Texas Longhorns athletic director Chris Del Conte is working to deal with several major changes to college football as effectively as possible. That includes questions of roster sizes in the sport, as well as the future of things like walk-ons.
Del Conte was asked about this during the SEC spring meetings. In particular, he was asked about the ideal roster size. That’s when Del Conte explained that the schedule has expanded and that should be taken into account when looking at roster sizes, while referencing Oprah Winfrey giving out cars as a comparison to bowl games.
“It’s easy to pontificate on that but you look at this and say, long schedule, player safety, health and wellness of the game,” Chris Del Conte said. “It’s a little bit different than when it was a 10-game schedule and you played a bowl game back in the day. You played a 10-game schedule and you went to your bowl game. By the way, when they set those limits back in the day, PAC-10 only had one bowl. You went to the Rose Bowl. That was it. If Washington State finished 8-2, they didn’t go to a bowl game that year. Now we have like 72 bowl games and it’s nuts. 6-6, you got a house, you got a house. Oprah’s just doling out bowl games like there’s no tomorrow.”
These questions of roster size are part of the fallout from the House settlement. Within that settlement, there is going to be back pay to athletes for money they should have made from NIL. On top of that, there is going to be a revenue-sharing model with athletes.
The details of how this new system is going to work are still up in the air. However, it’s clear that this is a major change to the sport and it’s where some of those questions about how football and other sports operate come from.
“So, I think you have to look at the totality and say here’s where we’re at, and here’s what that looks like,” Del Conte said. “I don’t know, but I think data needs to be done.”
For now, Chris Del Conte isn’t committing to an opinion on how things should change or how large rosters should be, even if it does seem like he sees the value in larger rosters given his comments on the length of the schedule.
Chris Del Conte shared his opinion on NIL collectives
In the last couple of years, NIL has been a way that players were able to make money. With that, NIL collectives at schools sprung up to try and help collect and distribute money.
Collectives are something that Chris Del Conte understood. However, now he would like to see things moved in-house as the college sports world moves forward.
“I think at the end of the day, I understood the reason why they came about,” Del Conte said. “I think the reality is, with what the future looks like, I would prefer everything be brought in-house.”
The post Chris Del Conte: ‘Oprah’s doling out bowl games like there’s no tomorrow’ appeared first on On3.