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Time to reduce scholarship limit down from 85?

Mountain Man Hawk

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Mar 30, 2010
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I see lots of concern that the ability for recruits to get money is going to upend the competitive balance. Although with the same 3-4 teams making the playoffs every year you could argue we didn’t have great balance before anyway.

I think the most obvious way to even the playing field if we need to is to lower the number of players you can have on the roster so no program can stockpile all of the good players.

Thinking about the ways professional teams try to ensure a level-playing field, most don’t really apply today. I guess once schools can pay players you could have a salary cap, but you can’t really have a salary cap for NIL money. And without looking at the numbers, is the competitive balance of MLB that different from other sports? It certainly doesn’t seem worse than college football has been.

I guess theoretically you could have a draft at some point. The idea of it sounds crazy at first but at some point when the money is big enough and everyone is used to the idea that big-time college football players are really highly paid professional athletes then maybe it’s not such a crazy idea. I think a draft would almost be worse for Iowa because we would never be bad enough for a really high draft pick and never quite good enough to win the championship. You obviously get some weird incentives with drafts because teams that can’t win the championship are better off losing to get better picks.
 
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I believe the 85 man limit is just about right. I would not want to see it changed.
At a certain point the market sort of takes care of this itself because players want playing time and they will transfer to make sure they get it. I know the reduction down to 85 was viewed as a big win for parity, but at that time players couldn’t transfer so easily so there were probably lots of players that wanted to transfer but didn’t want to sit out a year.
 
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I see lots of concern that the ability for recruits to get money is going to upend the competitive balance. Although with the same 3-4 teams making the playoffs every year you could argue we didn’t have great balance before anyway.

I think the most obvious way to even the playing field if we need to is to lower the number of players you can have on the roster so no program can stockpile all of the good players.

Thinking about the ways professional teams try to ensure a level-playing field, most don’t really apply today. I guess once schools can pay players you could have a salary cap, but you can’t really have a salary cap for NIL money. And without looking at the numbers, is the competitive balance of MLB that different from other sports? It certainly doesn’t seem worse than college football has been.

I guess theoretically you could have a draft at some point. The idea of it sounds crazy at first but at some point when the money is big enough and everyone is used to the idea that big-time college football players are really highly paid professional athletes then maybe it’s not such a crazy idea. I think a draft would almost be worse for Iowa because we would never be bad enough for a really high draft pick and never quite good enough to win the championship. You obviously get some weird incentives with drafts because teams that can’t win the championship are better off losing to get better picks.
Never considered that but with the advent of NIL and the transfer portal there is a case to be made for scholarship reduction.

How about bringing back the "junior varsity" concept with organized competition. Hawkeye "Gold" team would be the "varsity" squad to compete for a conference and national title (same as what is in place today). Hawkeye "Black" team would consist of players not on the Gold team ..presumably consisting of new underclassmen and walk-ons which would compete against similar units from other B10 teams. Black team plays on Friday nights, Gold team on Saturdays. (Disclaimer: the idea has not been well thought out, just popped into my head ..... but I bet a lot of fans would love to watch the backups compete and those guys need to showcase for NIL opportunities also).
 
Nice idea, but I don't see it making a difference.

Schools in a "strong NIL position" will still be stronger than those without whether it's 25, 50, 75, or 85 scholarships.

Kinda like inflation ~ the rich feel the pain, but not nearly as much as the poor.
 
Nice idea, but I don't see it making a difference.

Schools in a "strong NIL position" will still be stronger than those without whether it's 25, 50, 75, or 85 scholarships.

Kinda like inflation ~ the rich feel the pain, but not nearly as much as the poor.
I’d say reduced it to 75
 
I’d say reduced it to 75
I would take it down to 55ish.. Maybe 60. but if you look at every other sport, none have the same ratio of athletes to starting positions that football has... almost 4:1. Compare that to wrestling were its <1:1. If they really wanted to level the playing field, cut scholarship limits dramatically and force some of these programs to offers 4 years schollies...
 
If they lower it what is going to stop the big $ schools from getting $ to 20 good preferred walk-ons?
 
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You need a lot of bodies for football. Can’t have a safety body type playing corner or a center playing tackle. Keep the scholarships as high as possible. I still think NIL stuff benefits Iowa, can start legally doing what the SEC has always done
 
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No, there's no good reason to do so. Depth is already a concern with 85, lowering it would just increase injuries and lead to more uncompetitive games. Terrible idea.
 
I think with playoff expansion they will not reduce roster size. More potential games to be played.
 
This! Even now you are going to see "Walk ons" getting NIL deals to defeat the scholarship limits.

One way to keep it fair when reducing scholarships (even keeping existing numbers) is for the NCAA to have a rule that any non-scholarship player receiving x NIL money will count against the scholarship limit.
 
I think with playoff expansion they will not reduce roster size. More potential games to be played.
I don’t think reducing scholarships means you have to reduce roster size. It would just mean more spots go to walk-ons and the roster size remains the same.

As others pointed out above, there would be no stopping Ohio State boosters from lining up NIL money for walk-ons, so it’s not a perfect solution. But I would think it would at least help. In this scenario, recruits would be deciding between a scholarship at Iowa plus whatever NIL money we can offer, versus the NIL money at OSU that first has to go towards paying out-of-state tuition and room and board there before they can start profiting off the NIL.
 
One way to keep it fair when reducing scholarships (even keeping existing numbers) is for the NCAA to have a rule that any non-scholarship player receiving x NIL money will count against the scholarship limit.
I probably agree with the other posters that it’s going to be looked at as a safety concern if teams can’t have the same size of roster that they have today. And with the Supreme Court ruling there is no way you can stop walk-ons from accepting money.

At some point many years from now there may be collective bargaining and revenue-sharing and salary caps, etc. like in the professional leagues but that won’t happen for a long time (if ever) so in the meantime we may need to look at other options if NIL is as disastrous as some fear to the current competitive balance.

I recently watched that Netflix show The English Game and all of this is very reminiscent of that. For those that haven’t seen it, it’s about the origins of professional soccer in the 1870s and (spoiler) lots of people reacted to players getting paid the same way many posters on this board are reacting in every thread on the topic.
 
Nice idea, but I don't see it making a difference.

Schools in a "strong NIL position" will still be stronger than those without whether it's 25, 50, 75, or 85 scholarships.

Kinda like inflation ~ the rich feel the pain, but not nearly as much as the poor.
Complete wrong example. Inflation takes indispensable money from poor and luxury money from the wealthy.
 
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