Pending roster limits pose uncertainty for college athletes

College recruits and coaches are facing critical decisions this Wednesday on national signing day without clear answers for how their teams could be affected by a pending antitrust settlement that could eliminate thousands of Division I roster spots by the start of next year and have already caused some athletes to lose verbal scholarship offers.

Leaders across college sports are rewriting myriad rules in preparation for implementing changes mandated by the $2.8 billion House v. NCAA settlement. Part of the pending agreement would set new limits for the maximum roster size of every Division I NCAA-sponsored sport, reducing D-I opportunities by at least 4,739 if the settlement is approved.

The new maximum roster size for 19 of 43 NCAA sports would be smaller than the current average roster in those sports. A handful of sports, including football, baseball and women’s soccer, would be disproportionately affected. Those reductions already have forced many coaches to renege on verbal promises they made despite the pending uncertainty about roster sizes.

Football, baseball and women’s soccer would all need to shed more than 1,000 athletes from their Division I ranks, according to data on the NCAA’s website. The new limits in other sports are higher than current average roster sizes, which could lead to more opportunities if schools opt to increase spots on those teams. If those sports remain at their current size, the overall reduction in D-1 could be closer to 10,000 spots.

Football teams would lose the most players, dropping from an average FBS roster size of 121 to a maximum of 105 players. Those limits have prompted some football coaches to raise concerns about player safety and the fate of walk-on players.

While some baseball players might benefit from increased scholarship money, nearly 1 in 5 current roster spots in baseball are scheduled to disappear by the start of the 2025-26 school year under the deal. The average roster size last spring was 41.9 players. Teams will be limited to a maximum of 34 players starting next year. Women’s soccer rosters will shrink more than 10 percent from an average size of 31.2 to a maximum of 28.

Taylor Wilson is among those cut out by the changes. The soccer player at Northwest High School in suburban Washington, D.C., had been committed to Penn State for a year when she came home from practice the Tuesday before her senior year started in August and heard from her father that her verbal scholarship offer was rescinded.

Wilson, who had a wardrobe full of Nittany Lions gear, said Penn State had been “a personality trait of mine.” She has a picture of herself with Nittany Lions coach Erica Dambach from a camp when she was 12. Four years later, a recruiting packet and scholarship offer arrived, which she accepted. A year later, the dream was pulled away.

“I was just shattered,” the 17-year-old said. “I didn’t really know how to act. I kind of felt numb.”

The following morning, Dambach was in tears during a 45-minute FaceTime conversation. Wilson said Dambach explained the pulled offer had nothing to do with her play or a lack of interest from the Nittany Lions. Instead, due to the new rules proposed by the pending settlement, women’s soccer rosters are capped at 28 players. Dambach’s projected roster for next fall was over the limit.

Wilson said she left the call with no ill will toward Dambach, who she said offered to help her find a new team for her freshman season. Dambach, through Penn State’s sports information department, declined to talk with ESPN for this story. Wilson said she and her parents were “mad and shocked” by the changes to college sports that had upended her dreams.

Dambach’s decision wasn’t “anything personal,” Wilson said. “It was just business.”

To avoid future antitrust lawsuits, college sports leaders are working to get rid of NCAA rules that limit how much money schools can spend on their athletes, including limits on how many scholarships a school can give to players in each sport.

If the settlement is approved, schools will be permitted (but not required) to offer scholarships to all athletes, which could lead to a significant increase in the financial aid players receive in some sports. College sports officials told ESPN that without scholarship limits, there needed to be a way to prevent the richest schools from stockpiling talent. Their solution was to set a maximum roster size for every sport, a more legally defensible mechanism for competitive balance among schools since it’s not as directly tied to compensation.

The fine print around new roster limits remains undecided, leading to more uncertainty as teams construct their 2025-26 rosters. One power conference official told ESPN that the college sports industry was in the process of making decades worth of changes in a year’s time, and while the official said he empathizes with the coaches and recruits feeling the brunt of those adjustments, answers to all their questions are still weeks or months away.

As a result, coaches across the country have been navigating painful conversations like the one between Dambach and the Wilsons ahead of national signing day, the period when recruits in most sports sign commitments to play for their future colleges.

“There’s still so much left … that everyone has to figure out, even the people who are a part of the lawsuit,” Wilson said. “I want more people to be aware of the destruction that’s happening in some of college sports with this, because it’s definitely surreal.”

How the proposed limits were decided

Months before the details of the new limits were finalized in settlement negotiations, conference leaders asked schools and coaches how many players they felt they needed to run a safe and competitive team.

The commissioners of the Power 5 conferences — all defendants in the antitrust lawsuits — met in late June to compare the roster numbers gathered from their members. They negotiated final roster limits in early July along with lawyers from the NCAA and lawyers representing current and former Division I athletes.

Steve Berman, co-lead attorney for the athletes, told ESPN he and fellow plaintiffs’ attorney Jeffrey Kessler wanted roster sizes to be as large as possible and were pleased with where the numbers landed.

“I think what we’ve negotiated is fair because on the whole more athletes are going to get more money than before in those sports,” Berman said.

Along with needing to maintain competitive balance, conference leaders wanted to restrict roster sizes to contain costs, according to multiple sources familiar with the negotiations. The settlement would allow schools to pay more than $20 million per year directly to their athletes through name, image and likeness deals, which will likely prompt many departments to adjust their budgets.

Athletic directors with the largest budgets are concerned the roster limits will force them to eliminate dozens of opportunities that they could otherwise afford to keep.

For coaches across multiple sports, the new limits raise concerns about having enough depth to absorb potential injuries, hold effective practices and reserve spots for players that might need more development before they’re ready to contribute to a college team.

