What Impact Will Roster Caps Have?
Case brought coverage of House vs NCAA tentative settlement yesterday, and by the way, the "House" in the lawsuit title is not the US House of Representatives (as I've seen reported a few times). It is, instead, Grant House, who was a swimmer at Arizona State. The other named plaintiff on the case is Sedona Prince, who played basketball originally at Oregon when she first poked the NCAA bear on social media about inequitable treatment at the NCAA tournament between men and women. Prince will be playing her last season of eligibility this season at TCU.
A lot of the response to this settlement has, quite understandably, been about the provisioning of scholarships, as it will result in quite an increase in the number of scholarships available for just about every sport. What has been less looked at is the impact that roster caps will have on teams. Mostly this is because the roster caps are generous enough that it's just not too much of a factor. But I thought it would be good to look back through some past teams and see where some of these roster caps might have had an impact. In other words, have some of our UofL sports teams had rosters in years past that are larger than the roster caps in the settlement?
Basketball
Volleyball
You don't have to go quite as far back to find Volleyball exceeding what will be the roster cap, just to 2021. This is, certainly influenced by the special Covid rules that happened, as we had Anna Hall (nee Stevenson, and Tori Stringer (nee Dilfer) were playing their 5th, Covid, year of play tipping us over the edge to 19 players on the roster. Otherwise, Volleyball tends to hang around right at 17 or 18 players.
Lacrosse
You don't have to go far back to see a Lacrosse roster that tops the 38 slots they'll get, indeed just a few months back to the 2024 squad that listed 40. They also topped it in 2021 with 39.
Softball and Field Hockey
Neither Softball or Field Hockey, in the recent large handful of years that I looked at, exceeded what will be their roster cap.
So, generally, it looks like the proposed roster caps are quite reasonable in comparison to the team sizes that are common today and in recent years, even accounting for the Covid years where roster sizes tended to be slightly larger than normal with players getting a 5th year of eligibility.
Coach Teeter may need to keep an bit of a closer eye on his recruiting, as the only multi-year "offender", with DBK and Walz maybe needing to keep the caps in the back of their minds. Coaches Sowry and Aprile have consistently been several slots short of what their roster caps will be, so they probably have nothing to worry about.
Ultimately, this settlement is, first and foremost, about scholarships, as it should be, but the roster caps do put a slight wrinkle into managing these teams that coaches will need to keep in mind.
Cardinal Couple Radio Hour Podcast
The crew, Case, Jared, Paulie, and myself, chatted about things on a broader scale, and how they impact UofL sports, even going to the international level with the Olympics, but also spending some time on the tentative House vs NCAA settlement and scholarship implications. Daryl was out, trying on wedding dresses with someone. Paulie openly wondered how you could get two in wedding dress, without being pregnant. We also got to hear about Case's travel woes (which did sound pretty heinous) this week, and we're glad he made it back home safely. That's what you get for booking anything through or in Charlotte. Good luck ACC in your move there.
Check out the great discussion at Spotify or any other location podcasts are found:
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JMcA
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