Nebraska Football Coach Sounds Off On Potential College Football Roster Size Reductions, Limits

One of the most cherished and storied backbones of the Nebraska football program – one that dates back from Bob Devaney to Tom Osborne and Frank Solich all the way to Matt Rhule – may be going the way of the buffalo.

Or maybe it won’t.

For that’s the tricky thing about the ever-changing landscape of this college football era and, more specifically, the potential reduction of roster sizes in the near future: Nobody really knows much of anything. If they do, they aren’t clueing in the head coaches. If they do, they aren’t keeping Rhule – who’s one of the best in the country at building and maximizing a monster roster size – abreast of what’s next.

“I don’t understand why we have a roster limit. But if we’re gonna have one, I’m just waiting to see what they are,” Rhule said Thursday. “I hear a lot of people saying ‘I heard they’re gonna do this.’ I’m just telling you right now: I’m in those meetings, Troy’s (Dannen) definitely in those meetings, none of us know anything right now about what’s gonna happen. So it’s gonna be a really unique time. It’s a time where we have to be really nimble between revenue sharing and roster limits.”

In May, as part of a newly proposed athlete compensation model, Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported that power conference leaders were considering a significant reduction in the allowed roster sizes for college football programs. As a consequence of that new model, those leaders were reported to be considering a potential reduction – from a roster of more than 115 players to as few as 95 or even 85 players, the latter of which is the current number of maximum scholarship spots allowed by the NCAA.

As soon as 2025, the new compensation model would likely see more than $20 million distributed per year at each school, spread out across all of its student-athletes. That, obviously, is the big, blaring headline. The potential for roster size limits, then, feels like more of a subhead that could be overlooked. But the new model would “remove scholarship restrictions by permitting schools to expand financial aid to the entirety of a sport’s roster positions,” Dellenger reported.

It would be a historic, potentially ground shaking move – one that would massively alter the structure of scholarship numbers, distribution and overall roster structure – in a CFB era in which it feels like a historic, ground shaking new decision gets made every 3-4 weeks.

The move would make the college football walk-on extinct, and programs like Nebraska – which for decades made a living by narrowing the margins by mining hidden talent through its walk-on program – would feel the impact.

It would be reducing a football roster of roughly 120 players (including the maximum 85 scholarship spots) by at least 35, effectively eliminating any and all walk-on opportunities. Ironically, if that decision does going into effect, it would come not long after the NCAA increased the allowable roster size from 110 to 120. (The roster needs to be at 120 players for fall training camp.)

The Huskers still (likely) need to whittle its scholarship count down to the 85-player max before the Aug. 31 opener against UTEP all while currently having the biggest roster size in the Big Ten and one of the largest in the Power Four.

“You know, it’s funny: We were in the Big Ten meetings, and we were the largest. But there are a lot of teams that are close to us (in roster size). There are teams that are at 135,” Rhule said. “Really, in the settlement, the crux of it is is that they would like a roster limit – and I think that’s gonna be conference by conference – but they also have eliminated scholarship limits. So if you say your roster limit’s 120, you can have 120 scholarships now moving forward. Now, for me, as a guy who paid his way to go play football at Penn State and who paid off debt for several years, I don’t know what’s wrong with helping young people pay for their education. If we’re gonna fit 90,000 people in that stadium every week, if we can pay for some walk-on player to not have debt when he’s done, if in women’s softball Rhonda (Revelle) can have her students all leave debt free, I don’t see what’s wrong with it. So I hope the number’s at least 120.

“And not everyone’s gonna make all those scholarships because there’s a component to that. If you add 30 scholarships for men’s football, now you have to add 30 college scholarships to women’s sports to stay in proportionality. So there’s a lot of things behind it. But the uniqueness that people will say, ‘Well, Coach, there’s 53 people on an NFL roster.’ But there’s 90, then 75 in an NFL camp. And in the NFL, you might have a 53-man roster. But that 53-man roster by the end of the year encompasses 85-90 people because a player gets cut, you cut them off your roster and he doesn’t count. It’s just another 53rd person. People get injured.”

To that final point of injuries, Rhule pointed to Demitrius Bell as an example, following the redshirt freshman receiver suffering a knee injury in the spring game that will keep him out for the entire upcoming season.

“Right now, Demitrius Bell is out for the year, right?” Rhule said. “Is he gonna count on our roster limit? And if we start saying (injured players) do, what are a lot of schools gonna do? They’re gonna start cutting injured guys. Is that what we want from education? There are so many unintended consequences of roster limits that I just hope they think through it.

“I would (also) have a really hard time telling some of the guys – just because of where they are there, maybe they were the 121st guy – telling them, ‘Hey, you know what, thanks for all that you do, but you can’t be here.’”

For a program and its leader that do a phenomenal job of constantly and consistently finding – and signing – every valuable talent that it can, the new roster limit proposal creates an even bigger bind.

Things like what we saw on Thursday – when the Huskers added to their QB room by officially landing 2023 NAIA Player of the Year Jalyn Gramstad – will happen much less frequently, if at all, at this late stage in the calendar.

So that’s what led to Rhule’s answer when asked a question that was unrelated to the specific subject of the proposed roster size limits: What goes into your thinking as you’re trying to add some more guys to the roster out of the portal and throughout June camps?

“I don’t know what I’m thinking, to be honest with you,” Rhule said. “I don’t think we’re really looking for people. I think the one thing that we try really hard to do is we want to try to outwork the work. So if we throw camps and people show up, we’re not gonna look away from those things. We’re at a time right now where there is no roster limit. There’s a Title IX roster limit, but there is no roster limit. So if we can add players who can help us, then so be it.

“It’s not like we’re sitting there saying, ‘Hey, go find this. Go find that.’ My thinking about the portal is it continues to evolve daily. I think the one thing, if I could summarize it, it’s that I don’t necessarily want to utilize the portal to get rid of players. A lot of coaches are culling their roster through the portal. If a player comes to play for me, I don’t want to tell him he has to leave. Sometimes if a player wants to play, he might have to leave, but I’m not telling him he has to leave. But I will look in the portal, I’ll look in other places, and if someone’s available and they can help us, we’re gonna do our best and do our due diligence. It’ll create a lot of competition here. The one thing I see with this group is it’s such a great group, and they love competition.”

That’s when Rhule harkened back to one of the most notable and significant things that he said during his very first press conference as Nebraska’s coach in November 2022 – when he declared the new Huskers, his Huskers, would “leave no stone unturned to find good players.”

“We’ll be recruiting all the way up until probably July 31st for this year’s class,” Rhule said. “There’s a couple of kids on campus that have popped up, kids on campus have come to the portal camps and they’ve reached out to us. There’s a guy that’s working out with us right now that was just a student last year. So we’ll look at all places to find players.”