After Meetings, Big Ten, SEC Are Working on Roster Limits of 23 Men/35 Women

By Braden Keith on SwimSwam

The SEC and Big Ten are discussing roster limits of 23 men and 35 women, respectively, for their swimming & diving programs, with both swimmers and divers counting as 1 athlete on those rosters. These new roster limits would take effect for the 2025-2026 season, with no significant easing-in-period.

According to sources, the SEC met about three weeks before the US Olympic Trials, in late May, and came up with a number of 23 men and 35 women. Big Ten coaches met two weeks later and came up with numbers of 30 men and 35 women, with both conferences expected to ultimately match at the lower number for men.

While other conferences won’t be bound by those numbers, as the two power brokers in college athletics, the SEC and Big Ten are expected to drive what happens elsewhere.

Last Friday, these numbers, along with numbers for other sports, went to mediation or arbitration to be finalized. SwimSwam could not confirm that the numbers were finalized.

These numbers are very similar to the 22 and 35 that SwimSwam first reported in May as an SEC proposal. The number for football teams is expected to land between 100 and 110 athletes.

The moves are all in response to ongoing litigation and rules changes regarding student-athletes and their share of revenues generated by athletics departments, including them being declared employees. Athletics departments across the country are now ranking their programs by different criteria and evaluating how they might reduce sports and/or budgets for those programs to deal with new rules, regulations, and settlements.

What remains to be seen is whether scholarships will count as ‘revenue sharing,’ and how Title IX regulations will be applied to topics of revenue sharing and Name, Image, and Likeness.

Below, SwimSwam has compiled, and averaged, the number of athletes on each Big Ten and SEC roster for last season to give an idea of how many roster spots will be impacted. This information is based on federally-submitted data, meaning that it won’t always reflect perfectly what happens on the ground (swimmers getting injured, quitting the team, etc.) but is the best count available.

In both conferences, men’s rosters are, on average, slightly smaller than women’s rosters. While a few women’s rosters, like Indiana, will be impacted pretty significantly by the new roster limits, many others won’t be impacted at all.

Several coaches that SwimSwam spoke with said that the impact on the men’s rosters is more significant – both because the number is so low, and because men generally develop more once they arrive in college than women. A roster of 23 would dramatically impact the ability of men’s programs to hold varsity spots for developmental swimmers, though some have floated proposals about using a non-varsity club team to skirt some of that.

Some schools may implement tighter restrictions as a cost control measure. There is currently no mandated roster limit, though schools often use roster limits in sports like swimming for budgeting and Title IX balancing purposes.

Ultimately, these new rules are going to have an enormous impact on collegiate athletics, barring any last-minute reprieve by an American congress that has been wont in recent months to pass any substantial legislation.

Big Ten Rosters, 2023-2024

SEC Rosters, 2023-2024

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