When SEC football coaches met with their bosses last month and proposed that assistants remain a part of the sport, they made an offer: If it’s a cost issue, take the money out of their salaries.
Kirby Smart, the Georgia coach who just received a $13 million-a-year raise, was the first to make the offer. Lane Kiffin, the Ole Miss coach who earns nearly $9 million, seconded the offer. Others joined in.
“The coaches agreed that we would pay out of our own salary, we would give ourselves less money for our salary, we would take whatever it cost to have assistants and pay it out of our salary,” Kiffin said.
The response they got: Thanks, but it’s not really about the money.
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On Tuesday, Kiffin said he had “major concerns on many fronts” about roster limits, which will be part of the settlement in House v. NCAA. The NCAA agreed to eliminate scholarship limits in all sports (currently 85 in football) and install lower limits on rosters. In football, that would mean many programs would go from 130 players to as few as 85, depending on where the final number ends up.
If it’s too low, Kiffin warned, teams would risk not being able to field teams at the end of the season. The combination of injuries, transfers and exclusions could lead to situations like last year’s Orange Bowl, when Florida State’s roster was decimated and the Seminoles were defeated 63-3 by Georgia.
Kirby Smart’s Georgia team defeated Florida State 63-3 in the Orange Bowl in December. (Sam Navarro / USA Today)
Afterward, Smart said, “People need to see what happened tonight and fix it.” Smart didn’t know that campus limits could be part of the future. Kiffin, who said he had players opt out of the Peach Bowl because they were going to the portal, warned that roster limits would lead to Orange Bowl repeats.
“That cap number going down, eliminating the walk-ons, you’ll see the situation with the state of Florida,” Kiffin said. “The measure now is that people have started not playing in bowling games so as not to get hurt when entering the portal. And I’m not even saying starters. I’m saying we had players on special teams, backups on defense, offensive teams, like, ‘Why don’t you play in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, New Year’s Six Bowl?’ And they say, ‘We don’t want to risk getting hurt covering a kickoff because we’re going to go in the door.'”
Ole Miss still earned a 38-25 Peach Bowl victory over Penn State, which also had opt-outs. With the new 12-team College Football Playoff, non-playoff games will be an ongoing challenge to generate interest. But bowling isn’t the only concern for coaches when it comes to roster limits.
Having enough players to practice with as the season progresses is important. While NFL teams have active 53-man rosters during the season, they can turn to the free agency pool or their practice squad at any time during the season, while college teams are locked into their roster once it begins. the semester.
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Additionally, while football generates the vast majority of college revenue, the sport could see the largest percentage cut to its workforce in the House deal. Baseball’s scholarship limit, for example, has been 11.7, but its roster limit appears to be above 30, and teams are free to offer scholarships up to that limit under the terms proposed by the House.
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Cost savings have been the stated reason for cutting football squads. The higher the roster limit, the more programs are likely to fill it with scholarship players.
“If they create a system where they say, ‘Well, you have a staff limit of, say, 95 or 100, and you can get them all the scholarships,’ well, people will eventually do that,” Kiffin said. “If Ohio State or Alabama give out their 95- or 100-place scholarships, eventually everyone will do it every year. Someone will hit you and you’ll say, ‘Why don’t we use all the scholarships they’re giving us?’”
Therefore, administrators have indicated, reducing the limits of the football roster would be one way to reduce it. That’s why SEC coaches offered, if cost was the issue, to foot the bill for assistants themselves. But when they offered that, Kiffin said, they got a surprising response.
“Actually, we’re told, the financial aspect hasn’t been a part of this at all,” Kiffin said. “It’s about potential lawsuits in the future.”
That could mean litigation over partial scholarships or the idea of assistants themselves. Those things have been going on forever in college sports, but the NCAA’s losing streak in court has basically scared it all these days.
Still, coaches continue to push to keep assistants, pointing to the history of college football. It was the basis of the movie “Rudy.” Georgia just won two national championships with former Stetson Bennett as the starting quarterback. There are children and grandchildren of players and coaches who get to be on the team.
It is not clear where the final number is. So is the schedule, except that it would be effective for the 2025 season. It would also be agreed upon by all conferences involved in the deal, according to Kiffin’s understanding, so the SEC would not set its own limits.
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Their desire is to have two limits: scholarships and schools, which is the current system. Some have proposed a practice squad system, a la the NFL. But the plaintiffs’ statement when the House settlement was announced was quite clear, stating that it called for the elimination of scholarship caps, meaning more money would go directly to athletes.
Since then, there have been many discussions behind the scenes and the coaches made their feelings clear.
“They may use different terms about it, but they are getting rid of the companions. “It’s a major concern,” Kiffin said. “There are all kinds of people who have become great players and have won championships and are playing in the NFL. And just the locker room culture of having chaperones, they become friends with the star scholarship players, and they’re at each other’s weddings later on, and a lot of those guys have actually become coaches. That’s part of the fabric of college football, it’s the walk-ons and their stories and their family tradition and going to the same school, and you would be eliminating that.”
(Top photo: Alex Slitz//Keynote USA/Getty Images)
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