Many of the guys you mentioned played by necessity. If Ferentz has the luxury of having a mediocre senior to pencil in as a starter, that dude is playing over a redshirt frosh, no matter how good the frosh is. I still have nightmares about what happened to that d-line in C-bus back in ought five after Roth, Babs, Luebke, etc. graduated and we had 4 undersized underclassmen starting.
