After Chinedu Udeogu committed, I pointed out it put Illinois as 86 scholarships and asked who was leaving. You (and @thunderwear ) said that Ethan Tabel and Donny Navarro had to earn their scholarships again, which put the scholarship count to 84. Christian Bell since de-committed, which put the count to 83. How do you come up with 84? It seems to me it is either 83 or 85.So just some numbers for us all to pay attention to. We currently have 61 scholarships accounted for next year (51 players on scholarship + 10 commits.) Leaving us with 24 scholarships available. We are only allowed a 25 man class, but with some early enrollments (to make those kids turn into 2020 recruits) we could take a possible 28 man class. 28-(10 commits)= 18 possible more HS/juco commits. 24-18= 6 scholarships left over for transfers. We currently sit at 1 scholarship available this season, so if we use it on a multi year transfer then we would be sitting at 5 possible transfers+ attrition. So the next year has us possibly adding upwards of 33 scholarship players to the roster. It’s going to be a huge year for roster building.
If there are only 23/24 scholarships available next year before the 85 player cap is reached, I'm not understanding why they would go with up to 28 or 33 scholarships unless there was some creaning planned or known that some players are leaving early on their own.