Hugh Freeze is very much against the idea of a hard roster cap of 85 players, the Auburn head coach made clear during his time in Destin this week.
The House v. NCAA settlement calls for an end to scholarship limits. Instead, the case calls for a hard roster cap on teams depending on the sport. There are 85 scholarship spots in football and 13 for men’s basketball, for instance. Generally, SEC football teams work with well over 100 players when you account for walk-ons, pushing over 120 players in many cases.
“We’re only used to practicing a certain way. We’re not the NFL. We (have) physical practices,” Freeze said this week at the SEC spring meetings.
Repetitions, player safety and proper development are all important issues to SEC coaches when thinking about the topic of a roster cap.
“Hopefully we can find a reasonable number to where we still feel like we can operate at a high level as coaches and for our players,” Sarkisian added.
Keep in mind, the hard cap idea isn’t something that’s been decided on, simply something tossed out as an idea. Needless to say, the pushback is strong.
“I think it’s absolutely against college football, what it stands for and what it’s about. I think that would be a major problem,” Elko said.
On Monday, CommissionerGreg Sankey intimated that the league’s football coaches were already griping behind the scenes about the hot-button topic expected to dominate conversations throughout the week at the SEC Spring Meetings.
Sankey cautioned that the cap was merely a “concept” and not yet a formality, and he pleaded with the SEC’s coaches to think about the “why” and that will lead them to the “what.”
For the time being, discussions about how a future roster cap might look are in the early stages. There is no resolution expected before the 2024 season, and while SEC head coaches agree to keep their walk-on programs, a doomsday scenario is unlikely.
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