Kansas State football coach Chris Klieman on new NCAA roster limits
Kansas State football coach Chris Klieman talks about his frustration with the upcoming NCAA 105-man roster limits.
MANHATTAN — As eager as he is to finally get his Kansas State football team on the field for spring practice, Chris Klieman has a number of other things on his mind that are not as pleasant.
Klieman, who is starting his seventh coaching season at K-State, expressed his frustration with the state of college football Wednesday during a news conference ahead of Friday’s first of 10 spring practice sessions.
“Off the field, I still think the industry of college athletics is a disaster. It just is,” Klieman said. “Between the lines, I think it’s great.
“During this month of April — not our decision as coaches, not our decision at Kansas State, but the industrywide decision — 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, I’ll be honest with you.”
While Klieman has a laundry list of complaints, including a second transfer portal window in April, his greatest source of frustration is the NCAA-imposed roster limit of 105 set to take place for the 2025 season pending approval by Congress. For K-State, that will mean trimming roughly 20 walk-ons from the program.
“There’s a lot of kids that want to be here, want to stay here, that we can’t have in the program,” Klieman said. “Kids that are paying their way, kids that have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in this place. Kids are invested academically.
“Now those kids have got to make a choice.”
At the very least, Klieman argued, the NCAA could have phased in the changes.
“It’s frustrating to me because I don’t understand why the number came to 105,” Klieman said. “Why didn’t we kind of slowly bring it down? And I don’t even know who decided it, but as a lot of us coaches talk about it, we’re not in those meetings. We’re not in the rooms.
“The practitioners, the guys that have their boots on the ground every day aren’t in the meetings that decide some of these things. I’m sure happens in other sports as well, but in football in particular, we’ve got to get our roster down to 105, and we’re quite a bit higher than that.”
As a result, in addition to preparing for the upcoming season, spring practice sessions now effectively will serve as tryouts for those players battling for the final roster spots. And while the official cutoff date is not until the first day of competition — K-State opens on Aug. 23 against Iowa State in Dublin, Ireland — Klieman refuses to follow that timeline.
“How fair is that? Then it’s like the NFL, and we’re just going to make cuts, and kids are going to go on,” he said. “If they want to go on and play, we need to have them have that opportunity to go and play. But make no mistake, I’m not in favor of this at all. We have a lot of kids that want to be in the program that are not going to be able to be in the program.”
By making the cuts in the spring, marginal players have a chance to enter the transfer portal in April to explore other opportunities.
“I think that’s great,” Klieman said. “The negative, which you guys all know and can assume, is our best players are getting contacted every day right now. And it may be not them in particular, but it’s going to be their agent.”
Another concern, Klieman added, is how injuries might affect the roster limits.
“What happens if you lose a kid in spring ball? Well, now you’ve got to make a decision on that kid,” Klieman said. “Because if he’s not going to be a part of your 105 is there an injured reserve? I don’t know. Is there a practice squad? I don’t know.
“I don’t think any of those things have been talked about, or if they have, we don’t know about them as coaches, but we’re not in any of those meetings. And so, a lot of us in the industry are really frustrated because a lot of these decisions are made without our input.”
Arne Green is based in Salina and covers Kansas State University sports for the Gannett network. He can be reached at agreen@gannett.com or on X (formerly Twitter) at @arnegreen.
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