Butch on new roster limits: ‘This is huge’
AUBURN | For decades, Auburn baseball faced an uphill battle compared to its SEC out-of-state rivals when it came to building a roster.
That’s all about to change with conference commissioners finalizing new roster limits for baseball and several other sports according to a report by Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger.
The new roster limit for college baseball will be set at 34 pending approval in the settlement of the House vs. NCAA lawsuit.
“The 11.7 has been such a huge challenge for the D-I baseball schools in the state of Alabama. This is huge,” said AU coach Butch Thompson.
“This is the next step. We’ve been waiting the last couple of years with everything going on making scholarships seem like a thing of the past with NIL coming.”
The NCAA limits schools to 11.7 scholarships for baseball. But many schools in other states were able to supplement that with state-sponsored scholarships or similar programs such as the Hope scholarship in Georgia.
The new 34 roster limit would potentially allow schools to offer 34 full scholarships. Thompson, however, doesn’t necessarily expect the changes to be that cut and dry.
“I’m not sure the conference is going to go to 34 full scholarships because we have a 34 roster number. I think a lot of people think that and hope that, but I think it’s complicated,” he said.
“What is going to be the scholarship number and how does that balance with softball, which has been the counterpart of baseball? What are the Title IX implications going to be in this new world? Is it going to be 25 full scholarships? Is it going to be less? Is it going to be up to 34? We still don’t know, but we have step one, which is the roster limit.”
Softball is increasing from 12 scholarships up to 25. Other sports impacted by the new limits include football, increasing from 85 to 105, men’s basketball from 13 to 15, and volleyball from 12 to 18.
Roster limits for baseball were previously set at 35 before being unlimited during the COVID pandemic due to the extra eligibility for players. The roster limits were set to 40 last season and will be 40 again in 2025.
Thompson expects a lot more to be worked out by the conference commissioners and coaches over the next couple of months.
“If we have this many less players, how many games do we play a year? How many innings should a game be. There’s a lot of things to think about now,” he said.