I know that coaches often ask what the affect on work ethic is when redshirting players.  I took over a new program in DII and had to redshirt a senior and sophomore and wanted to post my results so future coaches know what to expect.

Senior: WE -30  From 46 to 16
Sophomore: -11  From 67 to 56
Freshman: No change

If you're interested, here are the messages I received:

SENIOR:

Thanks for posting that, nottonis. Obviously, if you are redshirting a senior in hopes of getting a little more development from the player, that will pretty much put a stop to the attributes development. Formation IQ development should still be ok. But if you have 2 great senoir RBs, and want to start one senior this year and the other one next year, and don't care about future development, redshirting him might be worth it.

Thinking more about it, though, the one danger that the redshirted senior might decide to leave the program after the current season.

That's exactly my plan BJ. He's much better than the guy I'll have if I don't RS him so I think it's worth it. Plus, he would be my second stringer this year.

In D-IAA I just red-shirted a Sophomore WR would had minimal involvement in 11 games and was only thrown 6 passes in his Freshmen season, he was 5th rated of 7 in WR roster and he only lost -6 in WE. He went from 38 to 32

Message was...
Coach,
I`m a little disappointed that you decided to redshirt me this season, but we`re cool. I understand that you just want to save a year of a my services. Later.

Looks like for the sophomores, in each case it's right around 16% of their WE. I've done it before as well and that seems pretty accurate. For any attribute, I don't think the numbers displayed are as precise as the actual game uses. Work Ethic might say 56, but I think it would actually be something like 56.2243 so that would explain the slight variance in the percentages.

Posted by bjschumacher on 10/13/2015 5:24:00 PM (view original):
Thinking more about it, though, the one danger that the redshirted senior might decide to leave the program after the current season.

This. Don't be shocked when you get an email at the end of this upcoming season about him leaving the team. I don't think much of anything is a 100% lock in this game - there is some uncertainty in every aspect - but I'd have contingency plans in place, all the same.

I'm not so sure that I've ever been so desperate as to RS a senior. I'd just say recruit a strong class and move on imho. However, if he leaves then I guess it doesn't matter anyways save for the "wasted" RS. It's an interesting concept that I've never entertained.