Ohio State kicker Jake Seibert entered the transfer portal on Monday.
On Saturday he had been on the field at the Horseshoe, though he didn’t attempt a kick during the spring game. His lack of opportunities that afternoon with nothing at stake now seems ominous.
Back in 2018, Taver Johnson began recruiting him to Ohio State from La Salle High School in Cincinnati. A year later neither Johnson nor his boss Urban Meyer were still on the football staff, but Ryan Day still chose him to be the first kicker he would sign as Ohio State's coach.
Blake Haubeil handed all of the extra points and field goals during his first year with the program. Seibert got some game action in year two during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but then Haubeil tested positive for COVID prior to the national championship game.
Unexpectedly, the first kicker Day signed would have the sport’s biggest stage all to himself.
The only successful field goal of Seibert’s Ohio State career would come in a half-empty stadium against Alabama. The PAT in the 3rd quarter would be the final point of his career. He would go on to miss both of his field goal attempts in the 2021 spring game. Ominous.
Two months later, Noah Ruggles transferred in from North Carolina. On scholarship.
Parker Lewis would arrive the following year, also on scholarship. Seibert never attempted a kick after that Alabama game, and now he'll be trying to kick for another team.
So the signs were there long before Saturday’s scrimmage that he would be the odd man out among the kickers. Either Siebert realized this, or he was gently informed that his status on the depth chart was No Field Goal Attempts During a Scrimmage.
Attrition stories like his used to be quite common in college football. Just not at Ohio State.
Jan 11, 2021: Jake Seibert kicks a 23-yard field goal during the 2nd quarter of the CFP National Championship. © Kyle Robertson-USA TODAY Sports
A dozen years ago, a football program delicately advising or abruptly encouraging a player to exit the program generally had a location stamp like Fayetteville, Oxford, Baton Rouge or Tuscaloosa. There were others, but LSU and Alabama were the oversigning kings of that era.
When those two programs signed their respective 2011 classes, they were 19 players over the 85-man cap combined. After that, they collectively processed an entire recruiting class worth of second-chances to bulk up and power their respective rosters.
Their ascendancy was not mysterious. LSU vs. Alabama was that season’s BCS title game.
The Buckeyes never threatened the 85-man cap back during that era; whenever Jim Tressel found himself with extra scholarships on account of natural attrition or early NFL departures, the beneficiaries of that surplus were Ohio State’s walk-ons.
Of-season shopping for, say, a right tackle wasn’t a thing. Transfer Portal was not in the lexicon. And even if it was, making room for a new player didn’t involve another one –typically with a Seibert-like depth chart status – to head elsewhere.
A lot has changed over the past 12 seasons. Roster management is not only no longer a largely SEC exercise in program juicing, it's now an acceptable part of doing business –because now everyone participating in amateur athletics has a tangible stake in that business. And businesses restructure headcount routinely.
College athletics now operate in an amateur-adjacency frontier. Athletes get endorsement deals and do quite well above the table now, finally. They still are not technically employees. They operate in a fuzzy zone between amateur and professional with income possibilities now permissible for them as student-athletes.
Roster Management stopped being a regional exercise in Program juicing the moment players were open to business opportunities. Businesses restructure all of the time.
A byproduct of amateurism dying is that headcount management is now permissible. There are still ethical ways to conduct this, just as corporations do when eliminating positions to reduce bloat.
Seibert, who hadn't kicked in a game in two years is a Barstool Athlete™ holding an NIL value of $22,000. If that seems low to you, consider his price tag is three times the total aggregate market value of discounted tattoos and merchandise cataloged in Ohio State's Tatgate Scandal of 2011.
His departure takes Ohio State's scholarship count down to 88 guys, which breaks a roster tie with Alabama. The Crimson Tide has four guys too many with four months to go. A lot has changed in 12 years, but the roster cap has not – at least three more Buckeyes will follow Seibert into the portal between now and fall.
We used to look at what Alabama and LSU did as part of their empire-building as unethical and callous, which, yes. Part being the operative word; Ole Miss signed 37 players in its 2009 class and played in two bowl games over the next four seasons.
Even once the practice was legislated out of the sport, roster management continued surreptitiously. Roster forecasting, as is the case in business-business, often involves a little sandbagging.
And that sandbagging began happening in Columbus recently. But considering how amateurism has evolved through modest-to-extravagant NIL opportunities, conscientious roster management seems to be an appropriate condition for the new rules of engagement.
Because being over the cap is no longer objectively unfair. Not since it became just a business.
