Lane Kiffin sounds off on eliminating walk-ons (2024)

When the SEC’s football coaches met with their bosses last month, making their pitch for walk-ons to stay part of the sport, they made an offer: If it’s a cost thing, take the money out of their salaries.

Kirby Smart, Georgia’s coach who just got a raise to $13 million per year, was the first to make the offer. Lane Kiffin, Ole Miss’ coach earning nearly $9 million, seconded the offer. Others joined in.

“The coaches agreed we would pay out of our own salary, give us less money to our salary, take whatever it costs to have walk-ons, and we’ll pay it for it out of our salary,” Kiffin said.

The answer they got: Thanks, but this isn’t really about money.

On Tuesday, Kiffinsaid he had “major concerns on a lot of fronts” about roster limits, set to be a part of the settlement in the House vs. NCAA case. The NCAA has agreed to eliminate scholarship limits in all sports — currently 85 in football — while installing lower roster limits. In football, that would mean many programs going from as many as 130 players down to as few as 85, depending on where the final number lands.

If it’s too low, Kiffin warned, teams would risk not being able to field teams by the end of the season. The combination of injuries, transfers and opt-outs could lead to situations like last year’s Orange Bowl when Florida State’s roster was decimated and the Seminoles were beaten 63-3 by Georgia.

Afterward, Smart said, “People need to see what happened tonight, and they need to fix it.” Smart didn’t know the roster limits could be part of the future. Kiffin, who said he had players opt out of the Peach Bowl because they were going to the portal, warned that roster limits would cause repeats of the Orange Bowl.

“That (roster) cap number coming down, eliminating walk-ons, you’re going to see the Florida State situation,” Kiffin said. “The move now is people have started to not play in bowl games so they don’t get hurt to go in the portal. And I’m not even saying starters. I’m saying we had players on special teams, backups on defense, offensive teams, like, ‘Why are you not playing in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, New Year’s Six bowl?’ And they’re like, ‘We don’t want to risk getting hurt covering a kickoff because we’re going in the portal.’”

Ole Miss still got a 38-25 win in the Peach Bowl over Penn State, which had opt-outs as well. With the new 12-team College Football Playoff, the non-Playoff games are going to be a continuing challenge to generate interest. But the bowls aren’t the only worry for coaches when it comes to roster limits.

Having enough players to practice as the season goes on is a major one. While NFL teams have 53-man active rosters during the season, they can dip into the free agency pool or their practice squad at any point in the season, while college teams are locked into their roster once the semester starts.

Also, while football brings in the vast majority of revenue for universities, the sport could take the biggest percentage cut to its roster in the House settlement. Baseball’s scholarship limit, for instance, has been at 11.7, but its roster limit figures to be north of 30, with teams free to offer scholarships up to that limit under the proposed House terms.

Cost-saving has been the stated reason for cutting football rosters. The higher the roster limit, the more programs are likely to fill it with scholarship players.

“If they create a system where they say, ‘Well, you have a roster limit of, say, 95 or 100, and you can get them all scholarships,’ well, people are going to eventually do that,” Kiffin said. “If Ohio State or Alabama’s giving their 95 or 100 spot scholarships, you know, eventually, everyone’s going to do it every year. You’re gonna get beat by someone and go, ‘Why are we not using all the scholarships they’re allotting us?’”

Hence, administrators have indicated, lower football roster limits would be a way to curtail that. That’s why SEC coaches offered, if cost was the problem, to foot the bill for walk-ons themselves. But when they offered that, Kiffin said, they got a surprising answer.

“Actually, they told us, the financial aspect has not been a piece at all of this,” Kiffin said. “This is about potential lawsuits down the road.”

That could mean litigation about partial scholarships or the very idea of walk-ons. Those things have been going on forever in college sports, but the NCAA’s losing streak in court has it spooked about basically everything these days.

Still, the coaches continue to push for walk-ons to remain, pointing to the history of college football. It was the basis of the movie “Rudy.” Georgia just won two national championships with former walk-on Stetson Bennett starting at quarterback. There are sons and grandsons of players and coaches who get to be on the team.

Where the final number lands is unclear. So is the timetable, other than it would be effective for the 2025 season. It would also be agreed upon by all the conferences involved in the settlement, per Kiffin’s understanding, so the SEC wouldn’t be making its own limits.

His wish is to have two limits: scholarships and rosters, which is the present system. Some have proposed a practice squad system, a la the NFL. But the statement by the plaintiffs, when the House settlement was announced, was pretty clear, stating it called for the elimination of scholarship limits, meaning more money going directly to athletes.

Since then, there has been a lot of discussion behind the scenes, with coaches making their feelings clear.

“They can use different terms around it, but they’re getting rid of walk-ons. It’s a major concern,” Kiffin said. “There’s all kinds of walk-ons that have become great players and gone on to win championships and are playing in the NFL. And just the locker room culture of having walk-ons, they become friends with the star scholarship players, and they’re in each other’s weddings down the road, and so many of those guys actually have become coaches. That’s part of the fabric of college football, is the walk-ons and their stories and their family tradition and going to the same school, and you would be removing that.”

(Top photo: Alex Slitz / Getty Images)

Seth Emerson is a senior writer for The Athletic covering Georgia and the SEC. Seth joined The Athletic in 2018 from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and also covered the Bulldogs and the SEC for The Albany Herald from 2002-05. Seth also covered South Carolina for The State from 2005-10. Follow Seth on Twitter @SethWEmerson