Got an idea

[UtesRule]

Since the basketball team still has four open scholarships and a need for some players, how about they sign Caleb Lohner and use one of their open four scholarships to free up another scholarship for the football team.

He would still play football primarily and basketball only after the playoffs are done. 

[NashvilleUte]

Sounds good! He’ll likely red shirt in football this season anyway… Gotta learn to play football first.

[2008 National Champ]

There used to be a rule that if a kid was a two-sport athlete and one of them was football, his scholarship had to count against the football limit. That dates back to when the NCAA started limiting scholarships so that schools wouldn’t load up the non-revenue sports with football players to circumvent the cap.

Interestingly, one of the main reasons Paul Barton ended up at Utah was the full ride the football team was able to offer him to be the heir apparent to Mitchell while pitching for the baseball team. He had offers to all of the big baseball programs of the late 80’s but most of those were for baseball only.

[NarfUte]

It’s still a rule. If Lohner wants to play football and has a scholarship, it needs to count against the football number

[Utah]

What’s so stupid about these rules now, is there are no scholarship limits. Nebraska has some odd 100 kids on “scholarship”. Same with Alabama.

They just give a kid a scholarship or a NIL that magically equals the cost of attending their school and playing football.

[Charlie]

For walk-ons there is a limit, I believe it is still 20 additional non-scholarship players. At one time the difference was the walk-ons did not get the training table – unlimited food with the team. Conference travel team restrictions also drew a line. There always has been, likely always will be big schools that can carry more numbers but making them all happy is a challenge if they want to be something more than the scout team.

[2008 National Champ]

20 seems low. Utah’s roster was over 120 last year so I’d double that.

2023 Utah Football roster

[MDUte]

Yea the numbers I’ve always seen are 85 scholarship and 40 walk-ons for a total of 125 players on the team.

[Charlie]

Thanks, I missed that. At one point I thought it was 85 and 105.

[2008 National Champ]

105 sounds like the number from the first time the NCAA limited scholarships before eventually dropping down to 85.

1973 brought about the first limitations on football scholarships in order to free up money for women’s sports after Title IX was passed by Congress in 1972 as part of the Equal Opportunity in Education Act. This caused the NCAA schools’ presidents and athletic directors to push through a limit of 105 football scholarships. Additional reductions were made in 1978 (95) and again in 1992 which brought the limit to its present number of 85 and 63 for Division I-AA.

[Author]

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