QB Mason Moran will be enrolling Spring Term at OSU

True, but football season is over (or will be over in the next week or two).  Pretty sure Andersen wants Moran on campus in the spring time to get the playbook down and be ready to be a possible backup.

This "enrolling early" business happens almost exclusively in football, and almost exclusively for quarterbacks. The only other instance I can remember at OSU is Kavin Keyes in baseball. According to this article, the idea there came from the coaches as well:

www.oregonlive.com/beavers/index.ssf/2011/04/kavin_keyes_graduated_from_hig.html

unless they coaches are planning on playing him in the fall, I don't see a benefit of having a kid skip out on the last few months of high school. I'm not going to pretend I played football, but how long does it really take to develop chemistry with your wide receivers? Is that something that takes six months over three?

would make way more sense to actually get more done to getting a college degree than spinning wheels on HS diploma and goofing off. Even non-atheletes should appreciate that fact

It's an entire spring practice session and I think it's inarguable that practice time is valuable (unless you're Allen Iverson I suppose). It's more time to be around the team and form bonds with them. It's more time for the coaching staff to evaluate and coach. It's also extra time to adapt to the college life for the first time ever without a full practice schedule or traveling to games as additional distraction. If you think none of these things matter, then there is no point to having experienced players on a college football team.

How long does it take to develop chemistry with wide receivers? I don't know, but is there a certain "ceiling" for chemistry where you've developed as much as you can and you might as well stop working on it?

Did people here really have that monumental of an experience during their last few months of high school? Maybe I'm alone in this, but I didn't learn a damn thing. Almost all my credits to graduate were taken care of before the year began and I was not an exceptional student. There's the social aspect, sure, but in my opinion it only gets better after high school. If I could go back and do so I'd certainly prefer to start college a half year early (and nobody wanted me to for anything athletic related, that's for sure).

Remember, these players ultimately are making their own choice whether they want to go to OSU. We don't know all of his reasons, but if it was incredibly important to him to stick around his senior year he would have that option. OSU can't force him to enroll early, and if they tried to do so against his will, he still has the opportunity to choose a different school. It could be that football is very important to this kid, and now that his HS season is over, he'd rather move on to the next step of football than wait. Of course I'm sure he feels it increases his chances of being in the QB mix early, which it does, and he's not coming to OSU because he wants to be the backup.

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This also decreases the chances of him getting poached by another school, as well.

The offseason is when you have time to work on individual fundamentals. If you don't have them down when the season starts, the likely aren't going to improve much during the season. For a QB, that can be a whole lot of things - footwork, learning to read defenses pre-snap, etc. For a QB, a whole lot of things need to slow down, and the learning curve is steep. If a kid expects to compete right away, I doubt sprint term of fun in HS is much of a sacrifice.

I have a cousin who is pitching at the D1 level, and he was shocked at how little coaching he got in season specific to him developing and refining pitches, especially in season - let alone during the offseason. It was expected that he put in the work himself to establish those things, on non-team time.

This is what I love about message boards - I get to put my opinions out there, and then I get to see if other people agree with me. In this case it seems most people don't. Y'all brought up some good points that I didn't think about - namely that, if Moran wants to play as a freshman, it probably behooves him to get here as early as possible and get cracking. That part is undeniable. My one big issue is the coaches approaching him about it - that puts the kid in a spot where, even if he wanted to stay in high school, he knows it's not what his future coaches want. Yes, he probably could go to another school if he felt that strongly about staying in high school, but I'm assuming he made the decision to come to Oregon State not solely on playing time. After all, aren't we always arguing about all the great stuff Corvallis and OSU have to offer? So, if Corvallis is where he wants to be, and he wants to play early, he kind of has to come when the coaches tell him to right? I think it's been demonstrated that this coaching staff isn't real cool with people who don't see things the same way they do. All in or in the way, right?

As for the comment above from orangesocks about wishing he could've started his college experience early, that's pretty much the exact opposite of the experience I had. I was still 17 when I graduated from high school, and was just starting to develop self confidence and an understanding of who I wanted to be as a person. Leaving everything behind to start over with new people in a new city wasn't exactly something I was ready for. The adjustment to college life was huge for me, and I spent the better part of my freshman year making some decisions I look back on now and say "damn, what the hell was I thinking?" I guess what I'm saying is that what's good for someone as an athlete may not always be what's best for them as a person. Obviously I wish the best for Moran, both on and off the field.