Thank you, Kai. Check your e-mail!
Well, I've beeon this board since I was a senior undergraduate (found it after I applied) and have waited. This is actually the first year I've seen a lot more people attempting their second and third tries. I think a lot of it has to do with the Great Recession in 2010 and 2011 causing a lot of budget cuts, forcing departments to scale back a lot. Michigan used to make 34-36 offers with a yield of 18-20 students but in 2009, they accepted the first 20 people they wanted and then admitted people off the waitlist after someone in the original 18 turned down the offer. As you can imagine, there's a pool of people like myself and others who have been shut out because of these cuts and our sub-fields not being given a spot for that year (damn you Indiana, how can you go three years without a new student in my subfield?!). Consider this as pre-academic job market where you have an influx of newly-mint PhD holders seeking jobs who didn't get jobs the year before because departments called off searches due to cuts.
Also, I think it depends a lot on the department's priorities and what kind of students it lost to drop-outs and graduation the prior year. I didn't know how to write my Wisconsin SOP until I read its fall department newsletter to see what was going on. As it turned out, it was looking to expand its new transnational history program with 3 searches this year and these new hires would share thematic interests with me. So it was an opportunity for me to sell myself as another "new hire" for the department, coming from my own subfield that was not part of the searches. In their perspective, I was a bonus. Among other factors, I think this is how I really landed in a school that I've never applied to and on the surface looked like a weak match. It may be another reason why I didn't get into Indiana- my SOP was entirely transnational history and Indiana isn't interested in doing that right now (or my POI's most advanced students are refusing to graduate. )