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Emerging out of the unprecedented circumstances created by the coronavirus pandemic is a roster crunch unlike any in college baseball history.
HawgBeat has reported extensively on the reasons behind that, but it really boils down to two primary factors: the shortening of the 2020 MLB Draft to five rounds and the approval of eligibility relief across the board by the NCAA.
Some of the dust has settled with the draft being in the books and the NCAA agreeing to eliminate the 35-man roster limit, expand the number players who can be on scholarship from 27 to 32 and allow less than a 25 percent scholarship next season.
While Arkansas head coach Dave Van Horn won't have to worry about cutting a massive roster down to 35 players and now has an extra five spots to use them, he'll still have only 11.7 scholarships to divide amongst an abundance of talent in 2021.
Scholarship information is private - and constantly changing - in college baseball, so it would be impossible to determine which players are walk-ons and won't count toward the 32-man limit for scholarship players, as well as how much of the 11.7 total is currently accounted for.
With that in mind, HawgBeat thought it would still be interesting to continue to track how the 2021 roster evolves throughout the offseason, so we've put together what we know so far.
For the purpose of this list, we categorized the returning players who appeared in games in 2020 with their classification from this season because the eligibility relief applies to all of them. For example, Connor Noland was a sophomore in 2020 and will be a “corona-sophomore” in 2021.
Our tracker will continue to be updated as players are added and removed.
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NEW USERS | RETURNING USERS
Current count for 2021 roster: 54 players
Returners
Played in 2020 (25)
RHP Mark Adamiak - freshman
RHP/OF Blake Adams - freshman
RHP Caleb Bolden - redshirt sophomore (graduated)
RHP Jacob Burton - sophomore
RHP Marshall Denton - redshirt junior (graduated)
OF Christian Franklin - sophomore
INF/OF Matt Goodheart - junior
INF/OF Zack Gregory - redshirt freshman