How many players are on a college football team?

[kennytomson]

i keep hearing 70-75 players will be the roster limit for NCAA football, but how many players are usally on scholarship at an average university? they get about 20-25 new scholarships a year, so is 80 players per team a sound about right?

[ADW]

Each school in Division 1A is allowed to have up to 85 scholarship players on their roster assuming they're not being punished by the NCAA with scholarship reductions. Obviously some schools may not carry that many, (usually smaller 1A schools) but most do carry 85 scholarship players. Also, many programs get quite a few walk-on players to tryout for the team. In many instances you'll find walk-ons who through hard work will eventually earn a scholarship. Large public universities on average will usually get more walk-on players than a private school simply because it costs more to attend a private school. So basically if you take the 85 scholarship players and add to that another 20 or so walk-ons, a major university could easily have over 100 players on the football team.

A small note, in the old days there were virtually no scholarship limitations. Schools could offer as many scholarships as they wanted. Basically what this did is guaranteed that school A would get all of the talented players from school B. In this day and age with the scholarship limitations, school B now gets to offer scholarships to players that school A can no longer offer. It really brought about parity in Div 1A football.

[kennytomson]

-so in a perfect world, 100 roster limit would be the best case senerio(maybe for 3rd generation systems)?
-when was the old days(70's, 80's, when were scholarship limitations put in)?