AMES – With a roster limit set to be implemented before the 2025 football season, Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell is struggling to figure out how to shave down his roster.
Before the 2025-26 season, rosters were not restricted to how many players they had; most rosters had around 120 to 130 players, including walk-ons. The ruling will limit teams to 105 players, forcing programs to cut players who normally have the opportunity to stay on the roster and potentially redshirt.
The Cyclones had 132 players on their roster during the 2024 season, which would have required 27 players to be cut from the team before the season started.
“It’s showing you where college football is today,” Campbell said. “It’s criminal, and it’s sad. It’s disappointing. It’s one of those things that is, when your responsibility is the development of the student-athlete, no matter where that student-athlete falls in your football program, that’s what’s really hard.”
For many schools and universities, walk-ons fill out the rest of the roster and provide players who can fight for time on the field.
One of the most recent notable walk-ons for Iowa State is linebacker Caleb Bacon. Although Bacon was hurt for most of the 2024 season, he had the second-most tackles in 2023, an opportunity most former walk-ons would not get if the 105-person roster were put in place.
A school like Iowa State, which prides itself on the ‘five-star culture’ rather than five-star players, has fewer players to work with. The limit kind of throws a wrench in what the Cyclones try to do as a program.
“A lot of things that you don’t believe in and you don’t stand for, and right now you just try to navigate your program the right way and help benefit kids,” Campbell said. “The great thing is a lot of our young men that maybe were, you know, in a gray area in the 105 have already got themselves in some great situations.”
The spring window of the transfer portal opened on April 16, and some Cyclones have already entered their names, looking to find a new home. The most recent was sophomore linebacker Jack Sadowsky V, who had 29 tackles as a sophomore.
“You see the ability to help a lot of young men, along the way,” Campbell said. “So I think there’s a reward to that.”
Campbell and his staff have been forced to have some tough conversations in the past few weeks, figuring out who they should move forward with and who they might have to let go from the program.
“A really tough week and really a week that you just kind of sit and evaluate, ‘what are we really doing in our profession?’” Campbell said. “So really unfortunate, really tough, trying times.”
Campbell uses the word ‘profession’ because he thinks that taking away the ability for walk-ons is turning the sport away from what it really means, and making it a professional sport.
“But I think the reality of college athletics, 18 to 22 years old, and a young person wants to come to a university, come to a school and have the ability to walk on a program in some areas, pay their own way and for some way how this is education, right?” Campbell said. “This is higher learning. This isn’t a professional sport that we are going to mandate or dictate a number of how many guys can be on a team.”
Although the limits are messing with football programs and forcing them to cut players from their roster, it is being done to allow other sports to have more access to scholarships. One of the sports benefiting from this the most is baseball, which was only allowed the equivalent of 11.7 scholarships for 27 players. It will help other sports for Iowa State, though, as it does not have a baseball program.
“I think that’s really hard for me to understand that value (of taking away walk-ons),” Campbell said. “I certainly understand the value when it comes to equity in all of athletics. I certainly get that.”
With football programs across the country preparing to cut players and get a plan set in place, assuming the settlement goes through, one uncertainty still lingers: what the actual rules will be. Teams know about the 105-player limit, but coaches and players alike wonder how that will be enforced and what else will be part of it.
The settlement has been delayed as an agreement on the implementation of roster sizes has not yet been made. U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken will have both sides of the settlement meet and hopefully have a revised version before the end of April, according to ESPN.
“But it’s hard when you don’t know the rules, and the rules still aren’t very clear,” Campbell said. “And, I think when you don’t, you certainly have to prepare every young person for what could be the most extreme of the rules. I mean, come on, it’s April, and we don’t even know what the rules are for the next fall. That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of.”
The looming rule changes that will come from the settlement limit how much teams should prepare and restrict how they should practice. They are unsure of who will even still be on the roster by the time the team leaves for Ireland in late August.
“This is college sports. It’s higher education. It’s not professional sports,” Campbell said.
