Ohio State’s penaltiesgets handed down, among them the stripping of some scholarships, football ones I imagine.
How does that work though? Isn’t a scholarship just someone else paying tuition for a specific program for a student? With the amount of money the football program undoubtedly generates, couldn’t the school simply say they’ll pay some aspiring football player all his tuition for coming to Ohio State? What if someone else gets a, for example, chemistry scholarship and decides to also play football? Why does the school need any scholarships at all when they could probably fund the entire football program using the ticket sales from a couple of games?
Where do you think the money for scholarships comes from? It comes from the athletic dept. and they get their money from ticket sales and boosters. The athletic dept. has to pay the university for the scholarship they hand out. That’s why there have been major reductions in scholarship for athletes in minor sports.
When the NCAA takes away scholarships it is attempting to reduce the competitiveness of the program because they will not be able to recruit as many top athletes. The NCAA keeps an eye on the scholarships and the walk-ons. If a chemistry scholarship disappears into the athletic dept., whistles are going to blow. Just like the Athletic Director is protecting the athletic dept., the dean of the chemistry dept. is going to protect his turf.
It’s not a perfect system (by far), but that’s the way it is suppose to work.
But the tuition for even some of the best schools are less than $50000 a year. Given that the football program, including bonuses from bowl games, TV deals, merchandising, etc. number in the millions, I can’t imagine that Ohio State would bat an eye to simply ponying up a few hundred grand for potentially great football players.
But the point is, they are not allowed to do that. Paying a kid’s tuition is offering him a scholarship. The NCAA will monitor that. If they are giving up 5 scholarships for the next three years it means that of the average of 20 scholarship they are normally able to offer, they can only offer 15/year. Those 15 athletes (over three years) will go somewhere else where they are offered a free ride. It’s not a financial penalty to OSU, it’s a competitiveness penalty.
I’m sure someone will point to potential ways that OSU can skirt the rule but remember, they are also on probation. Get caught doing other stuff and the penalties get more severe.
The NCAA has rules on scholarships, and in football it means there can be no more than 85 scholarship athletes signed at any one time. Ohio State will have to make do with 82 for the next three years. It’s more of a burden than it seems up front - many schools like to hold out an offer to a star high school player until the last minute, and if they go elsewhere, they can either offer it to a lesser player or “bank” it for the next year. With three fewer to offer next year, it is unlikely that they’ll be able to do that.
That said, they could go the route that the SEC coaches go, signing too many players and releasing under-performing or injured players from their scholarships. This isn’t done in the Big Ten, but Urban Meyer is from the SEC…
NCAA scholarships are not for four years, but need to be renewed by the coach every year.
A bit of a nitpick: According to the linked article, OSU will have 5 less scholarships a year, not 3. Also, you may be right about the total number being 85. I thought it was 80.
The five scholarships (over three years) were the self-imposed sanctions the University set on itself. The NCAA added four more, for a total of nine, or three per year.
You aren’t allowed to give those sort of benefits to players. If you could, yes many schools would do this.
In the “ancient days” it was the wild west, and schools like Notre Dame were infamous for having 120+ kids on scholarship. More kids than they would ever need or use, but they recruited them to make sure they didn’t go elsewhere. Essentially it was “defensive signing.”
The 85-scholarship limit in Division IA (now FBS) football was designed so that the University of Texas (which has the highest earning Athletic Department and that generates over $100m/year in revenue) wouldn’t be able to pay for more kids to come play for them than Baylor, which probably doesn’t make half of what Texas does in a year.
This would all be meaningless if you were allowed to just pay the tuition through non-scholarship means, but there are strict rules about the sort of financial benefits you can give players on your football team. You are definitely not allowed to just pay the way of whoever you feel like, the only way the school can provide for the schooling of a football player is through a football scholarship.
Or, if someone genuinely qualified and earned an academic scholarship and then chose to play football, I imagine that might be valid as well (but that wouldn’t be part of the football recruitment process–a football coach couldn’t promise such a scholarship but I don’t believe there is any rule against legitimately earning an academic scholarship and then walking on to the football team.)
And yes, Martin Hyde is correct about how schools, especially Texas, were notorious for signing players so that they wouldn’t go to a competing school. Also, in those days the NCAA was more restrictive on allowing transfers. A lot of good athletes found themselves in limbo.
Just out of curiosity, but is something like this practically possible? That is, can a student who was not recruited by a college’s football team walk up and say they’d like to try out?
