MANHATTAN — It was just last week Kansas Statefootball coach Chris Klieman expressed his displeasure with the pending House vs. NCAA settlement that would significantly change college sports as we know it.
Chief among Klieman’s concerns was a cap on football roster limits at 105, which would force the Wildcats to remove roughly 20 walk-on players from the program.
Klieman and those walk-ons got a reprieve of sorts Monday when the judge overseeing final approval of the agreement put it on hold, asking the parties to make some changes. One of the changes she appeared to advocate was phasing in roster limits for individual sports so current athletes would not be hung out to dry.
But despite the latest twist, K-State is proceeding with caution rather than declaring victory just yet. After all, roster reductions remain on the table in some form.
You could say it does, but really that’s still coming, right,” K-State assistant head coach Van Malone told reporters Wednesday. “There’s still going to be some roster cuts. We just don’t exactly know what that’s going to look like.
So, we have to, as a staff, as a team, continually prepare for the inevitable. There again, there are going to be some roster cuts. Even though we don’t think the 105 roster limit is coming tomorrow, we know that something is coming along those lines. So, we’ve got to keep preparing our team in that way.”
K-State’s football program has a tradition of walk-ons developing into impact players. All-Big 12 defensive end Brendan Mott and linebacker Austin Moore, a captain and three-year starter at linebacker, are just two examples from the 2024 team.
“Because of the House settlement, because of different legality things and litigation, we’ve got to remove a lot of kids from the program, and it sucks,” Klieman said during last week’s news conference to kick off the Wildcats’ spring practice. “There’s a lot of kids that want to be here, want to stay here, that we can’t have in this program, and kids that are paying their own way, kids that have a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in this place.
