Time for one of my favorite posts of the year, giving a preseason prediction of our top players. This was a fun exercise for me in
2023,
2022,
2021,
2020 and
2019. The basic rule of it is I'm trying to predict the top 35 players by snap count at the end of the season and rank them in terms of quality (best understood in terms of things like quality in relation to ACC peers, which can be approximated by year-end PFF grades). Specialists are not ranked here. The top 35 in snaps is essentially synonymous with the non-specialists who matter in a season, those with approximately 200 snaps over the course of a 12 game season give or take a dozen snaps or so.
You can see in the earlier threads that I did quite well at this the first two years before whiffing in 2021, doing a nice job in 2022 overall but struggling predicting who would be best, and then doing even better last year getting five of the top ten right (better than the four of the top ten the previous two years) and 28 of the top 35 (same as in 2021 and 2022). Let's see how I can do this year:
1. Elic Ayomanor
2. Collin Wright
3. Ashton Daniels
4. David Bailey
5. Scotty Edwards
6. Levi Rogers
7. Anthony Franklin
8. Elijah Brown
9. Micah Ford
10. Connor McLaughlin
11. Chris Davis Jr.
12. Wilfredo Aybar
13. Emmett Mosley V
14. Tobin Phillips
15. Zahran Manley
16. Tiger Bachmeier
17. Che Ojarikre
18. Jackson Harris
19. Sam Roush
20. Teva Tafiti
21. Jack Leyrer
22. Clay Patterson
23. Mitch Leigber
24. Gaethan Bernadel
25. Simione Pale
26. Tristan Sinclair
27. Brandon Nicholson
28. Zach Rowell
29. Luke Baklenko
30. Jake Maikkula
31. Fisher Anderson
32. Jay Green
33. Omari Porter
34. Benji Blackburn
35. Aaron Morris
Apologies to Ryan Butler, Justin Lamson, Zach Buckey, Braden Marceau-Olayinka, Bryce Farrell, Matt Rose, Zach Buckey, Jahsiah Galvan, Sedrick Irvin, Cole Tabb, Mudia Reuben, and others. Butler, Lamson, and Farrell were tough omissions for me as I think they are more likely to be top 35 in snaps than at least one or two guys I included, but this exercise is truly meant to be a prediction and as such I insist on trying to be realistic. While those guys have very good shots at 200+ snaps, it is almost certainly not happening that we'll have four key contributing RBs or three key contributing QBs and I do think Harris has definitively passed Farrell, so I made judgment calls on what I think will happen. As always, obviously many such subjective judgment calls in here and I look forward to hearing folks' thoughts.
P.S. For the longest time I had an audacious pick in here of Javion Randall bucking expectations (which for outsiders couldn't be lower considering he's one of our lowliest regarded recruits ever) and becoming a key contributor in his first year. Just have hunch on that. But I'm a coward and swapped him out for Morris at the last minute. Don't feel great about that but at some point I have to stop tinkering and submit my bid for the year.
stanford.rivals.com