Yes, they’re called “walk ons” unsurprisingly, and they happen on many teams. Getting a try out may not be easy, but most schools have ways to make it happen.
Absolutely! There are many, many instances of walk-on players earning a starting jobs in college football. Just like there are many, many instances of un-drafted players earning a spot on an NFL roster.
Recruiting is an inexact science. Kids at that age are very unpredictable. They mature differently. An awkward kid at 16 might look like a star at 20. A “sure bet” at 18 may never improve, he’s already peaked. Look at the NFL rosters and see the number of guys that didn’t come out of “elite” football programs. A lot of HOF players came out of minor programs.
All that being said, if a kid walks-on, and earns a spot, the coach may very well decide to offer him a scholarship because he sees him as a sure bet.
I remember when I was in college (Rice) there was a freshman walk-on on the basketball team; he wasn’t a “real” walk-on, in that he was a legitimate high school star who was offered scholarships by a number of other colleges. At the time he made his decision, Rice didn’t have a scholarship to offer him. There was an understanding that he would get one his sophomore year, as he did.
An interesting story from my local college team: Matt Williams was in a promo contest they frequently run during halftime at home games, where if you kick a 30-yard field goal, you win six months of free rent. Williams put it through the uprights, and head coach Mike Leach liked his form, so he set about getting Williams on the team as a field goal and extra point kicker. The NCAA agreed to allow him to become immediately eligible, but he had to forgo his winnings from the contest and sign on as a sophomore (he’d been on the team at Tarleton State for a month, never playing a game).
I should also point out that schools have field goal kickers walk on from the soccer team all the time. Notre Dame’s kicker David Ruffer was discovered after he was hitting field goals in intermural football games.
That depends on your definition of “chemistry scholarship.”
Any tuition / assistance given to a student from the school that has even the slightest bit to do with football is counted as a football scholarship.
On the other hand, if the school can show that the scholarship was given solely based on non-athletic criteria (for example, somebody created a scholarship fund at the school to give out scholarships to “deserving chemistry students”, and the selection criteria did not include athletics at all), then it wouldn’t count as an athletic scholarship.
Three other things the school cannot do:
First, it cannot give a scholarship to a football player and call it, for example, an ice hockey scholarship (so it would count against the ice hockey limit but not the football limit). Each scholarship student has to count in a sport in which he/she actually plays.
Second, since it is an FBS school, it cannot give out just 2/3 of a “full scholarship” and count only only as 2/3 of a scholarship towards the limit (it can in some sports, but not football, men’s and women’s basketball, and some other women’s sports - note that FCS schools can do this in football, although there is both a “head count” limit and a “scholarship total” limit).
Third, since it is in Division 1, it cannot give out a scholarship to someone who, for example, is on both the football and track teams and count it either as “just” a track scholarship or as 1/2 a football and 1/2 a track scholarship. Division 1 has a rule where each multi-sport scholarship athlete is counted against one, and only one, sport; in most cases, the school gets to choose which sport, but if one of the sports is (for men) football, basketball, ice hockey, or (if the student is also on the water polo team) swimming, or (for women) basketball or volleyball, the student has to count in that sport (the sports are listed in “order of precedence”, so a football player on scholarship must have it counted as a football scholarship).
NCAA athletics are divided up by divisions in order to increase competitiveness.
Typically big schools with more prominent programs are in the highest divisions (there are exceptions, some small schools are in high divisions and some big schools may not be.)
Anyway, for ages the top division was Division I, followed by II and III. In the 1970s you had traditional football powers like Harvard and Yale that were no longer relevant in football, and realistically never would be relevant against schools like Texas and Alabama, they were not willing to become “football schools” which is what it would have taken. At the same time, these schools were a lot better than Division II schools of the time.
So they split Division I into two division, Division IA and Division IAA, IA was the highest division and is where schools like Texas, USC etc went. IAA is mostly smaller schools (with some exception), many of whom were good enough in football they would destroy Division II schools but were no longer able to compete in the “new” era of college football. A lot of the schools that moved to IAA were traditional football powers, or at the least had been football powers in the earlier days of college football when small academically-oriented schools could actually be relevant.
Sometime recently they rebranded Division IA “Football Bowl Subdivision” and Division IA “Football Championship Subdivision”, because I guess they wanted to emphasize that D-IAA has a championship format and IA doesn’t (but has bowls), and also because I guess maybe the IAA schools felt slighted by the IA vs IAAA designation.