The Front Row

Those numbers are NCAA numbers however the driver is the 85 as conferences allow over signing if necessary to maintain the 85. What the SEC has said is that they will conform more to the 25 which supposedly stops their oversigning. I don't believe it will because the SEC will grant liberal waivers.

in the SEC it was 28 until last year when they voted to enforce the NCAA guidelines of 25 at their Spring Conference meetings! They had no such numerical limitation at all until just a couple years before that. Once Houston Nutt took an unholy 37 in 2009 they set the 28 limit. Once they saw that a limit was not a significant obstacle to oversigning they accepted 25.

To be precise the 25 we are talking about is an annual 'signing limit' not a 'scholarship limit'. The NCAA's caps are 25 'counters' per year. 'Counters' are determined at the start of the following football season. Those students who 1st year players, enrolled for the fall quarter. So 25 stays the same while the definition changes.

For instance. OSU currently has 25 kids in this 'recruiting class' (a generic term). With 6 early enrollees in the fall quarter, OSU had only 19 'signees' in the class (no where near the standing Big 10, and new SEC rule, limit). As it stands, OSU will have only 18 'counters' next fall. Luke Roberts is a spring enrollee so he is a signee but will already have a quarter of school under his belt. The other 7 can count toward that year or the previous year depending on when members of the outgoing class departed. It's a rule with endless variable making it complex but malleable. So there are subtle, extremely important distinctions!

Unlike the SEC the Big 10, I believe has:
~A hard cap of 28 football enrollees in an offseason (there is no hard cap in the SEC)
~An additional 'signing' limitation of the number of outgoing seniors plus three (so OSU had 17 seniors? meaning 20 is the hard cap)
~A 4 year contract implemented by 9 of the 12 programs and recommended by the conference (as opposed to the year to year scholarship defined by the NCAA (and interpreted literally by Spurrier and others)
~A rule against oversigning (exceeding the 85 limit at any point - the SEC has no policy so schools can have 100 players on scholarship so long as the have 85 come next football season)
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