I slapped a redshirt on a player without mentioning it during the recruiting process. I got the "not cool, man" email, but when I checked his WE it went down 5 points (51-to-46). In my experience, an unwanted redshirt usually results in a drastic drop in WE, down to almost 0.

This drop seems fairly minimal. Can I keep the redshirt on him and still see progress?

If I were you I would leave well enough alone.  That's not much of a drop.

It won't drop any more so you're good to go.

I'd be interested in other opinions on this:  I'm not confident enough yet in my school's recruiting power to risk losing a guy I want before he's signed.  So this recruiting period just ended, I signed 3 kids.  Two of them will play right away.  The third one will be good down the road, but to give him time to improve I waited until he was on the roster and gave him a RS.  

He told me he was upset, so I took it off.  Then I waited until after the first exhibition and did not play him during that game.  Put it on him again and this is what he said:

"Coach, I think it's probably a good idea - I could use the year to work on my game - it's going to be tough watching though!"

So my question then, is in view of this success whether it's even worth risking your recruit if you can manipulate the process after he's signed? 

It's still a risk. Sometimes they will take it like you described, sometimes they won't. I've done it both with informing of RS (which requires extra effort to be put into the player in the same cycle you inform) and not informing. Without informing, there have been several seasons where I couldn't get a player to RS at all, which I wasn't happy about.

Posted by girt25 on 12/14/2010 7:03:00 PM (view original):
It's still a risk. Sometimes they will take it like you described, sometimes they won't. I've done it both with informing of RS (which requires extra effort to be put into the player in the same cycle you inform) and not informing. Without informing, there have been several seasons where I couldn't get a player to RS at all, which I wasn't happy about.

what he said. if you have extra money and a guy you particularly want to redshirt, spend the money (but be careful - don't wait until 5pm the day of signings to offer the redshirt if you aren't sure he will still take it with the amount of effort given. usually an extra 3 campus visits/6home visits or so will do it, but if i wait to 5pm, i usually go a little bigger to be extra safe, the last thing you need is somebody looking around the cycle before signings which happens all the time and seeing your guy open). but at the same time, the redshirt button shouldn't be a really high priority, because you often get away without it. over time you will just build a feel for the risk/benefit trade off.

also, guys who are close to the border of who is in your range and who is not are generally less likely to take the redshirt. so if its like you are an A prestige d2 school and the guy in question is a 190 rated pg, i would usually take the risk. but if its like the 100 rated pg i would be more inclined to spend a few k and use the button. also supposedly who else is on the team mattered (by position) but i am not sure if that is still true or whatever.

Does the info in the eval help at all?  I've seen this line a few times:

"BTW, this kid is the consumate team player, looks like anything we'd want him to do, he'd do it."

Always assumed that meant he would take a RS without a problem, but haven't tracked it enough to say for certain.

I believe it does ryrun.  Guys with that type of language in their evals always seem to take the RS.  With that in mind I never inform ahead of time.  I like to save all my extra cash for scouting.