You are correct, the grey shirt delays the enrollment till spring. Kellen would still have 5 years to play 4, like every other player. I would imagine that is exactly what will happen, much like Jermaine Preyear did last year. It probably does not make sense to burn a year of eligibility till needed. Even if Kellen is healthy it is unlikely that he was going to play this year.

I think it’s pretty much a given that Kellen Williams will greyshirt at this point, and I imagine he probably will regardless of whether or not we need a greyshirt.

If he greyshirts, he would delay enrollment until the Spring semester, and that will completely change things with his eligibility. His eligibility clock won’t start until later, so he will go into the 2010 season as a true freshman — i.e. with five calendar years to play four football seasons — and he could redshirt then (probably a likely scenario even before the injury) and then be a redshirt freshman at the start of the 2011 season, so he would basically play from 2011-2014. On the other hand, if he enrolled this Fall, he would certainly redshirt, and then he would play from 2010-2013.

And by the way, a greyshirt is basically just where a potential student-athlete does not enroll full-time in a college, and he pays his own way. There’s nothing overly complicated about it. The biggest downside to it, aside from having to pay your own way for a semester, is that you cannot work out with the team until you officially enroll later in the Spring.

Anyway, in a way it creates a pretty good situation for us. We look to have at least four scholarships cleared out right now — above and beyond the graduating seniors a year ago — and plus we have at least one candidate who could greyshirt without it being any problem.

Evaluating kickers is very tough, and believe it or not it is probably one of the more difficult positions to evaluate. The allowed heights of the kicking tees are different, and that often times changes everything. Bottom line, it’s hard to evaluate kickers, and there’s no use beating the bush with this one, Saban and company flat out swung and missed.

And honestly, the difficulty in evaluating kickers is one of the reasons you see so few of them offered scholarships coming out of high school. A great kicker can provide tremendous value to your team, but no coach wants to waste a scholarship for four years on a bad kicker.