One element of the Bama model that ND can't match that

matters a lot is the grey shirting. Bama in effect gets 15-25 extra players every 4 years. It allows them to replace injured or ineffective players much like the NFL has free agency, practice squads and trades.

It works at Alabama because their tuition is so dramatically lower than ND's tuition. In state tuition is below 10k per year. Out of state is in the 30k range -- and they give a lot of academic scholarships to what ND would consider to be bottom half academically within any class -- lowering that to 15 to 20k for out of state.

Someone can carry the cost to grey shirt at Alabama for a year and hope it works out and then accept a scholarship somewhere else if it doesn't. At ND that one year will cost you 75-80k all in, so it is virtually impossible for ND to match that aspect of the Bama machine.

Wow

It was only a matter of time until this one came up.

25 extra players?

Bullshit (check the link) they didn't get any "grey shirts" in the 2016 class.

But let's check out their mid year enrollees from last year:

Alabama Enrollees January 2018

Kindly remind all of us which one of these kids were grey shirts that graduated in May of 2017? That's right, it was just Parks (and there are plenty of articles about how he was the last of a dying breed), which was 1 of 5. Their early enrollees projected for this year, all are graduating now, not last may.

But if we look at the large number of 2017 enrollees in January, still not a ton of grey shirts. In fact there were none. 12 of them graduated in December then enrolled, and 4 used their mini mester to enroll

2017 Enrollee Article

1 grey shirt in 3 years isn't what you wrote, or are you talking about a different practice?

Click here for link at https://www.al.com/alabamafootball/index.ssf/2016/02/nick_sa

It may be a different practice

What I am talking about is walk on players that pay their own way and then eventually get a scholarship - or leave to take a scholarship somewhere else that they could have taken straight out of high school.

EDIT: Your method of uncovering those players is invalid -- because they are not people that are enrolling in the middle of a year. They are already students at the school from day one and are on the team as walk-ons originally.

You may or may not be able to detect them by checking for changes in the names of players that have scholarships by class over time and/or by the number of players that originally were in a class versus the end -- but they still had 85 scholarships. It isn't trivial to unwind -- and it is perfectly legal (so not saying Saban is breaking any rules, just taking advantage of Bama being cheaper than most private grade schools).

Your definition of grey shirting is wrong

Google it.

My method was fine and accurate.

A gray shirt is a player who doesn’t sign in February, graduates in May and doesn’t enroll until the following Spring because they don’t have a scholarship avaialable until the Spring semester.

That is gray shirting defined and few teams really do it anymore.