TAKE ONE: The Scholarship Dilemma

As Ross Dellenger pointed out this week in a piece discussing the impact of the new scholarship limitation rules combined with NIL, thousands of athletes who currently compete in a sport are going to lose their roster spots.

If we focus on football, the number that Dan Lanning talked about with Duck Sports Authority prior to the season was "130 players" that needed coaching every day. At the time, he was praising the rules that allowed analysts to work directly with the players as a major benefit, given the ratio of players to coaches.

But that number will change next season as the new 105-player roster cap on football takes effect. Not only will those walk-ons lose a place as part of the team, but the team will also have 25 fewer players available for practice sessions — and that is not an insignificant number. Yes, college football still has twice the number of scholarship positions as NFL teams are allowed to have on their roster, but these are also teams that do not stay together for as long (graduation, early departures for NFL), have similar free-agent type departures, and some limits on how they refill those spots. In the end, I still think most programs are going to be able to get spring games into the books, but this is going to eliminate opportunities for at least 3,000 football players to compete at a Power Four school as a walk-on.

The bigger question that I have is how this will impact schools on a restricted budget. We already know that some schools will struggle to fill 105-player rosters with scholarship players, while others will be able to do so. Will those schools gobble up players from others, leaving those schools even thinner and pushing them further to the periphery? We have seen anecdotal evidence early this season that NIL has not negatively impacted the playoff picture, but I wonder what will happen when teams like Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, Notre Dame, and yes, Oregon, fill their entire 105-player roster with scholarship players, while some like Boise State, Washington State, Oregon State, and others still utilize some number of walk-on type players to fill their rosters.

How many players will choose a scholarship at a place that will contend for the playoffs versus taking a walk-on spot at a school where they might have a slightly better shot at playing time?

While it will likely benefit Oregon in the long run as a school that can afford 105 players on a football roster, it takes me back to those days before scholarship limits allowed Oregon to rise from the ash heap of college football to one of its premier programs. Scholarship limitations were directly responsible for Oregon’s rise, and now we are back to pre-1994 days. I wonder just how this will impact the overall sport. It will feel a lot like a new division of college football for those teams that have 105 scholarship players versus those with fewer than 105. Maybe it won’t look much different. Maybe the same structure will exist and all will be okay. Right now, it does not feel that way, but in some ways, I hope it does stay the same.

Note: There are also going to be Title IX implications on scholarship distributions that will cause many of the so-called "non-revenue" sports to lose some players or to see sports completely cut from a program. If a school like Oregon adds 20 scholarship athletes to the football team, it will have some Title IX requirements that must be met. Will Oregon add 20 total scholarships to women’s sports? Almost surely so. Track and Field and Softball seem very likely candidates to get additional scholarships (since both were under very small scholarship numbers and will now be able to fill their rosters using scholarships).

At some point, though, most schools will hit a breaking point in how many total scholarships they can afford. And we will still see some cuts in sports causing a loss of opportunity.

For me, that lost opportunity is a cost that cannot be calculated — and that is where the changes, which will benefit many people, become difficult. One thing seems clear, though: we don’t know how this story ends. It could end up benefiting lower-level schools where some of those walk-on players might earn opportunities.

TAKE TWO: Jared Curtis

When his name first came up, I mentioned that Oregon would certainly contact him, but I was literally on the Flock Talk podcast when that news started to break and had not yet even had time to talk to anyone about where Oregon stood.

Since that happened, it has become clear that Oregon is not just reaching out to him, but is in an excellent spot to land the elite 2026 signal caller. He will be in town for the game against Maryland, and he will be joined by his family. I know it has been said that Oregon is a leader for him, but I want to see where everything stands after his other visits to Georgia (November 16), Ohio State (November 23), and Alabama (November 30) before making any predictions. This is still college football recruiting, and we know that visits still matter to elite prospects and their families. He also has Auburn, South Carolina, and USC as schools he is talking to a lot right now as well.

Curtis has been to Oregon before, and he likes everything he sees with the program, so there are a lot of reasons for optimism, but it’s difficult to project what is going to happen on those other visits right now. Once those are all done, I think we will have a much better picture. Until then, excitement over his potential will be difficult to avoid. He is an elite QB who is going to have a chance to be a difference-maker somewhere. The question is: where? We might know that answer in about a month.