The new coach is quoted as saying he is going to give Crossland and Sasagi a chance to secure a top grade spot.
Crossland is 18/19 this year and Sasagi is 17/18.
If he is giving kids that young - and we also have Best and Toa who are also under 20s available next year - it really is clear that we won't have the situation we had under Brown where he gave out spots before the preseason even started and stuck with his preferred squad all preseason, and the others were just picking up the scraps as crash test dummies for the number 1 squad to practice on.
This pre season, players like Momoisea, Randall, Zac Hosking, Daniel Ticehurst, Brodie Jones, Tex Hoy and Mitch Andrews will all go into the pre season thinking that they'll have a chance to out train some bigger name players and pinch their spots.
I fully expect a few of these young guys will grab their chance.
A few years ago Luke Yates was very close to getting cut, and what he did was kept training by himself all off season and showed up first day of training as the fittest guy in the squad, and kept setting the pace all off season. Brown made a lot of statements about rewarding effort, but didn't give Yates a spot despite all the talk.
This year, if Brodie Jones and Tex Hoy were to do the same thing, I'd assume they would be in the round 1 side.