‘It makes sense’: Why NCAA eliminating signing limits helps South Carolina football
College football teams are getting more roster flexibility.
The NCAA announced a blanket two-year waiver on Wednesday that will allow FBS teams to sign as many players as they so choose, overriding a previous rule that limited squads to 25 players per signing class.
“Some schools hadn’t given out all their scholarships and felt constrained by the annual limit,” Division I Council chair and West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons said in a release. “This temporary change provides schools more flexibility and adds opportunities for incoming and current student-athletes to receive aid.”
The change comes, at least in part, due to the NCAA and major college football’s desire to sort out the increasingly volatile nature of roster construction within the sport.
The one-time transfer rule, which passed last year and allows student-athletes to switch schools once without penalty, has created a vacuum for players to bounce from school to school, but little flexibility for teams to replace those athletes.
Past legislation limited football coaches to signing just 25 players per signing class, a response to coaches “oversigning,” or, signing more players than needed, which often led to scholarships getting pulled soon thereafter.
That rule had since been adjusted to allow teams to back-fill up to an additional seven spots that previously belonged to players who transferred out of a program without counting toward their bank of 25 spots.
South Carolina, for example, fell victim to the quagmire of previous rules ahead of the 2021 season when it began fall camp with roughly 79 scholarship players on the roster.
NCAA rules allow for teams to offer scholarships to as many as 85 players in a single year. However, given the Gamecocks had already signed 25 players who qualified as “initial counters,” or, part of their pool of allotted signees that year, coach Shane Beamer and his staff were limited in how they were able to add players to the team.
“I would’ve loved that last year, because we started the season with 79 guys on scholarship and I couldn’t add anybody else because I’d already used my initials up,” Beamer explained following a Gamecock Club event in Rock Hill on Wednesday. “So to have the opportunity now to get to 85 (players) — to me, it’s a player safety issue and it makes sense.”
Before roster limits were put into practice, recruiting classes routinely included as many as 25, 30 or even up to 35 players in a given season.
Between 2005 and 2011 — when the 25-man limit was first enacted to combat oversigning — South Carolina netted signatures from 25 or more players in six of those seven classes. USC also signed 31 or more players in three of those years.
The hope with the new rule, at least in Beamer’s eyes, is that teams can better adjust to the changing landscape of program building, while allowing new staffs the flexibility to adjust their rosters from previous regimes without penalty, among other positives.
“That’s the biggest thing is it helps with player safety and allows — especially new coaches — to be able to get their roster where it needs to be from a competitive standpoint,” Beamer said. “And then also, if you lost a bunch of guys in the transfer portal you could somewhat replace them.”
This story was originally published May 19, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
