AMELIA ISLAND, FL. — Last week, the NCAA filed a brief that would permit “grandfather” exemptions to roster limits set to be imposed in the House v. NCAA settlement. The rule would allow — but not require — schools temporary leniency on the upcoming player caps for specific sports in an effort to prevent athletes from losing scholarships due to the court case.
Some schools have already made plans to take advantage of the exemption. Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua told Yahoo Sports the Irish will honor the roster spots of current athletes and welcome back those who had been cut over the previous year.
With so much still up in the aire, Florida State athletic director Michael Alford isn’t yet sure the Seminoles will follow a similar path.
“We’re looking into it,” Alford told CBS Sports on Tuesday. “(We are) getting back with our coaches and what athletes are impacted? Where are they? A lot of them left. So we’re running out that ground ball per se right now, as we gathered more information about what it all means and who was considered grandfathered in. And now we’re going to go back and kind of find where those students are and have discussions with our coaching staffs.”
Alford acknowledged that the clock was ticking but didn’t have a hard deadline on the school’s decision. The House settlement remains unfinalized as the judge presiding over the case awaits objections from the plaintiffs regarding the NCAA’s recent brief. The defendants then have until the end of the week to respond, pushing a likely resolution into next week at the earliest.
“Well, you’re running so many different trap doors right now because you’re working on so many different fronts,” Alford said. “My budgets were due three weeks ago. I’m running three different budgets depending on how (the) House (case) goes. I don’t know, but yet, we’re preparing a budget for the beginning of school year in July, so you’re trying to figure out what that means and where it’s going to land.
“You’ve run all these scenarios, and then you’re looking at rosters with your coaching staffs, and you’re trying to prepare for that – running different scenarios on ‘grandfathered in’ clause (and) what the roster limit means. So right now, you’re just doing triple, quadruple the work going into the school year, because you don’t know the final answer. You can predict and get decision trees made, but you have a lot of decision trees as you go through this process.”
Even as schools search for concrete answers, hard deadlines are quickly approaching. Many players have already signed revenue-sharing contracts or — in FSU’s case — memorandums of understanding with a start date of July 1. As the House case settlement creeps further into May, it’s encroaching on the already short runway universities have to finalize their decision before payments to athletes are set to begin.
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