...simmed 7 seasons and noticing a lot of teams in smaller conferences: SWAC, Southland, A-Sun etc... have a lot of walk-ons. Mississippi Valley State has 12 walk-ons on their roster.

I noted this in last year's version:
https://www.draftdaysports.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=350&t=35566
When I checked across my association there were quite a number of schools that had this problem and it very negatively impacted immersion for me. I hope it gets addressed.

will investigate - players should be declaring earlier this version which I thought was allowing the small schools to end up with better results but maybe something is still off on that.

Just to clarify my comment. The underlying issue that I was observing appeared to be a long-term AI budgeting issue. It was not that players were declaring early. The schools were spending way too much money on coaches and had no money left for recruiting...leading to teams that were composed of almost all walk-ons. Kind of a death spiral really, as the teams would continue to perform badly and the budgets seemed to get further and further in the red. In my last 10-year old association there were between 20-25 teams that were suffering this problem.

Right, what I meant was that in the past part of the issue at least was that players took longer to give a verbal to a team so the middle ones mostly waited for the top guys and then the bottom guys waited for the middle ones etc and at the end the worst teams were not getting enough of a chance for players to consider them. I will make a note to investigate how much of a problem the coaches salaries are.