Quote Originally Posted by Sader87 View Post
Not discounting it out of hand, but I have a hard time strongly connecting PL woes to not having the 91st to 100th best players playing on their teams.

I think the AI is still probably the toughest hurdle to climb in terms of recruiting (along with not having redshirting... but just dealing with what we can work with here)....as well as the coaches in the league (in general) not being used to recruiting with scholarships yet. Still a work in progress but I think many PL schools and their fans' patience is wearing thin.
I don't think this is the right way to look at it. The way to see this is a PL football team today has a pool of 90 players they can suit up in August and say "these guys can be football players". The staff doesn't know at that point whether players 91-100 that would have been in camp would a career scout team all-star or a future all-Patriot League starter. Again, this has an larger impact than you might expect.

It's also worth noting that as far as I can tell other conferences don't have limits like this on their preseason roster sizes - or indeed any limits on their roster sizes for home games at all. I couldn't find any historically for the CAA, Big 12, SoCon, or Big Sky. Now they do have travel roster limits - in the Big 12 you can't dress more than 70 players for a road game (and even then there are exceptions). Travel roster size limits make sense. But schools like Princeton, Monmouth, or Villanova can try out any number of walk-ons to become football players, and can dress them all during home games vs. Patriot League schools. In contrast, Patriot League schools can only invite 90 bodies to camp in August.