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The House v. NCAA settlement eliminated scholarship caps. What will replace them?
As the landscape of college sports continues to move and shake, one big change is flying under the radar. While discussions of billions in back pay and future revenue sharing are currently dominating the conversation around collegiate athletics, the House v. NCAA settlement quietly included an elimination of the scholarship cap. The NCAA is expected to move to a roster cap structure to maintain some level of parity, though they have not officially confirmed the change.
The current scholarship cap structure allows teams that are “non-headcount” to have a select amount of scholarships to distribute among team members. This means that every team member may not receive a free full ride, but a partial scholarship — for instance, baseball teams split up 11.7 full scholarships each year among their roster.
With a roster limit, the amount of available scholarships would expand, but the potential to walk onto a team would be very limited at top programs. These programs will now have more scholarships to offer to top high school recruits. For instance, a roster cap could hypothetically place a baseball team at 30 players and there would be up to 30 available scholarships, but any extra spots on the roster that previously went to walk-ons or less-recruited players would be eliminated. More student athletes would be provided with a full ride, but fewer would have the chance to actually play a sport at the highest level, and the separation between top-tier and mid-tier Division I programs will continue to grow.
It’s all about making football more equitable — potentially at the cost of other sports. The roster cap is meant to create more equity among football programs. Some schools that fundraised massive NIL collective funds were able to provide the amount of money equivalent to a scholarship to walk-ons and non-scholarships players, effectively surpassing the scholarship cap and giving their team a recruiting advantage.
In Power Five (now Four) schools, collectives contribute an average of over $9 million to athletic programs — a number significantly higher than the cost of scholarships for football and men’s basketball programs. The latter receives an average of 24% of NIL collective funds, adding up to an average of over $2 million in NIL money going toward basketball teams with a 13-scholarship limit. While NIL will still play a major role in recruiting, the number of student athletes benefiting from those funds in lieu of a scholarship will be capped.
As football and basketball become more equitable (only in theory — NIL collectives will still set the top schools apart for the best recruits), other sports will see more and more division. There likely won’t be a requirement in place to provide a full scholarship to every member of every roster — if there were, we would see hundreds of teams cut entirely across the country — but there now exists an opportunity to offer up to, say, 30 scholarships.
This means that smaller programs will need to take a risk on developing players while top recruits flock to the best programs. Baseball players who wanted a full ride in the past would often end up at a smaller or lesser-known school if they didn’t quite meet the bar to earn one of the 11.7 scholarships. Those players will now all be heading to the SEC and Big Ten, whose schools will have plenty of funding to expand their scholarships and NIL pools.
This is an interesting provision in the settlement as the NCAA moves forward with broadcast revenue sharing. The effective elimination of walk-ons at the highest level of Division I would limit opportunities for students who were not heavily recruited out of high school, but the expansion of scholarships to the entire roster would give more opportunities for “student-athletes” who were unable to afford partial tuition at these schools within the former structure.
However there is a big question as to what that roster cap will actually look like. As of now, football teams are limited to 85 scholarships, but their rosters often include over 100 players. If the NCAA brought the roster cap down to 85, football teams could be short on several positions that are less heavily recruited out of high school, and would need to change their approach to roster building.
Schools that use their football teams as their meal ticket will continue to thrive and further separate themselves from smaller conferences under this change, easily able to afford the extra scholarships. It’s sink or swim, and without the moneymaker, it’s hard not to picture athletic programs drowning throughout the nation.
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