In football you can only play 11 players at a time. Sure, Texas A&M brags about a 12th man and such, but going beyond 11 normally results in a penalty. With those 11 you want to go with your best and most experienced players if at all possible. Sometimes this means freshmen if they are really good, but in the Big Ten, playing a lot of freshmen usually does not bode well.
That said, at one point in the second half of Saturday’s game at Minnesota Purdue had SEVEN freshmen on the field at the same time:
We could have even gone eight deep, as Eric Miller was getting snaps on the offensive line.