Obviously this is not the way things work now, but is there room in the HD universe for the player who responds to adversity by working harder?  We know these guys exist in real life, the guy who gets benched and vows to come back by working even harder.  Obviously if this were introduced in HD it wouldn't be every player, just a rare few.

Right now we just have players who respond positively to being given time and negatively to having it taken away (with respect to work ethic, I'm not talking about changing expectations and transfer rates).  Realistically, you could have positive, neutral or negative work ethic reactions to not enough playing time and positive or neutral reactions to getting starts/playing time generated randomly (but weighted towards most of the players being what we have now).

Thoughts?

I'm no expert on how things currently work with WE, by any means.  But what you say makes a lot of sense.

Players are individuals and are going to react to circumstances differently.  It's a bit too formulaic, in my opinion, to always have players lose WE due to lack of playing time. 

Relating to the real world, my Kansas Jayhawks this year have 2 guys coming off redshirt seasons.  Both have worked extremely hard and show measurable improvement.  Not once has either of them ever even hinted at a poor attitude. They knew their time would come.

In HD, I just made my first attempt at redshirting a freshman who only has a 30 WE.  I'm nervous about what is going to happen over the season - providing he accepts the RS.  I need him to get a lot better so I can play him next year, and my impression of the system right now is that he'll probably only see very slight increases in skill.

Great point.  I always thought players' WE potential should vary as well.  For instance, some might come in low with very high potential, possibly going from sub 20 to very high by Jr year, while another might have 25 with low potential.  Seems like many RL players have such differing WE potentials.

This is the sort of thing that could make psychological evaluations useful again. Maybe you do a psych eval on a guy with 10 work ethic and it comes back telling you "All he needs is a strong authority figure in his life to motivate him," or "He has done his best developing as a person when working through adversity," to give hints about how his WE might go up quickly under the right conditions.

Posted by prezuiwf on 12/14/2010 11:55:00 AM (view original):
This is the sort of thing that could make psychological evaluations useful again. Maybe you do a psych eval on a guy with 10 work ethic and it comes back telling you "All he needs is a strong authority figure in his life to motivate him," or "He has done his best developing as a person when working through adversity," to give hints about how his WE might go up quickly under the right conditions.

I like that idea, prez.   At this point I have no idea whether a player is amenable to redshirting or not until I actually try it.

The freshman I wanted to RS got back to me and informed me that he was very upset.  It was my first inkling that he didn't like the idea.  I'll hold him out of tonight's exhibition game and try RS again tomorrow.  If he still balks, I'll just go ahead and play him.  It just seems like I'm stabbing in the dark here.  And with a WE of only 30 to begin with, I can imagine him just taking the season off if he's not happy.