Mind of Mike: The Death of Walk Ons?

There are many things you can blame the NCAA for. And the current mess with NIL and a lawsuit that will lead to the NCAA paying billions out of sheer greed over the years is one of them. And now it will affect roster sizes and essentially kill the idea of the walk on. And the trickle down effect of that is going to be massive.

College football programs are currently capped at 120 players during a football season with a maximum of 85 scholarship players. Under the proposed settlement in the House vs. NCAA lawsuit, that scholarship limit will be raised to 105. Awesome news right? More opportunities for hard working kids to get their education paid for right? Kinda. But the impact isn’t going to be pretty.

That 105 scholarship limit is assumed to be a hard cap roster limit as well. That means we are going from 120 players on a roster during the season to 105. That essentially means the end of walk ons and it means a lot of difficult decisions to be made by college coaches. Who gets the extra scholarships? A walk on who’s been on the team for a couple of years or a kid in the portal or a high school prospect? How do you essentially say to 15 players (often more as there is no roster cap in the off season) that we love you but you’re done here? Or tell them there’s a nice “club” football program we set up for you? Would players like Baker Mayfield, Stetson Bennett, Hunter Renfrow and others have an impact on college without earning chances as a walk on?

The 105 player cap also eliminates the hope to parse out scholarship money with “partial rides” which would have been a Godsend. With 105 full scholarships allocated but no room above and beyond that for roster management, you can’t partial a couple of kids to keep everyone happy. It’s all or nothing. And it’s dumb.

And for the 105 scholarship kids, who do you decide to leave behind on road trips as most teams travel with about 80 players? That decision alone is going to tick off quite a few players who might harbor some resentment and jump in the portal when it opens.

And how do you think 20 brand new scholarships at the Power Four level will impact the Group of Five and so on? Power Four schools will pull up from the Group of Five, Group of Five will pull up from FCS and on it goes. The rich will get richer. And that’s my entire point, let that happen but do it smartly.

Who cares you might say? These are decisions college coaches who make millions of dollars have to make and it shouldn’t be easy. This is where the coaches and administrators need to band together. I’m all for the 105 scholarship rule as it’s been a long time coming. It used to be 105 in the 1970s and was then reduced to 95 in 1978 and then to our current 85 in 1992. Before the scholarship reductions, mainly due to Title IX, it was the biggest programs who could afford the most scholarship money. Sounds familiar? The biggest and the best get the advantage? So what’s different now?

The money generated by TV has led to an arms race in facilities and now in NIL. The bigger programs have always had an advantage. Why not keep it that way? Hear me out. The coaches of the heavy hitter schools need to band together with the smaller schools and push to keep the 120 man roster alive. Keep the new scholarship limit at 105 and if a program can afford it, they can scholarship all the way up to 120 as they see fit. If they can’t, or don’t want to, they can fill their roster out with walk ons as before.

Yes, the rich will get richer but we are already there. And why would the smaller schools agree to work with the richer and bigger schools on this? Because it means keeping walk ons alive, easier roster management for college coaches and we won’t see even more embarrassment as we saw with Florida State and their bowl game opt outs. The bottom line — more players on a roster during the season is needed, not less.

There may be nothing the coaches or conference commissioners can do about this. This might just be the way it is and they have to adapt and adjust. In fact, that’s likely. I texted a Power Four coach for this article asking if there is anything they can do? The response?

“No sir”

But they can certainly raise a stink. Conference commissioners can negotiate billion dollar TV deals and college coaches can negotiate eight figure salaries so the skillset is there. College football has way too many sweeping changes of late to the point that the game itself is similar but everything around it appears different. Let’s keep 120 players on a roster alive and well. Can’t we just keep one thing that has worked for a long time?