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After sweeping the SEC Championships last week in their inaugural season, the University of Texas will get another recruiting boost: the ability to offer full rides to all 52 members of their swimming & diving teams within the next three years. Archive photo via Texas Athletics
Texas A&M junior Hayden Miller swam the 500 on day one of the TAMU Last Chance meet, and went a season best time to potentially earn her NCAA Invite
Smith fired off a time of 49.51 to break the NCAA, U.S. Open and American Record of 49.53 set by Cal’s Liam Bell at the 2024 NCAA Championships.
SECs was fantastically quick last week, and it’s impossible to have eyes on everyone – here’s some swims that may have slipped through the cracks
This week on the SwimSwam Breakdown, we discuss the first week of conference championships.
Auburn senior Mason Mathias is currently studying mechanical engineering and owns a 4.00 cumulative grade point average.
February 28th, 2025
The University of Texas has announced that it will add almost 200 new athletics scholarships after the House settlement is ratified, including offering the maximum 52 full scholarships in swimming & diving. That increase in scholarships is expected to take place over the next three years and will come at an estimated cost of $9.2 million.
That is in addition to paying out the $20.5 million in revenue sharing.
One of the richest athletics departments in the country, for the 2023-2024 fiscal year, Texas pulled in $239 million in revenue and spent $225 million, generating a $14 million surplus.
Besides fundraising, Texas has other strategies to come up with the new money, according to athletics director Chris Del Conte. That includes $13 million in new revenue and $6 million in budget reductions. That includes a $13 increase in the price of football single game tickets, or $80 over the course of the season, for the 100,000+ seat Daryl K Royal Stadium.
Del Conte is also advocating for the SEC to add a ninth conference football game to the schedule, which could add millions more in revenue. He also said that the Longhorns are adding high profile non-conference games like Michigan, Ohio State, and Notre Dame, which will increase revenue as well and come with less downside risk given the expanding field for the college football playoff.
While football will receiving the majority of the House allocation, Texas does not currently plan to increase the scholarship cap from the current 85 offered.
Under the House settlement, most NCAA Division I sports will, for the first time, have unified roster limits, at least for schools that opt in. Scholarship limits, though, will be removed.
That means that the women’s rowing team, for example, will grow to a massive 68 allocated scholarships.
While the House settlement only tamps down swimming & diving roster spots to 30 each for men’s and women’s teams, the SEC is expected to further limit men’s swimming & diving rosters to 22. While the conference had not made a statement on the reasoning behind that different limits, coaches are saying that the primary driver is that SEC schools tend to have smaller athletics programs than their cohorts in the ACC or Big Ten, and therefore less flexibility in Title IX compliance to do things like add 48 full scholarships to the women’s rowing team (though Texas’ department is bigger than most).
Other notable increases includes a near-tripling of the number of scholarships offered for the beach volleyball program, which was only added as a varsity sport at Texas in 2022 and now has more scholarships than the indoor volleyball team, and gigantic increases in scholarship allocations for track & field programs as well.
While these increases will eliminate the idea of “walk-ons,” which has been much lamented, it will mean that essentially all varsity athletes at Texas will attend the school for free.
Not every university will have the resources for this kind of move, most of the mega-universities are expected to add scholarships through this process, not reduce them. Ohio State previously announced that it would add 91 scholarships across its varsity programs.
The moves are a double-edged sword: they will increase the gaps between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots,’ but they will also increase the share of revenue that is allocated directly back to students. These moves will also likely create a new arms race, with Texas’ latest announcement being a clear declaration that they intend to spend whatever money they can spend in order to be the top athletics program in the country.
Does this make all coaching positions at Texas the most high profile jobs in the country? No excuse for funding, right? Women’s rowing with 60 FULL scholarships!!! National Championships or bust????
Braden Keith is the Editor-in-Chief and a co-founder/co-owner of SwimSwam.com. He first got his feet wet by building The Swimmers’ Circle beginning in January 2010, and now comes to SwimSwam to use that experience and help build a new leader in the sport of swimming. Aside from his life on the InterWet, …
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