With House settlement, is clock ticking on college football walk-ons?

No college football program has a more celebrated walk-on program than Nebraska, which for decades has seen some unexpectedly develop into NFL players while the vast majority were just grateful to be part of the team, even if they never played a down.

Long hailed as the team’s “secret sauce,” its walk-on program is a melting pot of players – from late bloomers to almost-fast-enough or not-quite-big-enough guys – all oozing pride to be a part of the Big Red program that once ruled college football. Nebraska’s roster currently includes 145 players.

Now the Cornhuskers’ model is in peril. 

As part of the settlement in the landmark House case, scholarship increases are coming to college sports, but so are roster size limits – including in college football. If U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken certifies the settlement, many fear this will spell the end of walk-ons, an integral part of the tapestry of college football. 

Remember the movie “Rudy?” Remember Stetson Bennett? Or how about Baker Mayfield? 

The list goes on.

“I think it would be awful,” Nebraska coach Matt Rhule, himself a former walk-on, told SiriusXM College Sports Radio. “For every player that ends up with a high-end commercial, there are 100 players who are becoming better people by having played college football and being part of a team.

“Those are the people who usually end up running our country, running our corporations, running our businesses. We spend all this time talking about what great things college football does … We have unbelievable young men on our team that don’t care if they ever play a snap, they want to do everything they can to help Nebraska. They’re going to change the world someday. And to think we’re going to take that away from them, there’s so many unintended consequences sometimes.”

No program would be impacted more than Nebraska

The heart of the House settlement entails the NCAA and all 32 Division I conferences paying $2.8 billion in damages and schools, at their discretion, being able to share as much as $22 million annually with athletes. But the tentacles of the agreement reach far and wide, with implications extending to the potential death of the walk-on model to what that means for having enough healthy players late in an increasingly longer season to run adequate practices.

And that’s to say nothing of the challenge for some teams to field respectable squads for non-College Football Playoff bowl games in the age of player opt-outs and the endless churn of the transfer portal.

“It’s scary for all the different walk-ons, the guys who are an inch too short but they make their way and it’s a feel-good story, or all the kickers and punters,” one industry source told On3. “A cost-measuring, a cost-cutting mechanism. It’s sad. It’s awful, and all because people couldn’t figure it out 10, 15 years ago. And there’s still 100 more questions than answers.”

The move to increase scholarships – currently 85 – stems from believing that providing more benefits to athletes will help shield the NCAA and schools from further lawsuits. The move to create a roster limit – a number has yet to be established – stems from cost-cutting at a time when schools face an enormous financial stress test in a post-House settlement world that includes revenue sharing.

Sean Callahan, publisher and owner of HuskerOnline, has covered Nebraska football since 1999 and can rattle off name after name of former Nebraska walk-ons who made the NFL, from fullback Andy Janovich to kicker Alex Henery and many more. Callahan said not enough people are grasping yet what roster limits could mean for the future of walk-ons.

“This will affect Nebraska as much as anybody in college football if they did this, because Nebraska has probably the largest roster of any Power Four conference program right now,” Callahan told On3. “Some of the greatest success stories in the program’s history at Nebraska have been walk-on players that have come in and gone on to have NFL careers.”

Axing walk-ons: ‘Against what college football stands for’

The potential adverse effect on walk-ons will be exacerbated at Nebraska but felt elsewhere – be it other programs with rich walk-on histories like Iowa and Wisconsin or far beyond. The issue stirred spirited reaction from SEC coaches at the league’s recent spring meetings.

Oklahoma coach Brent Venables: “We’re going to expand the length of the season, we’re going to play more games, but we’re going to have a smaller roster?”

Texas A&M coach Mike Elko: “I think it’s absolutely against what college football stands for. It’s something that’s really bad for the sport.”

Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer: “There’s a lot that goes into development, there’s a lot that goes into putting together a practice that (makes it) efficient. There’s a health and safety piece, for sure, that comes into play when it comes to roster size.”

If walk-ons as we know them are eliminated, coaches have discussed the possibility of a taxi/practice squad of players who wouldn’t count toward the roster cap. Think along the lines of men who regularly practice against a school’s women’s basketball team.

SEC coaches even pitched to league leadership the possibility that coaches would take money from their own lucrative contracts to pay for walk-ons, according to The Athletic. That option was shot down. 

With settlement terms potentially taking effect as early as fall 2025, the clock may be ticking on walk-ons, perhaps one of the enduring vestiges of the sport’s tradition now in peril.

“They can use different terms around it, but they’re getting rid of walk-ons – it’s a major concern,” Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin told Seth Emerson. “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.”