Teacher educators are engaged in a perpetual quest to squeeze as much as possible into preparation of new classroom literacy teachers. In response to increasing demands for preparing future teachers for modern classrooms, seven teacher educators tackled the question of what constitutes a manageable body of early literacy content in preservice coursework. Through retrospective analysis, they discovered common constraints among their institutions that influence their decision-making about when, what, and how much content to teach. These constraints include teacher educators' beliefs about teaching literacy methods, time and resource management issues, range of students' needs, and influences of local and national educational contexts. The findings are significant because they offer an initial naming of some of the constraints woven into the complex web of literacy instruction coursework that is offered to preservice teachers, which, in turn, will impact the professional development they receive as inservice teachers.