The Limits Of Roster Limits
That’s “Cap”?
The NCAA is set to cap FBS football teams’ rosters at 105 players, which is less than the 130 or most FBS programs carry. And, teams will be able to scholarship “up to” the 105.
This “up to” implies that some programs not able to foot the bill for 105 full rides may cap their own scholarship numbers at a lower number. For example, a smaller program may only be able to scholarship 80 players. But, they have 25 spots still for walk-ons.
So, walk-ons are not dead dead (yet), but there will still be 25-30 less walk-on spots per team in the FBS come Fall 2025.
This may create a tidal wave of FBS 3rd stringers hitting an already crowded portal to find new homes at smaller FBS or even FCS schools, and push down a lot of talented, high quality players to increasingly lower division levels.
This may squeeze out the mid to low level D3 guy who, for now, may still be able to find a team, but come 2025, maybe won’t. The Power 4 FBS walk-on 3rd stringer might now be Group of 5 FBS starter, or FCS scholarship guy.
This will likely exacerbate problems that already exist with placing kickers in college in 2024:
There are just more high quality kickers than a decade ago because of more coaching.
There’s more competition from older, game-tested kickers in the transfer portal.
There’s hesitancy now for FBS teams to offer a high school kicker who isn’t a day 1 starter, thus deemphasizing development even more than it already is for specialists.
And, many teams now are shy to pull the trigger on walk-on spots when the NCAA hasn’t been crystal clear yet about exactly how Fall 2025 will look.
Talking to one buddy who is a Power 4 coach, it seems what is likely to happen is most teams will carry two kickers, two punters and two snappers, maybe one more. But, that 6-7 number of specialists is still going to be smaller than the 9-10 man specialists rooms many teams have today.
What might help a lot of FBS guys on the bubble is that coming from brand-name schools, a lot of Group of 5 or other programs would love to take a shot at talent they didn’t previously have access to.
What may help high school specialists is going back to really tiering your college recruiting searches for the 2025, 2026 and beyond classes.
You might do well to actually develop relationships with coaches at the D3 and smaller school levels, because odds are, it’s only going to be harder to find an FBS willing to try a high school kicker out when there’s so much talent on the market that has either already been in college, played or is older and more mature (on paper anyway).
There is always a market for a kicker who can kick 65 yard FG’s, KO 75 yards and punt 5.0 seconds of hang time routinely. But the market for everyone else is ever-changing.
Plans to leverage football to play in college need to be more flexible than ever before.
Brendan
P.S. If you’d like to work together, check out my website coachcahill.com and see if we might be a fit.