ROAD BLOCK?

Scholarship expansion puts mid-majors at a major disadvantage on the road to Omaha

- J.J. COOPER

In late July, college baseball coaches learned that the much-despised 11.7 scholarship limit is going away.

Beginning with the 2025-26 academic year, Division I schools will have roster limits of 34 players, and all 34 players can be given full scholarships.

The demise of the 11.7 scholarship limit is nearly universally popular. For generations, college baseball has been a sport in which 25 or more players see playing time, and almost none of them were on full scholarships. This change will ensure that fewer players have to go into student debt—or rely on their parents—to play college baseball.

That’s great news, as pretty much everyone agrees.

“I think it’s an important issue. I look at all of this through the lens of: 20 years ago, I was a freshman on a $1,500 scholarship,” Charlotte head coach Robert Woodard said. “People have been complaining about 11.7 since I was in middle school.

“Now that it’s expanded . . . It could have gone the other way . . . Now isn’t the time to complain about the challenges in front of us.”

While scholarship expansion is great news, it might be too much of a good thing for many. Woodard may not want to complain, but there are a lot of coaches feeling stressed.

The jump from a limit of 11.7 to 34 available scholarships may be way much too much of a good thing. It’s as if the largest college athletics departments just designed a new rule to ensure that no one else will be able to compete with them. They are pulling up the drawbridge and leaving everyone else outside the moat.

The near tripling of the number of potential scholarships is a decision that was made by the remaining power conferences—the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12 and Southeastern—as part of the settlement for House v. NCAA. But it will apply to all D-I conferences.