re: What is Grubb missing as a play caller?

The Saban and others like him essentially tried to stack talent. However the title years under Saban had a tendency to have freshman class hitting hard and winning a title the year they arrived or their sophomore year.

2008 => 2009 (Julio, Ingram, and so many others)

2012 => 2012 (Yeldon and Cooper being the difference between a really good offense and excellent one)

2015 => 2015 (Most of the secondary were freshmen, Ridley ended up being crucial when Foster went down)

2017 => 2017 (The freshmen were crucial to winning the CFPCG in the 2nd half)

In the aughts and teens, the accepted model was to always stack talent so you had a base of veterans but you'd hope to hit the lotto and have a handful of freshmen elevate your entire team.

In the modern era, I don't think you can ever build a deep enough roster where a handful of day 1 contributors are the finishing step for a champion. However, it is arguably more critical to be playing freshmen in today's environment because freshmen will ride the pine out of town these days.

I think worrying about redshirts is a fool's errand. You're not likely to enjoy saving that year of eligibility for an athlete, so you might as well be playing them. Our staff just did that with AK Dear by the way. They burned his redshirt year in 2025 for 1 pass reception in the Iron Bowl that may have been his only participation in that game to boot.

I think the dynamic in the modern era is to hope you can line up a team with a nice base of sophomores, juniors, and seniors you invested in from day 1 and hope you can supplement gaps with junior or senior classification transfers. You're going to be playing freshmen - and will need to at least rotate them generously with the starters to keep them invested - but you shouldn't be hoping for high schoolers to fill in your gaps like Saban and others did in prior to the transfer/NIL era.