Committee proposes NCAA tournament changes

Interesting scholarship proposals. One raises the number to 14. The other raises the number to 27 for tuition and fees only. If the latter is adopted the big state schools intsantly lose their recruiting edge, especially those with state funded tuition assistance programs in place, such as Florida, Georgia, Louisiana. Program #2 would be a pay cut for many of the kids in those states. I am betting the system stays as is with a couple of scholly's added.

quote:

The baseball committee looked at some preliminary models for increasing scholarships in baseball. One proposes raising the limit of 11.7 scholarships to about 14, still to be divvied between several players. The other is more radical, proposing 27 individual scholarships that cover tuition and fees only--leaving the responsibility of paying for housing, food and books on the students. That number was selected because an average of 26.8 players on Division I teams received some sort of scholarship aid in 2005.

Its an interesting proposal.

I once read that when baseball scholarships were reduced to 11.7, it enhanced Stanford's ability to compete at a top-20 level.

The argument went something like this: By limiting the scholarships downward, other public Pac-10 (and other public power conference) teams couldn't stockpile players as before. They now got spread out to a wider range of schools. Schools like Stanford benefitted because their pool of possible players was so small to begin with, having other schools NOT being able to have 25 scholarship players leveled the playing field so to speak...that is brought them down to a similar number of top players.

I really don't know if there's any truth to this or not...Stanford and Duke and others seem to do just fine in basketball where the scholarship numbers are big per squad size however you really only need 6 or 7 top-talent basketball players to compete at a high level...but if there is merit to this argument (above), it may not bode as well for private, high-academic schools as one might think.

jbb

Could be that 27 tuition scholarships would float most everyones boat, so to speak, yet perhaps less so at the Rice's and Stanfords of the landscape. Successful programs learn to adjust though.

Now that I think about it, if the state schools could mix the state tuition money with their own money they could be improved from a scholarship point of view. Increasing total dollars is better for the students overall.

One issue with the proposals is how will schools fund the increase in scholarship money. Since baseball is not revenue producing are all schools willing to invest the money? Where will the money come from,,,maybe the baseball budget reducing other investment in the program...just wondering

they can find money if they need to, after all, does it really cost them 2 or 3 times the instate tuition to educate an out of state "scholarship student"?? they charge it because people will pay it

the majority, if not all of what they have to make up could be done with some creative book-keeping.

in Ohio colleges can be (ARE) "for profit" institutions, tho their books are closed and only they know what is done with their wheelbarrows of money