By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
My inbox has been full of requests this week to do an article about all of the cuts happening across the country this week in anticipation of next week’s transfer portal opening (women next Wednesday March 12th, men the Wednesday after March 19th).
And here’s the reality of what we know for sure:
- We know that programs have to cut huge numbers of swimmers. This is not new information.
- We know that this is the week it’s happening.
Some programs have to cut more than others. Auburn, which lists 43 women and 44 men on its roster, had to cut a ton this week. That’s not particularly surprising – thought he scale at which they’re going to have to cut to get to 30 women and 22 men might be more than many or most programs. We know that the Auburn men have to get from 44 guys to 22, they have 11 guys exhausting their eligibility, they have at least 7-8 guys scheduled to come in next year.
We can all do that math, and that math hasn’t really changed this week – though some programs are cutting a little deeper than they have to with hopes of upgrading their rosters from the transfer portal.
The rumored numbers are flying around, especially from the programs that had the biggest rosters to start with, but because of the well-told problems that swimming has with the concepts of transparency, producing a list of cut numbers from each program would be basically impossible. We could triangulate within a couple, but we couldn’t say anything with full certainty.
Even the number of athletes in the transfer portal, which we will do our best to report on, won’t give the full story (I’ll explain why shortly).
I would love to produce this list of cuts-per-team, but in reality, I can point to at least two schools where actual members of the team have produced slightly different numbers of how many were cut.
There are still a few interesting anecdotes to come out of this week.
Two I’ll highlight both come from Texas A&M, which is not to target that school (which is, incidentally, my alma mater), but just because I think they paint a good picture of two important things that are happening.
- One person connected to the A&M program sent me an email saying that A&M head coach Blaire Anderson was cutting to make the team faster, cutting swimmers to recruit other faster swimmers, and cutting injured swimmers, criticizing the coaching staff’s “effort in creating a team.” This highlights the ongoing disconnect between the role of a Power 4 head coach in the post-House world and the expectations of the sport. Big time college athletics are, now, objectively a business. If you are an SEC program, and you have 22 roster spots, and you can take 22 athletes to the SEC Championships, there is no room on the roster for injured athletes. Cuts are the harsh reality that is outside of the control of these head coaches. Coaches had to make these cuts, and while timing and communication of those cuts are certainly fair topics for critique and debate (though I would contend that there is no good time to tell half your team they’re gone), the fact that they happened is well outside of control of the coaches.
- One A&M freshman announced her retirement from swimming. Lizzie Watson posted on her Instagram account that she was stepping away from the elite side of the sport, saying that she “never intended to see (her) career end this way.” Watson was a good recruit, an in-state swimmer and Texas high school regional champion who was on A&M’s SEC Championship roster but didn’t score any points. The thing that this demonstrates is that if an SEC team cuts 25 swimmers, that is not a guarantee that all 25 will wind up in the portal. Some student-athletes will decide that they would rather stick with the big state school experience as a non-varsity athlete than deal with the hassle of transferring, or the tuition of a private school somewhere down the chain, or compromising their educational experience for their athletic experience. The other side of that coin is that we can’t assume that every athlete who goes in the portal was cut, either. Some might leave because of frustrations over ‘who else’ got cut, and those emotions are valid even if they’re misplaced. Some might have planned to leave anyway. We might even see some big names go in to pursue NIL opportunities at other schools – which is the other part of this conversation.
NIL money is happening in swimming. It’s happening at the Power 4 level in a big way (six figure offers), and it’s happening in smaller ways even at smaller mid-major programs.
College coaches will find recruiting from some programs harder in the near future, as those clubs might feel burned by cut decisions. There are even reported scenarios where twins and siblings have been on opposite sides of cut decisions.
The paradigms of swimming are shifting, and we have to expect these kinds of jolts to the system at least monthly for the foreseeable future. In a few years, things will stabilize and normalize, but the emotional toil of the 2024-2025 season will be a scar upon college athletics for a generation.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: College Swimming & Diving Programs Make Huge Roster Cuts Ahead of Portal Opening