EVANSTON-Northwestern held an open spring practice in front of about a thousand fans at Martin Stadium on Saturday. It was the last of 15 practices for the Wildcats this spring.

Now, the hard work begins for head coach David Braun.

Northwestern will have somewhere around 113 players on the roster once the Class of 2025 recruits report in June. Braun will have to get that number down to the 105-player roster limit that the NCAA will likely be imposing very soon, once the House Settlement gets implemented as expected.

Braun is not a fan of the player limit. He was visibly rankled when I asked him what process he will use to, in essence, cut players over the summer.

“This, I gotta take a deep breath here,” he said. “This whole thing is really, really frustrating.”

Making matters worse in Braun’s eyes is an NCAA that hasn’t given football programs any guidance on how they should go about it.

“Us, as college football programs, can try and guess what the parameters are gonna be,” he said. “We're trying to do right by the young men that we've been charged with mentoring and [stewarding] their experience here at Northwestern.

“We don't even have clarity on how we're supposed to do that. So as a program, you gotta figure it out. You can't just, you know, complain about it.”

The bottom line is that Northwestern, along with just about every other program in the nation, will have to let some players go.

The Wildcats began the spring with 99 players, according to Braun. They have since lost two to the transfer portal. Once the summer rolls around, 13 scholarship players and three preferred walkons will join the group as incoming freshmen. That makes for a total of 113, eight over the anticipated limit.

The hard truth is that some of the players who went through winter workouts and spring practice may not be on the roster come fall. Most, if not all of them, will be walkons. Braun will have to conduct those difficult conversations to tell them they don’t have a spot on the roster.

MORE ON SATURDAY'S OPEN PRACTICE:

What David Braun said after practice l Impressions from Northwestern's open practice

To Braun, the roster limit is more of a professional model than one that’s appropriate for a college game that is supposed to be more about developing players. The Wildcats may not be able to carry players who take two or three years to develop because they won’t necessarily be ready to help the team this fall.

The new limits may be particularly difficult for a developmental program like Northwestern that specializes in taking three-star prospects and “diamonds in the rough” and turning them into Big Ten contributors over the course of four or five years.

Braun pointed to PJ Spencer as an example of the type of player who may get squeezed out of the college game by the 105-player limit. He was a walkon defensive lineman in the Class of 2019 who played in just four games over his first three years in the program, and four games in his fourth.

Then, in his final year of eligibility in 2023, he became a valuable contributor in Braun’s first year at Northwestern. Spencer played in all 13 games during that surprising season for the Wildcats, starting seven. He made 22 tackles, including 1.5 TFL, and earned Academic All-Big Ten honors. He made two tackles in the Wildcats win over Utah in the Las Vegas Bowl.

“I also get frustrated when we're eliminating opportunities for young men to develop within the program,” said Braun. “Because PJ Spencer, who was getting after Utah at the Las Vegas Bowl in 2023, if you would've asked people in the program when PJ came in as a walkon, ‘Is this guy gonna be someone that helps us go beat Utah and Las Vegas?’ [The answer would have been no.]

“I don't want those stories to not continue to be part of college football. So we're trying to find a ways to get creative with it.”

One of the ways is treating the 105-man roster likes the NFL’s 53-man roster, and the players who don’t have a spot on the 105 like a practice squad. Braun says that they’re operating under the assumption that the limit won’t be imposed until the start of the season.

“That doesn't mean that it's in place during June, July, or even August,” he said. That would at least allow players to take part in summer workouts.

And if a player doesn’t make the roster in the fall, that doesn’t mean he can’t earn a spot the next season, said Braun.

“The second that we get done with our bowl game and we get back into offseason workouts, [the player] can integrate right back onto the team” and potentially make the team the following season.

Braun is nothing if not open and honest. So he is planning to have conversations with players now about their standing, so that it won’t come out of nowhere if they aren’t on the roster in the fall.

“What it comes down to is making sure that we are abundantly transparent with every single young man on our team after spring ball, as we start to get into post-spring, spring meetings of, ‘Hey guys, we don't know if this is gonna be 105 or not. We're anticipating that it is’. And then just having very clear conversations with a young man of whether or not we can guarantee them a spot on that 105.”

Some people might look at this pro-like roster limit and see it as appropriate now that college players are being paid with NIL money.

Don’t tell that to Braun.

“It's not pro football,” he said. “They're called pros for a reason. They're pros, and those guys are ready to step into a facility and go do what they need to do.

“College football is about developing people and developing football players. And I really get frustrated when we…”

He cut himself off. Like he said, he wants to be part of the solution, not the problem.

“At the end of the day, we need to make sure that we put the best 105 together to go win in the Big Ten.”

That’s never easy at a school like Northwestern. And it just got harder.