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[QUOTE="sutomcat, post: 1059267, member: 27"]
Other schools routinely do this, and sometimes get burned where they have an extra player on scholarship that they really can't give a scholarship to.  I think this happened with Buss and Indiana a couple of years ago.

SU has, to my knowledge, been historically very conservative awarding scholarships, routinely playing seasons with 11 or 12 scholarship players (though they might award the extras to walk-ons).

To make an analogy to plane reservations, I think the Syracuse staff has been willing to book all 13 scholarships but not to overbook, so when a player transfers, gets kicked out of school or leaves the program early to play professionally, the staff has been willing to play with 11 or 12 true scholarship players.  As we all know, this has been how the scholarship situation has been for some years now.

This approach can help with the APR, if the extra scholarships are awarded to walk-ons who also happen to be good students.  But it also can lead to alarming lack of depth, especially when injuries occur.

Maybe the staff has made a decision to get a little less conservative given the history of the program, where many players do not stay for 4 or 5 seasons, and is willing to throw the dice and overbook given the extremely high probability one or more players scheduled to be on scholarship for 2015-16 will not be around by that point?
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