, here are the teams who had the most snaps from true freshmen during the 2016 season: pic.twitter.com/O2UloalCuq
— Vinnie Ronca (@PFF_Vinnie) January 30, 2017
That’s four of the top ten Big 12 teams that played the most freshmen and Texas Tech was in front of Kansas and Texas by 500 snaps, Kansas State by nearly 800 snaps or so.
If you ever wanted to have a bit of hope, especially on defense, then this would be it. If you ever wanted to think that the team really was young and those players are going to be significant players in 2017. Jordyn Brooks, Douglas Coleman, Brayden Stringer, Desmon Smith, Kevin Moore, Joseph Wallace and Johnathan Picone were the major contributors of those snaps. Of course, Kansas State and Texas were also the beneficiary of true freshman snaps, I’d love to know the breakdown for them. I think for the Longhorns, they had some true freshmen on the offensive line and I’d also guess that they played some on defense too. Other interesting note is that if you wanted to credit Strong for trying to build something while Herman is likely to take advantage of it (although I’m not completely sold on that just yet), this would be it.
I’m about to go all-in on Texas Tech making a major improvement on defense, in combination with the junior college players that arrived in January, I somewhat feel like I’ve got nothing to lose in regards to predicting great success. We all know that the defense needed the most work, the best players on the defense last year, in my opinion, were largely freshmen. The only freshman on offense receiving significant snaps was RB Da’Leon Ward and OL Travis Bruffy received snaps as a tight end on some ocassions as well.
@PFF_Vinnie FWIW, here are the 10 teams who had the least amount of snaps from true freshmen during the 2016 season #NSD17 pic.twitter.com/231owkfHJQ
— Vinnie Ronca (@PFF_Vinnie) January 30, 2017
And how about one more tweet that didn’t get as much play yesterday, Ronca also tweeted the teams that played the fewest freshmen and the only Big 12 team that made an appearance was TCU, which means that TCU was largely mediocre with playing guys that have been in the program for at least a year. Maybe it also says something about the fact that they don’t “need” to play freshmen too, but there you go.