Last year Texas A&M had to drop out of the Gator Bowl due to COVID, Injuries, Opt Outs. and Transfers. Boise State pulled out of the Arizona Bowl and it was cancelled. LSU played the Texas Bowl with 38 scholarship players due to those same issues.
Yesterday. teams received their invitations to their bowl games.
Over the past week more and players have declared themselves eligible for the NFL Draft. I believe players have until January 16, 2023, to make their declaration. If players are leaning strongly in that direction, many of them will chose not to expose their bodies to potential injury risk in a bowl game.
Today the Transfer Portal has opened. As I write 912 players are in the transfer portal of 3:00PM 12/5/22 according to 247Sports. That is on average of seven per team and we aren't even close to being done yet.
How many players opting out via injuries, declaring for the draft, and the transfer portal does it take for a team to not have enough scholarship players to play in a bowl game? I do not know but I would guess that LSU was close to not playing last year. In fact, I would think LSU has more viable walk-on players to play in a bowl game than 90 percent of other schools. Let's show how the numbers could dwindle quickly.
Total Scholarship Players on Roster | 85 |
Viable Walk-ons | 10-20? |
Total VIABLE Players Available to play | 95-105? |
Typical injuries late in the season | 5-10? |
Players leaving for the draft and opting out of bowl | 5-10? |
Players transferring and opting out of bowl | 10-20? |
Total players available for the bowl | 55-85? |
NFL teams play with an active roster of 55 players. Some conferences limit a team to taking only 70 players to road games. At about 55 as shown above a team may be forced to opt out because a few position groups might be severely impacted by this issues discussed.
We will see how many teams simply cannot play in a bowl game due to the impact of the transfer portal. I think it will be at least a handful of teams. Perhaps, that is too many. We will see,
Let me know what you think.
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