Louisville baseball coach Dan McDonnell says the limits will make it hard to hold effective practices, which has already proved to be a challenge in recent years. “If you have 10 pitchers throw today and tomorrow, you literally can’t scrimmage for three, four or five days. And so we’re limited as it is with how many times we’re able to intrasquad,” McDonnell said.

“So as a coach, there’s a competitive side that concerns us with 34.”

Baseball teams were previously required to trim their rosters to 35 by the start of the regular season. Since COVID prompted the NCAA to give players extra years of eligibility, teams have been able to carry up to 40 players in-season. Some coaches have been hoping the number would permanently jump to 40 due to the contraction of the minor leagues in pro baseball and a smaller Major League Baseball draft leaves more players potentially staying in or going to college.

Previous limits applied only to a team’s roster during its season. Most teams carried more players during their offseason, which explains why NCAA data says the average Division I roster size is 41.9. Under the new roster limits, it’s not clear whether teams will be allowed to carry more players during the offseason. “It’s kind of a necessity, really, to have more than 34, at least in the fall,” Tennessee baseball coach Tony Vitello said.

NCAA and conference officials also have not yet agreed on whether teams should be able to replace players who suffer significant injuries before or during the season. Vitello said dealing with inevitable injuries “could get kind of dicey” if a team has 30 or fewer healthy bodies heading into the season, especially in an era of increased specialization among pitchers and other fielders, leading to fewer two-way players. McDonnell said he could envision teams canceling or forfeiting games due to a lack of healthy players, particularly pitchers.

Women’s soccer coaches hold similar concerns about coping with injuries on a 28-player roster for practices and games, especially if multiple players suffer season-ending injuries.

Sources with knowledge of the rules under consideration told ESPN that it’s unlikely teams will be allowed to maintain a practice squad or junior varsity roster that works out with their varsity team. It’s also unlikely that teams will be able to move players on and off their roster during the season via injured reserve lists like those that exist in pro sports, the sources said.

Conference and school officials are working through these details, but specific answers are likely still months away. Coaches in most conferences have been told to plan for next year’s rosters with the expectation that they will need to comply with the new limits.

Coaches say limits will ‘better the experience’ for some

Multiple coaches told ESPN that roster limits aren’t all bad. A Division I women’s soccer coach believes the smaller roster size “should improve the quality of every program” by spreading out the talent among more schools.

Some Division I players may end up at Division II or Division III schools, increasing the quality of players at the tops of those divisions as well. Division II and Division III currently do not have roster limits.

“Where I think this is actually going to help is for those recruits, I think if the [youth] clubs do their job, they are going to push those mid-major, lower-end D-I recruits to the top D-II’s and D-III’s,” said Frank Marino, a youth club administrator and the women’s soccer coach at Division III Cal Lutheran. “And I actually think it’s going to better the level of D-II and D-III soccer. And I also think it’s going to better the experience for those student-athletes.”

At the power conference level, schools are likely to offer more scholarship dollars to their athletes in certain sports. But coaches say they are disappointed they might have to eliminate spots for those willing to pay their own tuition for a chance to be a part of a D-I team.

“That’s where I have the hardest time of capping a roster,” McDonnell said. “Not even talking about development and scrimmaging and having enough players and all that stuff. I hate it for kids that want to be a part of your program, and now you’re going to have to say, I’m sorry, you can’t.”

Some coaches have raised the idea of introducing the new limits gradually, which might prevent some current players from losing their spots after having spent several years at their current school. This type of plan could also lessen the impact on the incoming recruiting class and potentially the 2026 class.

“If this is to help players, there’s definitely a gap in looking out for all players. This didn’t have to happen as fast as it did,” Wilson said. “They could have phased it in, and that, I don’t understand why they just said, ‘Oh, no, this has to happen right now,’ because it’s definitely changing every single person’s lives, even players on their current teams.

“What’s going to happen when their coach says, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have room for you anymore?’ Where do they go?”

Conference officials told ESPN that while a more gradual process has been discussed, there hasn’t been enough of a push from coaches and schools to make it a priority. One conference leader told ESPN that the implementation of the new limits was “not set in stone,” and could change before the settlement is scheduled to be finalized in April, or even in future years.

Seeking new options

The days after the Wilsons’ call with Dambach were difficult. Wilson had a high school soccer game that Wednesday afternoon as she figured out whether she still wanted to play college soccer.

By Friday, she was on a plane to Indiana to visit Purdue. She didn’t necessarily want to go and was still mourning what happened with Penn State, but her parents encouraged it. The next week, she started talking to Louisville, a school she hadn’t talked with previously.

As she explored new options, Wilson stayed in touch with Dambach, who kept her word and helped throughout the process. She asked Dambach for her thoughts on different coaches, schools and cultures. Wilson sought information from prospective schools about 2025 roster numbers, whether they’d have to cut players and what might happen to that school’s 2025 recruits if she committed.

She avoided schools where her club teammates had committed because she didn’t want to be the reason a teammate would end up being decommitted.

“If that would have happened to them, it would have just been more heartbreaking,” Wilson said. “I was never going to allow the addition to disrupt anything else. I didn’t want anyone to feel what I had to feel.”

Wilson said she appreciated finding out Penn State’s decision when she did, which allowed her to find other opportunities. She found comfort in her conversations with Louisville’s coaches and her research into the school. Weeks after Penn State decommitted, she chose to play for the Cardinals.

As Wilson went through the process forced by roster cuts, she also had to make another decision: picking a senior year research project for her school’s honors program. She initially wanted to focus on sports and mental health, but after what she’d been through, she switched to a project on the NCAA settlement case.

“I can channel all of the emotions that I had about the case and still have about the case for other players, and I can put it into this paper,” she said. “And it’ll be a really interesting read for many people — when they see just the impact that the settlement case is having.”