A roster is not who you signed. It is how you spent the pool.
Add a player, re-run Team KR, and read the delta against its real cost out of one thin, shared pool.
Add the player. Re-run the team. Read what changed.
Team Intelligence grades the roster you have. This surface changes it. Drop a player onto the squad and Team KR re-runs through your scheme, and the number that matters is not his own rating, it is the delta, how much better or worse your team is with him in it, read against what he costs to add.
The same player who reads plus two point seven here could read plus half a point at a programme that already has him, because the delta is about your team, not his talent. This is where a rating becomes a decision: not how good he is, but what he does to you and whether the delta is worth the cost. The player has a rating. The move has a delta, and only the delta builds a roster.
Illustrative engine read on the real roster-delta mechanic (add or subtract a player, re-run Team KR through the scheme, read the delta against the cost). Composite squad, demonstration figures.
A place is not a scholarship, and the pool is thin.
College football is an equivalency sport: a programme divides a limited pot of athletic aid into full, partial, or no scholarships, on top of a small share of the revenue-share cap and a modest NIL market. So a roster place does not mean a full ride, and every add spends a slice of one thin, shared pool.
This is the college-football cost reality the revenue sports do not share: the pool is small, most of the school's money flows to American football and basketball, and the coach is splitting fractions of scholarships to cover a full squad. So a plus-two-point-seven add that costs a large slice of the pool can be a worse move than a plus-one add that costs almost nothing, and the delta and the cost sit side by side. The best delta is not always the best move. The best delta per dollar is.
Illustrative engine read on the real equivalency and funding reality (every NCAA sport an equivalency sport post-House, partial aid split across the roster, a thin non-revenue pool, no assumption that a place is a full scholarship). Composite programme, demonstration figures.
Once you are full, adding means subtracting.
College football runs under a hard 28-place roster limit, phased in by the House settlement: players recruited before April 2025 can be designated and do not count, so it bites gradually as they graduate. Below the cap you can simply add. At the cap, an add is a swap, priced on the net, the incoming delta minus the outgoing one.
Once the designated players graduate and the roster is genuinely full, the coach is no longer adding talent, he is trading it, and the honest move is the best net delta the pool can afford. The incoming delta, the outgoing delta, the swap, and the cost sit together, so a move that looks like an upgrade but only nets a fraction after the cut and the spend is seen for what it is. Below the cap you add. At the cap you choose, and every choice has a price.
Illustrative engine read on the real roster-limit constraint (the 28-place cap, the designated-athlete grandfather phasing it in, the at-cap swap netting incoming minus outgoing delta, scholarship protection, and the leaving-up rule), read with confidence, never touching a KR. Composite squad, demonstration figures.
The best move is never the best player available, it is the best delta the pool can afford.
Do not collect players. Spend the pool.
The College Roster surface re-runs Team KR on every move, prices the delta against a thin equivalency-and-NIL pool, nets the swap at the 28-place cap, and never lets the constraint touch a rating.