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Buffs among youngest teams in the nation

Posted July 10, 2008

If experience is truly as important to the success of college football teams as coaches generally insist, the Colorado Buffaloes might be looking at another rough year.

The Buffs are very young with only eight players on the roster who have lettered in three previous seasons. Phil Steele does a good job of judging the experience level of every Division I team each summer in his college football preview magazine.

This year the Buffs are one of the least experienced teams in the nation and rank in a tie at 117th out of 119 teams. It's an interesting coincidence that coach Dan Hawkins' former team, Boise State, is the program with which the Buffs are tied. Texas and Florida are tied as the youngest teams in the nation.

Steele uses a pretty straight forward formula to determine the experience level of each team across the country. His rankings are based on the roster at the end of spring practices and are admittedly inexact because it's difficult to know the impact of the incoming class of freshmen.

He awards three points for every senior starter and 2.5 points for every additional senior in the two-deep depth chart. For every junior starter he awards 2 points and 1.5 points for every additional junior in the two deep. This formula continues until he gets to freshmen.

Steele subtracts 1 point from a team's score for every freshman starter and .5 points for every freshman in the two deep. Under this system the Buffs received 51 total points in this year's chart.

The most experienced teams in the nation are Navy and Army followed by Memphis.

Steele ranks the Big 12 this way from most experienced to least experienced (total points in parenthesis).

Kansas State (78) KSU signed 19 junior college players this year.

Iowa State (73)

Nebraska (71)

Missouri (71)

Kansas (71)

Oklahoma State (69)

Baylor (69)

Oklahoma (66)

Texas Tech (64)

Texas A&M (61)

Colorado (51)

Texas (50).