April is typically a season of tremendous excitement for college football coaches around the country, as everyone begins to get a sense of how their rosters have developed through spring practices. However, the spring season of 2025 has a very different feel to it.
With the House settlement on the docket to start early next week, it seems like the uncertainty and frustration coaches are feeling has started to reach a boiling point.
Kirby Smart expressed his frustration earlier this week and Chris Klieman recently chimed in on the state of college football as well with some pointed comments.
“I still think the industry of college athletics is a disaster. It just is.”
“Between the lines, I think it’s great,” Klieman shares, before speaking for much of the coaching profession on how the month of April has coaches in major college football around the country uneasy, to put it nicely.
“During this month of April – it’s not our decision as coaches and not our decision at Kansas State – but the industry-wide decision because of the House settlement and 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.”
“There’s a lot of kids that want to be here, want to stay here, that we can’t have in the program. There are kids that are paying their way, that have put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into this place. Kids that are invested academically…now those kids have to make a choice.”
“It’s frustrating to me because I don’t understand why the number came about of 105,” he shares, referring to the roster limit set to come into place. “Why can’t we slowly bring it down? 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 and the guys that have their boots on the ground everyday aren’t in the meetings that decide some of these things. I’m sure it happens in other sports as well, but in football in particular.”
“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. Then we also have the transfer portal happening in the month of April. There are some positives with that, in kids that maybe won’t make your 105 will have the opportunity to go on and play somewhere. I think that’s great.”
“The negative, which you all know and can assume, is our best players are getting contacted every day right now.”
Klieman goes on to share how the month of April is going to be absolutely crazy for FBS coaches before going on to talk a bit more about the difficulties of roster construction and management during a time filled with uncertainty around every corner.
“Is there an injured reserve? Have you guys found that out?” Klieman asks reporters in attendance. “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 because we’re not in any of those meetings.”
“So a lot of us in the industry are really frustrated because a lot of these decisions are made without our input.”
Hear more from Klieman in the clip.
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