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The NCAA Football Oversight Committee has made new recommendations to remove the requirements for FBS conference championship games and allow a two-year waiver for unlimited draft classes. Both initiatives, announced on the same day by the NCAA Board of Directors issued new NIL guidesIt will come to the Division I Council for formal ratification later this month.
The removal of railings from championship games is not considered controversial and will likely be rubber stamped, giving conferences additional flexibility to approve new ways to crown a champion. In particular, the change would allow conferences to eliminate divisions, an idea that has gained popularity in recent years.
Current NCAA rules require that any football conference with 12 or more members must hold a championship game and divide teams into divisions with round-robin seasons for divisional opponents. The NCAA passed legislation in 2016 allowing conferences with fewer than 12 members to hold conference championship games, paving the way for the 10-member Big 12 to hold a title game between their top two regular-season teams. .
A more significant development, especially in the midst of the transfer portal era, would be the blanket two-year waiver to remove the initial 25-man scholarship counter. Programs can only add 25 scholarship football players per recruiting cycle between high school recruits and transfers. However, a major transition period can decimate a roster and make it unable to meet the 85-man scholarship limit. The additional year of general COVID eligibility only complicated scholarship counts, especially when players transferred to use a fifth or sixth season.
Perhaps the most notable example of the scholarship counter sinking a program into a deep hole came after Charlie Weis was fired from Kansas four games into the 2014 season. There were 39 scholarship recipients left when his successor, David Beaty, joined the Jayhawks, a number that was reduced to 28 for the spring dance. The scholarship hole has followed Kansas for a decade at this point; the Jayhawks have a combined record of 11-70 since firing Weis.
If the waiver is approved, it will allow programs to fill those gaps much faster over a two-year period. Perhaps just as notable in the age of the transfer portal, it could allow more high school recruits to find FBS opportunities in a suddenly more transfer-happy market.
