“I was just talking to our head coach about this for an hour today.”
Those were the words of a Big Ten general manager earlier this week when asked about college football’s latest seismic change: A roster cap of 105 players moving forward as part of the settlement of the House v. NCAA lawsuit.
That new roster limit, which is part of a sweeping lawsuit settlement that will transform the sport, is a major departure from the rules that currently govern college football, which include scholarships for 85 players. It’s been the talk of the sport behind the scenes for much of the last week, since Yahoo! Sports first reported this was coming.
Right now, schools are allowed up to 120 players on their roster during the season with no limit in the offseason during times like spring practice. FBS programs are allowed 85 football scholarships and as many walk ons behind them as they’d like to fill out the roster. That will soon no longer be the case. There are three critical roster changes that will come with the settlement when it’s expected to go into effect during the 2025-26 academic calendar year:
- The 85-scholarship cap is removed. Schools are now allowed to give out up to 105 football scholarships.
- Football is now an equivalency sport – all sports will be under the new rules – and longer a head-count sport, meaning the school is no longer required to give full scholarships to each player receiving aid. That means football programs can split scholarships if they choose to, like you see in sports like baseball.
- The 105 roster limit is firm, which will result in many programs having to greatly reduce their roster sizes while endangering a lot of walk-on programs.
“I can’t imagine suddenly everyone is going to take 20 more high school players,” Wake Forest head coach Dave Clawson said at ACC Media Days. “I think it’s trying to predict now what roster turnover is going to look like every year.”
To get a sense of how teams will adjust to this new reality and what the changes mean, 247Sports spoke to a general manager or a player personnel director from every Power Four conference to get an idea of how schools are planning and preparing for the shift. 247Sports national analyst Anna Adams also spoke to multiple head coaches at ACC Media Days for their perspective.
These are some the big picture questions schools are thinking about when they plan for their rosters of the future.
Are 105 players enough?
Many schools, especially on the Power Four level, have rosters in the spring and fall camp that swell into the 120s and 130s. Thus, there’s been a bit of a behind-the-scenes panic as rumors have spread that the number could drop well below those previous totals.