Are Gamecocks set to feel roster pain? A closer look at USC’s scholarship situation
There might be a case that South Carolina football is proof the NCAA’s rules are working.
When the limits on signing players were tightened — holdings teams to 25 new scholarship players a year — the thought was this would encourage coaches to avoid signing too many recruits with academic risks, and not fall into the high-turnover “over-signing” approach that sometimes left schools cutting recruits to make the numbers work.
Under Will Muschamp, the Gamecocks were a bit cavalier with their roster management. They took a consistent set of grad transfers, averaging two each of the past three seasons. Their traditional transfers — think Josh Belk and Jamel Cook — often didn’t work out and left after a year or so. A few junior college players and a general level of attrition (young guys who left after a year or two) that didn’t work out meant each of those 25 spots wasn’t accounting for four or five years a lot of the time.
And that was all self-contained within one coaching tenure. There hasn’t yet been the roster attrition that comes with a new coach hire. There will be soon.
South Carolina, like every FBS team, has an 85-scholarship limit. But an analysis of the roster shows the Gamecocks only has about five spots it can replace with a change-heavy offseason still to come. That’s in part because the Muschamp staff “borrowed against” the 2021 cap for new scholarships with four transfers and August signees who arrived before the 2020 season. And it’s in part because the roster attrition didn’t slow, even as the class limits went into place.
Assuming one counts the players who didn’t walk on senior day as returning to USC (some could still leave) and counts those who did walk as leaving (some could still come back) and adds in USC’s 10 currently committed Class of 2021 prospects, the Gamecocks would be at 78 scholarship players (give or take four opt-outs whose returns are unclear).
That leaves 11 additional spots that can go to newcomers, whether that be new commitments from high school or junior college prospects, or offseason transfers.
The NCAA is expected to allow for one-time immediate transfer eligibility, which will mean the new coach will probably go looking for quick help. More players from the current roster than usual, including some good ones, will likely leave for a range of reasons.
All this might just be a penance South Carolina has to pay. A coach whose teams seemed in need of quick help each of the past three seasons left the roster in a tight spot, and perhaps it’s on the next guy to dig the Gamecocks out. This could also make the job even more of a rebuild than expected.
The reality is, this might end up being more of a sport-wide issue.
The potential transfer changes are going to accelerate that process in a notable way. There’s no way around it. More reserves will look for better spots. More good players in so-so or bad situations will look for better ones — if other schools will have them. (South Carolina’s players showed a strong allegiance to Muschamp and many had other suitors close in their recruiting process.)
Maybe the NCAA lets it play out, sees if the transfer portal pushes more schools well below the scholarship threshold. (Kansas has spent years in this sort of purgatory.)
Or maybe it could try to expand that number, to say 30, to account for the level of attrition that is going to be part of the sport soon enough and is to a degree already.
Worse comes to worse, whoever gets the South Carolina job probably hopes things fall that way because it’s an under-discussed task he will have to handle.
This story was originally published December 2, 2020 at 10:38 AM.
