Matt Rhule calls potential elimination of walk-ons 'awful thing' for college football

Matt Rhule was the latest college football coach to hate the idea of eliminating walk-ons in the sport. The Nebraska head coach echoed Clemson’s Dabo Swinney about the NCAA pondering the idea, amid speculation of roster limitations.

Walk-ons sum up the beauty of college football. But as the sport becomes more monetary for the players themselves, the walk-on could be eliminated.

While there’s no sign of it happening yet, Rhule sent a warning signal.

“I think it’d be awful,” Rhule said on Sirius XM College Sports Radio. “I think a lot of things are being kind of said right now, I think there’s the kind of wait and see how it ends up because you know that might not happen. But if it does, I think it would be just an awful thing. For every player that ends up with a high end commercial, there’s 100 players that are, you know, becoming better people by having played college football and being part of a team and those are the people that usually end up running our country, running our corporations, running our businesses. 

“I mean, you know, we spent all this time talking about what great things college football does, and now if we take it away from a bunch of people, I would really, really, really be sad.”

The fabric of high school football is to excel at high school recruiting and not rely solely on the transfer portal, as Rhule put it.

“What I don’t want is, I don’t want a world in which, because we’re playing 17 games to win the national championship, which I’m all for, I don’t want you know, teams loading up on seniors and juniors only,” Rhule said. “I don’t want high school recruiting to die. I don’t want walk-ons to die.

“This is at the end of the day, this is still a sport which most of us love it. We end up being you know, old guys like me on the phone right now. And we’re only here because of the experiences we had. So I hope that that’s not a part of it. I hope that we can have walk-ons.” 

Rhule said some of the best human beings on his football teams have been the walk-on players. They just want to win.

“You know, I have a roster of 145 right now,” Rhule said. “And you know, I’ve always had a smaller roster, but when you come to a place like Nebraska, there are unbelievable young men on our team that they don’t care if they ever play snap, they want to do everything they can to help Nebraska win. 

“I’m going to tell you that some of these guys are gonna change the world someday and to think that we’re going to take that away from them, there’s so many unintended consequences. Sometimes the people that are making these decisions, don’t forget about access, you know, we need access for young people that really need it.”