What were those teams records the following year(s) is possibly more important.... If starting Nickel and him taking some expected lumps early led to us being in a great position in 2026, It could be a good tradeoff. I generally think Freshman who play and become "the dude" usually end up improving over time including in the win column. Guess it'd depend how much you think Nickel is a 3 year starter type and how good/bad he'd be as a true frosh.
If say we had a solid offensive season with Nickel as a Frosh and had a good defensive performance, but it made you feel great heading into next year, would that be good? To me the biggest negative with that is honestly I don't expect Dawson to return next season. To me hes going to move on to some HC opportunity. So it may feel like we're building just to start over and hope Mario picks OC correctly again. And you'd have the risk of Nickel following Dawson too...
Some I can think of: Jake Fromm, JT Barrett, Hurts I believe started as a Frosh, Maybe Colt McCoy and Sam Bradford? Pryor at ohio St? Kellen Moore, Jameis, Manziel were all RS FR so a bit different... So yeah not a great track record in the W/L column during most true freshman seasons. But I'm also not sure that's entirely the QBs fault. A lot of the times it is lower quality programs that were starting true freshman so the W/L record wasn't good BUT the qb had a successful season for the most part. Pre-NIL the top W/L programs generally had guys developing they could turn to and would only go frosh if it was like star talent.... Thats less and less the case in CFB today.
