I have 12 scholarships but usually only run a 9 or 10 man rotation. Is there any harm to my team by keeping 2 spots for walk ons that won't play and concentrating my recruiting $$ and energy on getting the best 10 guys possible?

You can take 2 walk ons without penalty. Looks like you run M2M-I would guess most coaches that run man or zone often take at least 1 walk on each season. When you run press it's harder as you need to be 12-deep with solid stamina.

There used to be a minor penalty for taking more than 2 walk-ons but not sure if that's still the case or not. The logic there was you couldn't run 5 on 5 practices with 9 or less guys and so your ratings would increase slower without the ability to practice with a full squad.

At D2-3, where you don’t worry about early entries, there is not much harm to taking a walkon or two, unless you are running fastbreak/press, or really like to run uptempo every game for some reason. Planning to run with 10 and carry extra scholarships is a valid strategy lots of folks use, but understand you are also raising the stakes for yourself a little; if you lose a number of recruiting battles, or hit a year where a string of your targets get picked off by D1 or D2 schools before you can sign them, you may be in a bind, because you will have fewer players in your development pipeline due to your approach. Because of early entries, you’ll feel this more at D1 than lower levels, but it can still come in to play, so I personally am still hesitant to take more than one walkon in a season unless I absolutely have to. Generally, I’d much rather take a guy I don’t love and cut him later if I find someone better. But both approaches can work well.

Thank you both for sharing your wisdom.

I love taking walkons, its just so much easier to get great talent.

The downside of taking walkons is you have less space to RS guys and for inels (in D2) as well as having fewer upperclassmen (just because if 1/2 of your players are upperclassmen and you are filling up your spots each year you'll have 6 vs only 5 if you take 2 walkons per year).

Please sitemail me if you want some more general tips about the game as well! I'd love to help extensively.