The mechanics behind how USC could add Tavien Feaster to its roster
Will Muschamp signed 23 prospects between December and February, and was able to count the scholarships for transfers Josh Belk and Jamel Cook toward the 2019 cycle, getting the team to a 25-man limit. So in one sense, South Carolina’s incoming football recruiting class is effectively full.
But USC still could find its way into adding former four-star Clemson running back Tavien Feaster as a graduate transfer for this season.
How does this work, despite technically being full? The answer starts with the old “blueshirt” rule, but gets muddled in the mechanics of what’s known as “initial counters” and the NCAA’s hard cap.
South Carolina director for compliance Jeff Whitehead explained to The State a football player’s scholarship fits into “three buckets.”
▪ The 85-scholarship limit — A team can only have that many players on scholarship at a given time.
▪ An initial counter limit — A player “counts” initially when they receive a scholarship or financial aid for the first time. A team has a limit of 25 of these per year, but there’s a good bit of flexibility for when players sign and enroll. Players who sign but don’t qualify academically don’t count toward this.
▪ The hard cap rule — A limit of 25 signees per year, with a bit of wiggle room in that mid-year enrollees can count forward or backward toward the current or previous class. This includes student-athletes who sign National Letters of Intent, an institutional offer of financial aid or sign a financial aid agreement for the first time.
On the first front, South Carolina appears to be two scholarships under the 85-man limit. So USC is good there.
The initial counter part involves a little jumping through hoops, going through the blueshirt process that popped up in recent years. Feaster can enroll once practice starts in August. If he is a “non-recruited athlete,” his initial counter can count ahead toward the 25-man limit that will mostly be filled by the 2020 recruiting class.
To be a non-recruited athlete doesn’t mean the staff can’t actually recruit him, but he and coaches have to stay within a set of three guidelines:
1. The player cannot take an official visit but can take unofficial ones on his own dime.
2. The staff cannot have an “arranged, in-person, off-campus encounter” with the recruit or his family. (They can talk on the phone or in-person on campus.)
3. The staff cannot extend a written offer for financial aid or a letter of intent.
Assuming everyone clears those hurdles, Feaster could join the team in August and, assuming the team has filled its last batch of initial counter spots, have his scholarship count ahead, making him functionally a part of the 2020 class.
This is the mechanism that allowed Josh Belk and Jamel Cook to sign last summer.
The restrictions of the hard cap are less in play at this point because of how recently it came into place and the ability to count back. It only came around in 2017 and spring enrollees could be counted against a previous cycle, where everyone began at zero.
That means many teams are still relying on extra flexibility that came with their initial classes, having received a buffer of sorts. Assuming coaches keep signing the maximum and at times pushing counters ahead for transfers, eventually there might be some smaller classes to get the hard cap spots aligned.
Down the road this could mean a bit more conservativeness with spots, as transfers will take a hard cap spot and eventually not be able to be counted forward.
The biggest gap between the hard cap and initial counter system is that the hard cap includes players who sign letters of intent, so a player who does not qualify counts against that 25 (but not against the initial counter).
South Carolina’s staff still has to recruit Feaster, even if he counts as nonrecruited. If he decides to come, he’ll end up, at least in one sense, a member of the 2020 recruiting class.
This story was originally published June 4, 2019 at 10:37 PM.