ATHENS, Ga. — College football programs on the FBS level soon will be able to give out up to 20 more scholarships per season. But Georgia coach Kirby Smart doesn’t think his program will substantially take advantage of that. Nor does he think there will be a rush by others to do so.
Scholarship limits, which have been 85 for football, are due to be eliminated as a result of the settlement in the House v. NCAA case. Roster limits will be put in place, with 105 the case for football.
The settlement, which includes revenue sharing with athletes, still needs to be approved by a judge before it is final. But coaches and administrators are starting to prepare for it, some differently than others.
Smart falls in the category of not wanting to give out more scholarships, especially with the chance to keep non-scholarship players via name, image and likeness money.
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“I don’t know that 105 scholarship players is the right way to go about it, because you’ve got 105 NIL capabilities there,” Smart said Tuesday. “You’ve got more people who would be unhappy if you don’t have walk-ons if you do that. I don’t think it’s set in stone yet that everybody’s going to rush off and go to 105. That’s a huge burden on the budgets of the athletic department. And honestly, there’s a lot of kids here who do a great job for us as walk-ons. You would be dismissing them if you said you were going to go and sign 20 more high school kids.”
Originally, coaches feared the roster limit would be much lower, perhaps even around 85, essentially ending the notion of walk-ons. Smart was one of the coaches who spoke out the most behind the scenes against that, particularly at the SEC spring meetings. Eventually, the 105 number was reached by the conferences and agreed upon with the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Most teams at the FBS level have around 120 players, some even more. Georgia’s official preseason roster has 134 players, a number that will have to be at 105 this time next year, assuming the settlement is finalized.
Smart said he and his staff have a timeline for talking about the changes and making decisions, including where to trim the overall roster and how many scholarships to give out. Clemson coach Dabo Swinney addressed the issue as well at the ACC Kickoff event.
“The off weeks, different times in the season, we sit down and look at our roster currently, our roster next year, how that looks in terms of what we have committed, what we need, what are numbers are going to be,” he said. “There’s a lot of gray area in that. You don’t have to go to 105. A lot of people may choose to.”
Clemson coach Dabo Swinney addressed the issue as well at the ACC Kickoff event in July.
“The crazy thing is there’s not many coaches that want 105 scholarships,” Swinney said. “We want to keep our walk-ons. It’s hard to manage that many guys. When you have that many guys on scholarship, you think you got transfers now, you wait till that number gets there, it’s gonna be … a lot. So it’s going to change a lot of things.”
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(Photo: Sam Navarro / USA Today)
