Greg Byrne explains importance of roster limits in House settlement

There will be plenty of changes to college sports following the House settlement, but one of the biggest might be in how rosters are allocated. Scholarship limits are out, roster limits are in.

What does the change mean, functionally? Well, it’s fairly straightforward.

“In summary, we’ve always had scholarship limits in college sports, so football is 85, men’s basketball I think is 13, baseball famously 11.7,” Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne said on the McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning radio program. “And you had to balance your scholarship numbers with Title IX.

“Well the courts have determined that scholarship limits are illegal, and so now, in the settlement on the House litigation that just was signed by Judge Wilken last week, both the plaintiffs and the defendants worked out a model where you have roster limits by sport.”

The roster limits were put into place as a matter of mere practicality. If the competitive playing field is to remain remotely balanced, you can’t have teams just stacking huge numbers of players on one roster.

There are also more practical reasons why the schools themselves are behind such a change, too. It’s an affordability issue.

“Because every body that you have in your athletic department, whether it’s student-athlete, whether it’s employee, costs money,” Byrne explained. “So there was decided we just can’t have unlimited people. Like people talk about our football staff at Alabama, we still put limits on how many people we had. So basically, in a nutshell, it was decided between the plaintiffs and the defendants that each sport would have a roster limit.

“Football was at 105. Well, we have decided as a Southeastern Conference that we’re going to have 85 scholarships. So we’re still going to have 20 walk-ons. So the walk-ons will still be there. You won’t be carrying 130, 140 like some schools have done in the past, it’s just going to be a roster number you have to work with on an annual basis. And that will go for every team, every sport.”

It’ll probably take some adjustment as teams get used to the new limits. There will probably be some hard conversations along the way.

But in the end, the new roster limits in the sport are designed to help keep things relatively fair. Now it’s on the schools themselves to learn how to operate within them.