Dabo Swinney reacts to new scholarship proposal: "Not many coaches want 105 scholarships"
Earlier this week, news broke about a proposal to increase the number of NCAA football scholarships from 85 to 105 per season. Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney spoke out against the change during ACC media days.
"The crazy thing is, not many coaches want 105 scholarships," Swinney said. "We want to keep our walk-ons. It's hard to manage that many guys."
Swinney attributes this proposal to a recent lawsuit that decided every football player must be on scholarship. Administrators didn't want 130 scholarship players on each team, so they settled on reducing roster sizes to 105 for this proposal. Any players outside the 105 kept on scholarship would lose their roster spots.
"The unintended consequence is it eliminates your walk-ons," Swinney said. "No coach wants that."
One of the most significant drawbacks of this proposal is that a smaller roster hurts Clemson's scout team efforts, which are led by walk-ons.
"When you do away with the walk-ons, we have no way to practice," Swinney said. "You don't put the corner at nose guard for the week for the scout team. You might have a corner that physically could play running back, but he doesn't know what to do. It's not like they all sit in the same meetings and learn the same terminology. It's frustrating. You need the walk-ons."
A danger of having 105 scholarship players is that transfer portal numbers could increase even more.
"You think you got transfers now? Wait until it gets to 105," Swinney said. "That transfer number will go way up because you only travel about 80 players. That will be a lot of football players not getting to play."
He also noted that some teams would have forfeited bowl games last year if this rule had been in effect because they wouldn't have had enough players.
"We're going to play more games than we've ever played, practice more than we have, finish later than ever, and have the smallest roster we've ever had," Swinney said.
