photo by: Courtesy of Conlee Hovey

Louisburg's Conlee Hovey is pictured during a game against Paola on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024, in Paola.

It wasn’t so long ago that the Kansas football team announced the addition of 10 freshman walk-ons to its roster as part of the 2024 offseason.

That sort of quantity won’t usually be possible going forward.

The impending adoption of the House v. NCAA antitrust settlement will officially limit the size of college football rosters from an average of 128 players (per one frequently cited estimate) to 105 starting next season. That steep decline combined with the fact that any of those 105 players could be on scholarship — when just 85 scholarships were usable before — is going to mean a severe reduction in numbers for the nonscholarship athletes who have constituted the back ends of many rosters over the years.

Hence why KU brought in just three new walk-ons this offseason, one of whom — former Free State standout Wesley Edison — has already left for the junior-college ranks.

For the remaining pair, kicker Dane Efird and tight end Conlee Hovey, though, the fact that KU would permit them onto this sharply curtailed roster is a sign, as Hovey put it, that the staff cares enough about them to entrust them with such a valuable spot.

“To me, it feels like they’re invested in me,” Efird told the Journal-World, “they actually want me in their program and stuff, and I’m not just another player on their team.”

That was precisely the sort of quality that a coach of Efird’s had told him to seek out in his eventual college destination: “He said, ‘Just take the PWO (preferred walk-on spot) and go to a school where they want you and they will invest in you,’ and that’s what I feel like KU has done with me.”

Efird kicked at Branson High School in Missouri, where he was a perfect 59-for-59 on extra-point attempts and 6-for-10 on field goals as a senior with a long of 47 yards.

A longtime two-sport athlete, he used to have to play high school soccer games on Tuesdays and Thursdays and football on Fridays, and it would take a toll on the distance of his kickoffs (they would die at the 5-yard line, as he put it) and the accuracy of his field goals until he finally made the “tough decision” to give up the other sport — and saw himself improve in both areas.

“Letting my body heal during the week was really good for me,” he said.

The kicker is a lifelong KU fan who was born in Kansas City and whose parents attended college in the area.

“We used to go to basketball games all the time and stuff like that,” he said. “Ever since I got into kicking, I was like ‘Man, I want to go to KU.'”

Efird attended camp at KU one summer, built a relationship with then-assistant Sean Snyder, began to keep in touch with new special teams analyst Kyle Deween after Snyder’s departure and then returned to camp and acquitted himself well again during the summer of 2024.

The Jayhawks waited to formally offer Efird a place on the team, he said, until they got a definitive sense of how roster limits would work going forward.

“They were kind of holding off,” he recalled. “They told me it was me and one other guy and they would like to offer but they don’t know if they would have enough spots for me in that particular position because they didn’t know what the ruling was going to be and stuff. They kind of said, ‘Just let it play out for a little bit.'”

They eventually offered Efird a place as a PWO in December, and while he was tempted to accept on the spot, he took a day to talk with his family. He announced his commitment on social media on Dec. 17.

Efird will play a valuable role as one of just two kickers on the newly limited 2025 roster, as he comes in behind fifth-year veteran South Alabama transfer Laith Marjan. He said KU has essentially pitched him on the idea of learning from Marjan during his first year, so that if he does well enough he could potentially earn the starting spot — and a scholarship — going forward.

“I’m going there to compete still, too,” Efird said. “I still want to try my best and let them know that I can perform at a high level for sure. But I’m also going there to get some good experience too. Because no matter what, experience is experience, and at this level I would be happy with anything.”

Like Efird, Hovey had a longstanding connection with KU, though his was of a different sort. His older brother Jase was once committed to KU as a PWO himself back at the start of 2023.

“That kind of started the interest,” Hovey told the Journal-World, “because I went with him to the practices and stuff and I really started to like it then.”

Jase ended up flipping away from KU to take a scholarship opportunity at South Dakota and, his brother said, “didn’t have a great experience.” That allowed Hovey to see the value of remaining in the state of Kansas, and doing so just about an hour away from his hometown of Louisburg, even though he had some low-level Division I scholarship offers of his own.

“I thought it was more worth it to me to stay close and walk on,” he said.

Those offers did help entice KU to show greater interest as Hovey attended the school’s camps over the years.

The 6-foot-5, 230-pound tight end had 25 catches for 286 yards and two touchdowns as a senior for the Wildcats and was a Kansas Shrine Bowl selection. In the meantime, he liked how KU was playing in late 2024 when it beat a series of ranked teams — including in the game for which Hovey visited, its victory over Iowa State in early November.

The new House roster limits did come up at times during his recruitment, when he’d ask coaches their opinions or expectations and, he said, “Even they didn’t know a lot of what it was going to look like.”

That wasn’t the only source of tumult during Hovey’s recruitment. Over the course of his relationship with KU, the Jayhawks lost two offensive coordinators who were also their tight ends coaches. Jeff Grimes had been his primary recruiter. He actually announced his commitment during the interval between the first reports of Grimes’ departure for Wisconsin and the hiring of Matt Lubick. Hovey said he’s gotten a positive impression of Lubick so far.

“I think things fell into place at the right time,” he said of his December commitment, which he made a few days before KU offered Efird. “The coaches told me they would have a spot for me and with this new roster change, it meant a lot, you know, because there can only be 105 guys on the team now.”

Hovey said that for PWOs, it doesn’t always necessarily feel like their teams care about them, but that wasn’t the case with him and KU. He’s now preparing to hit the ground running when he arrives in Lawrence, with an eye toward playing time in a year or two.

“The game of football has kind of changed, you know,” Hovey said. “It’s a lot easier to get cut now and I know it’s going to take double the amount of work it would have.”

photo by: Courtesy of Dane Efird

Branson’s Dane Efird kicks during a game against Carl Junction on Friday, Oct. 11, 2024, in Carl Junction, Mo.