I guess I'm missing something.....if you have 85 schollies currently commited on the roster and your senior class + attrition only equals say 15, why is signing 25 not oversigning? Maybe semantics....to me oversigning is signing more kids than you have room for under the 85 schollie cap given that it's the need to squeeze under that hard 85 cap that gives rise to the more creative roster managment techniques..... TOK, I believe, but am no expert, that the Big 10 places a hard cap on the 85 limit and you must petition and show evidence of why any class of any size will not exceed the 85 roster limit....but in any event, kudos to the SEC presidents for taking a step in the right direction.
Are you sure the B10 doesn't allow oversigning? Since Feb is when LOI's are signed and at that point most coaches aren't 100% sure who amongst the scholarship players will be back for the next year, I mean there are guys who fail to make their spring grades and flunk out, you have guys who get into trouble and are expelled, you have all sorts of things that leave coaches with a good idea of who will be back but not 100%. I googled and found this from a Mar 2011 article
Not an expert by any stretch, but I believe that they can "overoffer" by up to 3 and that may perhaps extend to signing with some documentation requirements as to how they will get to the 85 schollie limit, but the hard cap is the 85 limit, not an arbitrary annual number. As I understand it, using your example of Penn St, the budget is based upon the 85 limit, and under no circumstances could they sign more than the 13 even though the NCAA annual limit is 25...
If it was as hard as you say it is then PSU would only be able to sign 10, that's all their budget allows for...but I have looked on Oversigning.Com and they do say that the B10 does allow for a fudge factor of 3, so at 13 PSU would need some roster management to meet the 85 limit...which of course realistically given some of the things that happen is not too hard to do, worst case is you have a borderline player who is eligible for 5th year but you decide not to offer it and create an opening for one or two or three of the oversigned recruits.
I don't recall saying how hard it was, but I'm not aware of any more difficult. Perhaps you are? If so, they should use it as a model for the NCAA to finally address the issue effectively as many here and across the country have called for.... In many conferences - not just the SEC, they'd be able to sign twice that many, every year regardless of how many they already had on schollie...... Excerpted from comments made by Chad Hawley, Big 10 associate commish, here is the process....