I’m not an attorney, so I’m not going to pretend to predict exactly how the legal argument will play out. I can look at it as someone who’s spent a career in this profession, though, and I believe the five-coach limit will eventually go away. The question for me is less about if and more about when, and then what happens to the profession when it does.

We need to start by asking what the five-coach rule has already done. Did it limit opportunities for strength and conditioning coaches? Absolutely. One of the clearest examples is the graduate assistant position. For a long time, working as a GA with football was one of the ways a young coach could get meaningful experience, learn from experienced professionals and start building a career. When you put a hard cap on who can work with football student-athletes, those developmental opportunities become harder to create. The current rule doesn’t just say five people can hold a particular title. It says no more than five strength and conditioning coaches may work with an FBS football program in any capacity, including workouts, practices and game-related activities.

That brings me to a bigger question. If the five-coach rule goes away, do we simply hire a sixth, seventh or eighth traditional strength coach? Maybe. But I think the more interesting possibility is that we start thinking differently about what a strength and conditioning staff can look like. Could an experienced coach move into a chief of staff or director of operations role and spend more time mentoring younger coaches? Could we create hybrid positions that combine strength and conditioning with sports science, mental performance or another area of athlete development? Could coaches who primarily work with Olympic sports also contribute to football when their expertise is needed?

Those possibilities are worth considering because strength and conditioning has become much more than writing workouts and coaching lifts. Today’s performance departments include sports science, nutrition, sports medicine, mental performance and other specialties that weren’t nearly as integrated when many of these staffing rules were created. Sometimes the person who can best help solve a problem doesn’t fit neatly into one box. Removing an arbitrary number doesn’t mean every program needs to build a massive staff. It means programs could decide what staffing model makes sense for their athletes, resources and philosophy.

There’s another part of this conversation that shouldn’t be ignored. These rules didn’t develop in a vacuum. Part of the concern around staffing limits has always been preventing football programs from using strength and conditioning positions as another avenue for football coaching. If someone could be placed in the weight room and then effectively provide technical or tactical instruction, programs with more resources could keep adding people and creating an advantage. So rules were created to put boundaries around who could do what.

The problem is that college football has continued to evolve around those boundaries anyway. Programs created analyst positions and other support roles. Yet the five-person strength and conditioning limit remained. At some point, you have to ask whether the original restriction is still solving the problem it was designed to solve.

I’ve been in college athletics long enough to know something else: people with resources will find ways to use those resources. You can write a rule trying to prevent one specific staffing strategy, and someone will find another legal way to accomplish the same objective. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have rules. It means we should regularly ask whether those rules are actually accomplishing their intended purpose or simply creating unintended consequences somewhere else.

There’s also the student-athlete side of this discussion. The lawsuit argues that limiting strength and conditioning staffs can affect athlete development and safety by spreading responsibilities across fewer coaches. I think that deserves serious consideration. Football rosters are large, and strength coaches spend an enormous amount of time around student-athletes throughout the year. More coaches doesn’t automatically mean better coaching or safer training. The quality of the people, the systems and the leadership still matter. But there is a point where staff-to-athlete ratios affect how much individual coaching, observation and relationship-building can realistically happen.

That’s why I’m interested in Spellman v. NCAA beyond the outcome of one lawsuit. If this rule eventually disappears, we have an opportunity to rethink some things. Maybe we bring back developmental opportunities that have been lost. Maybe veteran coaches have new ways to stay involved and mentor the next generation. Maybe departments build more interdisciplinary positions. Maybe Olympic sport coaches have opportunities to share their expertise with football. The five-coach rule going away wouldn’t answer those questions for us. It would give us the opportunity to answer them ourselves. And if that day comes, I hope our profession thinks bigger than simply adding another coach to the weight room.