A few big questions about the proposed NCAA House settlement

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Last Friday afternoon, the full longform proposed settlement in House was finally filed. You can read the entire document here. It’s 133 pages, and parts of it will probably be incompressible to non-lawyers, but it’s also full of the most concrete details of exactly what this settlement means, how it will be executed, and what many of the proposed new rules are…not just for athlete revenue sharing, but for roster composition, NCAA governance, and more.

There are many excellent summaries of this document out there…my favorite, I think, comes from Kristi Dosh over at the Business of College Sports. I do not believe I have the expertise to write a better summary, so I won’t attempt to do so here.

But after reading the document, some legal commentary, and texting a few ADs/Smart Industry People/Readers, I do have a few big questions about where all of this is going…

What are the practical implications of massive roster size adjustments across multiple sports?

Right now, FBS schools are limited to 85 full football scholarships, although they can carry a total roster of ~120. Many other sports, like baseball and softball, have scholarship limits well below roster limits, meaning many athletes are walk-ons. If the settlement is approved exactly as currently written, that will dramatically change.

Moving forward, schools will be allowed to offer scholarships all the way up to the total roster size. Schools don’t have to do this if they don’t want to, but if they hypothetically wanted to give every baseball player on the roster a full scholarship, they could. Here’s what the new roster limits would be, via BCS:

• Acrobatics and Tumbling: 55

• Baseball: 34

• Basketball (men’s): 15

• Basketball (women’s): 15

• Beach Volleyball (women’s): 19

• Bowling (women’s): 11

• Cross Country (men’s): 17

• Cross Country (women’s): 17

• Equestrian (women’s): 50

• Fencing (men’s): 24

• Fencing (women’s): 24

• Field Hockey (women’s): 27

• Football: 105

• Golf (men’s): 9

• Golf (women’s): 9

• Gymnastics (men’s): 20

• Gymnastics (women’s): 20

• Ice Hockey (men’s): 26

• Ice Hockey (women’s): 26

• Indoor Track and Field (men’s): 45

• Indoor Track and Field (women’s): 45

• Lacrosse (men’s): 48

• Lacrosse (women’s): 38

• Outdoor Track and Field (men’s): 45

• Outdoor Track and Field (women’s): 45

• Rifle (12)

• Rowing (women’s): 68

• Rugby (women’s): 36

• Skiing (men’s): 16

• Skiing (women’s): 16

• Soccer (men’s): 28

• Soccer (women’s): 28

• Softball: 25

• Stunt: 65

• Swimming & Diving (men’s): 30

• Swimming & Diving (women’s): 30

• Tennis (men’s): 10

• Tennis (women’s): 10

• Triathlon (women’s): 14

• Volleyball (men’s): 18

• Volleyball (women’s): 18

• Water Polo (men’s): 24

• Water Polo (women’s): 24

• Wrestling (men’s): 30

• Wrestling (women’s): 30

That’s a HUGE change. For context, right now, the baseball scholarship limit is 11.7. In Softball, it’s 12. In Water Polo, it’s 4.5. For some sports, the number of potential scholarships will more than triple.

What does that mean in practice? Well, potentially a lot of things.

For football, every administrator and industry expert I’ve talked to expects every P4 program to fully fund the maximum allowable number of football scholarships. A roster cap of 105 means that players who might otherwise be player 106-120 at Ohio State or Michigan could potentially become scholarship players at Kent State or Youngstown State, expanding the potential player pool for G5s and FCS programs.

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