LOGAN – New Utah State football head coach Bronco Mendenhall is currently enjoying some of his last notable time off during the school’s spring break, spending the week on his property in Montana. On Monday, though, he joined the Full Court Press on 106.9 FM / 1390 AM The FAN with Eric Frandsen and Jason Walker to discuss various offseason topics, among those being the decision to close spring practices and scrimmages to the public, Utah State opting in to the House Settlement, whether the Aggies will join the trend of hiring a general manager, potential rule changes regarding players faking injuries and a change in the portal window.
Jason Walker and Eric Frandsen speak with Utah State football head coach Bronco Mendenhall about the offseason for Utah State football and the hurdles the program has to overcome both within the team and outside of it with the changing landscape of college football. Topics include whether USU will hire a general manager, how Mendenhall feels about potential rule changes with faking injuries and an re-worked transfer window, to how the Aggies themselves are working through spring workouts in preparation for spring practices.
Last Friday, the Aggies announced the start date for spring ball (March 18) and simultaneously noted that all of the spring practices would be closed and that the team would not hold a public spring game. The news that Utah State would not hold publicly viewable spring practices and scrimmages came as little shock, especially after Mendenhall heavily hinted at the possibility last month. Still, it’s a blow to the potential hype the program needs to try and build in the wake of its first non-bowl game season (the 2020 COVID year being excepted) since 2016.
Mendenhall is fully aware of what he’s giving up in terms of community outreach. But there’s a more valuable thing he’s trying to keep in tact: the team itself. Much like other programs that have likewise shuttered spring showcases this season, Mendenhall is very concerned with tampering. Last year the Aggies had open practices and held one public spring showcase (another was planned to be public but was held indoors and closed due to inclement weather). By the end of spring ball, no less than 14 players ended up transferring from the team, including five projected starters among other key backups.
Keeping that kind of attrition in the upcoming spring window (April 16-25) is the top priority.
“Ultimately, players are the most important commodity that exists in college football,” Mendenhall said. “The primary reason is to protect our current roster. We have a lot of good things going through our offseason cycle and how hard the players are working. And then also protecting the schemes and strategies that we intend to use as much as possible before we play. So there’s really no reason to give that away or share or show if we don’t have to and we currently don’t have to.”
Related to the Aggies’ trouble with the spring window is a proposal that has been passed to the NCAA oversight committee. In January, FBS coaches attending the 2025 American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) convention unanimously voted for a radical change in the current transfer portal window setup. Currently, college football has two portal windows — the only NCAA sport with more than one — the first taking place in December after the conclusion of the regular season and a second in mid-April, after or during the end of team’s spring practices (the December window lasts nearly three weeks and the April window is 10 days). The new model would eliminate the spring window and change the December window to a 10-day one beginning on Jan. 2. The proposal from the coaches seeks to implement this change as soon as the 2025-26 calendar year.
Such a change would, in principle, be a boon to the Aggies who, like many Group of 6 programs, struggle to keep players from entering the portal. Tampering is rampant and constant. Limiting the chances for players to bolt after being promised money and glory from Power 4 programs behind the scenes would be akin to an early Christmas. And yet, Mendenhall isn’t keen on the current proposal because it could end up effectively shutting Utah State out from using the transfer portal.
Incoming transfers to Utah State that plan on being in the program for spring ball need to be registered in time for the start of classes. And while many universities begin later in January (after what would be the end of the proposed portal window), USU’s begins the first week of January.
“School starts this upcoming year, January 4th. That would literally eliminate us from being able to use the transfer portal,” Mendenhall said, “unless Utah State’s academic calendar changed. Or they found, and we found, some way to have players arrive and either take remote or online or coursework, somehow where they have a chance to catch up maybe three up to even four weeks after the semester started.”
A different rule change that could be going into effect this upcoming season seeks to eliminate players faking injuries. Whenever a player remains on the ground with an apparent injury, the game is stopped by an official timeout. It’s a necessary precaution to protect player safety but the allure of a free timeout for teams is apparently one coaches have sometimes chosen to pursue. Ole Miss were directly accused of the practice this past season, especially after a video clip of one of its players apparently signaling to a teammate who then immediately collapsed to the ground with a supposed injury.
One of the primary uses of the tactic is to slow down hurry-up offenses. The timeout created by an injury, feigned or real, creates an opportunity to substitute in players (often very difficult against fast-paced teams), give the defense a chance to rest and even stifle momentum from the opposing offense.
Mendenhall said the practice is “very prevalent” and gave a harsh rebuke of the players, and especially coaches, who engage in it.
