Roster management is a losing battle
College football coaches finding that December has become a hectic month
First, Dave Clawson wants to know the conceptions of roster management in college football before he says what the biggest misconception is.
With the slightest hesitation, Mike Elko simply says the misconception is that roster management in college football is even happening.
Both use some version of the same answer: It’s impossible.
“I mean, it’s an absolute — it’s impossible,” Clawson said on Monday via Zoom press conference. “It is impossible.”
“That it’s possible,” Elko said when asked of the misconception about roster management. “There’s just a really, really hard situation.”
Wake Forest and Duke’s coaches aren’t looking for sympathy; this is the job Clawson and Elko signed up for, respectively.
And it’s not like either program is on the verge of collapse. Wake Forest played for an ACC championship a year ago; Duke enjoyed a five-win turnaround in Elko’s first season. Clawson and Elko are the last two ACC coach of the year winners.
But they’re facing a crisis when it comes to figuring out what their teams are going to look like in 2023 — all the while preparing for their bowl games.
“It is three storms hitting at once,” Clawson said. “You have an early signing date. You have a transfer portal with instant eligibility. And you have name-image-likeness money being thrown around. It’s impossible.
“If you’re ethical about it and you don’t over-sign, you put yourself at such a huge disadvantage.”
Early signing day was instituted in 2017 and it’s quickly become a misleading term. The three-day period to sign football players that begins Wednesday has become the preeminent signing period, while the first Wednesday of February has become something of a catch-all, last-resort, fill-in-the-gaps time for college programs.
On the eve of early national signing day, Duke and Wake Forest have 26 and 20 verbal commits, respectively. Each program expects every commit to sign this month.
The NCAA issued a blanket waiver for any player who was on a college roster in the 2020 season, and for the 2021 season, FBS teams could exceed the 85-scholarship limit to accommodate players utilizing their “COVID” year.
Reverberations of that waiver will be felt across for the next few seasons. The 85-scholarship cap, though, was back this season.
It means, essentially, more players are staying in college because they’ve got more eligibility; and then there’s the NIL of it all, that in some instances, players can make as much or more money in college as they would if they pursued professional careers.
“I’ve never over-signed. I’ve never had to make that phone call to a young man that, ‘Geez, I’m sorry, even though you’ve been committed to us for a year or eight months, tough luck,’” Clawson said. “We’ve never done that.
“But given the way that things are going, it makes it tougher than ever to hit your number.”
Clawson declared that Wake Forest is going to continue to operate that way.
Wake Forest and Duke are both on the lower end of transfer portal departures since the window opened Dec. 5 — though there’s separation between the two.
Wake Forest has had nine players — six of them on scholarship — either enter the portal or declare their intentions to enter it.
Duke has only had three.
Elko gives you a peak behind the curtain by pointing out when Duke picked up the vast majority of its verbal commitments; all of which occurred by the first week in August.
“You look at the summer and how you looked at this roster, a Ja’Mion Franklin, a Jalon Calhoun, guys you certainly had no anticipation were planning on coming back,” Elko said. “And they are now, so you’re obviously going to have to have room for them.
“It creates a challenge … with the way this whole thing is set up right now.”
It’s the other side of looking at this. Where Clawson wants to thread the needle on the 85-scholarship number, Elko and Duke are operating with an overabundance of players set to be on the roster next season.
“We’re on the good side of it, right? Because we haven’t lost a lot of guys,” Elko said. “So that’s the positive side of it. We’re managing a roster from a surplus standpoint and trying to figure out how to get it right.
“Obviously there are a lot of schools out there on the other side of it, which is not where you want to be, working on a big deficit.”
The most wonderful time of the year has become the craziest time of the year for college football.
If changes don’t soon come to college football’s calendar, the damage will extend far beyond this December.