“I would say the majority of teams feign injuries, which I think is just simply wrong and it’s against the rules and it’s not sportsman-like and it’s not honest. And I’ve been an opponent of some of those teams and just simply watched a player get a signal from his sideline and then just fall down and grab something.” Mendenhall said. “It’s a problem. “It sets a poor precedent, not only for young people in terms of what sportsmanship really looks like, but I think it’s just bad for the game.”
While feigning injuries hasn’t, in fact, been found to be explicitly against the rules as Mendenhall believes, the NCAA is still cooking up a solution to it. The one that will be examined by the NCAA Football Rules Committee in April is to charge teams a timeout if a player has to be attended to after the ball has been spotted by officials. If the team of the injured player does not have any timeouts remaining, a five-yard penalty would be assessed. Mendenhall had a different idea for a solution, a thought he’s had for more than a decade, dating back to a time when he was on the AFCA board.
“My suggestion at that point was the player ought to come out and have to stay out the entire rest of the series. And that didn’t receive any support,” Mendenhall said.
That approach of forcing a player that leaves the game with an injury to sit out at least the rest of the current series was brought up at the 2025 AFCA conference, though it didn’t end up as part of any official recommendations to the NCAA like the proposed transfer portal change did.
The NFL implemented its own rule surrounding injuries years ago in the wake of its own wave of fake injury viral videos. Currently, teams will be charged a timeout if a player has to be attended to when the clock is under two minutes in the second or fourth quarters with some exceptions.
Even with the portal and fake injuries on the minds of fans, media and coaches, the most pervasive subject in college football right now — one that is lurking and waiting to throw collegiate sports into a new, more professional model — is the House Settlement. The historic settlement to the court case of House v. NCAA includes a wide variety of changes that will come to the NCAA, most notably revenue sharing and roster caps. Colleges that opt in to the House Settlement will be subject to designated roster caps for the sports they sponsor, though it does raise the scholarship limit to that cap. In football, for instance, the roster cap will be set at 105, but the scholarship limit will rise from 85 to 105 (that’s not a mandatory minimum, though, and the SEC, for example, is maintaining a cap of 85 scholarships for all teams in its conference).
Mendenhall said that USU Athletics Director Diana Sabau plans on having the university opt in to the House Settlement (and that he believes all future Pac-12 institutions are doing the same). Initially, the deadline to opt in was March 1, though that was changed to a deadline for schools to “declare their initial intent to opt in” with a final opt-in deadline being June 15.
Utah State’s roster page currently lists 92 players, though Mendenhall stated that his team is “currently about 18 over our roster limit” and he speculated that “schools like Brigham Young University could be upwards of 40, Nebraska could be upwards of 50 over” the current limit.
The end result of these roster caps will be potentially thousands of lost opportunities for college football players. Mendenhall said right now is “the worst time in college football history to be a walk-on player at the Division I level.” But in addition to lamenting the loss of the roster underdogs, managing a smaller roster will also present challenges to teams on a day-to-day basis.
“It’s difficult to practice the fewer roster spots you have,” Mendenhall said, adding that it becomes “more difficult to maintain, manage, and keep your roster healthy, because you’re practicing against fewer players and you’re now doing so with a longer season than there’s ever been. And so (a) longer season, fewer roster spots, that doesn’t lead to the betterment of college football. It really makes it harder to manage the roster.”
A growing trend in the college sports landscape, something occurring largely as a response to the need for dynamic roster management, is for programs to hire a “general manager,” a role usually only seen in professional sports. Six Mountain West schools have hired an official general manager for football — Boise State, Colorado State, San Diego State, New Mexico, Nevada and Wyoming — including three of the five that are departing for the Pac-12 . Another two, UNLV and Fresno State, have hired individuals into positions that will include a GM-like role but not that specific title.
Utah State does not have a GM for its program. But, according to Mendenhall, the team is “fast approaching” having that position. Whether it happens and how soon will come down to whether the money to hire such a position will be worth the opportunity cost alleviated from the coaching staff which currently deals with general manager-esque duties. Right now, those duties are shared by Mendenhall and his chief of staff, Pat Hickman, who’s worked with Mendenhall for two decades, but one could argue almost too much of his time is spent on that management.
“Probably 35 percent of my time at this point is being devoted to the raising of funds, to then the raising of a roster that can be competitive and lasting and represent us well,” Mendenhall said. “You just have to gauge then, your organizational design, and then say is the management of our roster and the finances and the negotiations and anything else that comes with that now a disproportionate draw on my time and taking away from our collective work? And we’re teetering right on that.”
