Multi-year scholarships survive ... just barely

The votes are in, and multi-year scholarships for Division I schools survive ... but just barely! Opponents of the optional multi-year scholarships, which now can be awarded to student-athletes instead of the previously required one-year renewable scholarships, needed 62.5 percent of the vote to overturn it. They got 62.12 percent, reports the NCAA.

Those percentages are based on similarly close vote counts. Overturning the measure would have required 207 votes -- five-eighths of the total -- from 330 institutions. But opponents only mustered 205 votes, reports Steve Wieberg in USA Today.

The vote was required of the Division I membership after enough schools complained about the multi-year scholarship reform measure, which was adopted late last year by the NCAA Division I Board of Directors.

This extremely close vote indicates, however, that there's not much consensus on this issue among Division I institutions. So what are the implications? Hard to know at this point, because it depends on how many institutions move to multi-year scholarships, and how soon they do that. But it seems clear that it will be a great recruiting tool for the schools that offer them. And it would seem to be a great deal for student-athletes too, guaranteeing them a scholarship for the length of their eligibility, giving them needed security for all of the contributions they make to a school's athletic program and thus the school itself.

But might there be some downsides, too? For example, it would seem that there will be fewer opportunities for walk-on football players to earn a scholarship at a Division I school. That's simply because the guaranteed multi-year scholarships allow schools much less flexibility ... at least as compared to the renewable one-year scholarships ... in making year-to-year scholarship decisions. To be sure, fewer scholarships will now become available, under the 85-scholarship limit in place for Division I institutions, to walk-on players. What do you think?

Multi-year scholarships ... changing the recruiting world?

Based on what we can see after National Signing Day last week, it’s hard to discern the effect of multi-season scholarships on recruiting. Those multi-year schollies are now allowed after the NCAA enacted a package of reforms, at the behest of NCAA president Mark Emmert, last fall.

To be sure, some schools reported signing new recruits to multi-year scholarships (Auburn, Florida, and all but three Big Ten schools – Indiana, Minnesota, and Purdue) last week. But there’s no word from so many others.

Did the offer of a multi-year scholarship at a particular school win any recruits over the offer of a single-year, renewable scholarship at a competing school? There’s not much, if any, news on that. Possibly this change is so new that is simply isn’t on the radar of many potential recruits and their parents … and therefore it doesn’t play much of a role in their decisions. It should.

Prior to this change, Division I (Football Bowl Subdivision, or FBS) football programs could offer only single-year scholarships that had to be renewed from one year to the next.  Although not tremendously common, a scholarship that is only guaranteed for a year at a time can be pulled at the end of that year and awarded to someone else if a student-athlete isn’t deemed to be performing well enough for the team.  In contrast, a multi-year scholarship is cannot be pulled based on performance on the field – it’s more of a guarantee that the student-athlete will always have a scholarship throughout his football career in college.  

From the point of view of student-athletes, multi-year schollies could help control oversigning – a big and seems-to-be-growing problem among Division I FBS schools. Those schools are limited to 85 full-ride scholarships at any given time. So if a school signs, say, 25 recruits every year, they are oversigning student-athletes. That school obviously expects that quite a few of those recruits will not be on scholarship every year of their eligibility. Some of that happens through regular attrition … players decide they don’t to play football any longer, fail to make necessary academic progress, etc. But single-year, renewable scholarships also give those schools needed flexibility when they need to pull scholarships from some players, maybe only because the school needs that scholarship for an incoming recruit expected to contribute more over the long run.  And because student-athletes cannot transfer to another Division I school without sitting out a year, that’s seen as a bit unfair when coaches can take a job at another school without any such penalty.

Multi-year schollies are concern to schools that don’t have the financial resources to guarantee such a commitment. They’ll be at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to recruiting, widening the gap between the haves and have-nots in the world of college football, they say.

For all of these reasons, enough schools expressed concern that the NCAA is reconsidering its decision to allow multi-year schollies. Members will vote next week, from February 13 through February 17. Stay tuned.

 

NCAA reforms ... the lastest

Where do we begin in noting all that came out of the NCAA’s annual convention, which concluded on Saturday?  NCAA president Mark Emmert is really shaking up things, especially in Division I college football, which might make you wonder how many toes he’s stepped on and thus how long his tenure will be. After all, the NCAA is made up of member organizations whose representatives hire the NCAA president. But Emmert’s original five-year contract was extended for an additional two years by a unanimous vote of the NCAA’s Executive Committee last week. That means he’ll be around until at least October 2017, which would seem to be enough time to push through quite a few needed reforms that he’s backing, with more to come, no doubt. So his extension might be the biggest single item to note in all of the news from last week.  Hmmm … will the NCAA’s big football powers try to deal with this within the organization, or will they think of pulling out of the NCAA and starting their own, separate association?  That’s a topic for another day.

For now, let’s take a look at some other big, recruiting-related, Division I items coming out of last week’s annual NCAA meeting:

·         The $2,000 stipend proposal seems to have strong support among the college presidents and chancellors who make up the Division I Board of Directors, although they sent the proposal to a committee (okay, a “working group”) to work out implementation details and come back with recommendations in April.  After any changes are made to the proposal at that point, the NCAA membership would then again have the opportunity to give it give a thumbs up or thumbs down.

This stipend was approved, for immediate implementation, by the NCAA Board of Directors last fall as a way to provide help full-ride scholarship athletes pay for miscellaneous costs – things like a movie, laundry, transportation, or meals out – beyond the tuition, fees, room, and board for which scholarships pay. Although the stipend wasn’t mandatory, 160 schools objected to the measure by December, which meant that it was suspended and had to go back to the Board last week for another look. Much of the opposition was based on the cost of the stipend to schools, and the limited resources with which many of them have to pay for it. And if they didn’t implement it, they felt – it would seem legitimately – that they would be at a competitive disadvantage when recruiting student-athletes.  Concerns about gender equity issues – since football programs put many more men, compared to women in other sports, on full scholarships at a given school.

It’s interesting to note, though, that the student-athletes who signed national letters of intent in November – and who were promised the stipend at that time, when it was in place – will still receive it. Students who signed after the measure was suspended in December will not.

·         Allowing schools to offer multi-year scholarships – instead of only year-to-year scholarships based on performance –  seems to be a done deal, pending a vote by the entire Division I membership in February. Although concerns about this measure were also voiced by schools in December, not enough of them objected to cause suspension, and the Board stood by it at the NCAA meeting last week.

·         Parents can now be considered agents. This measure would prevent parents from “shopping” their student-athlete children to schools. In other words, parents could no longer ask a school for money (something other than a scholarship) in return for their kids to sign with that school.

·         Proposals to limit the number of scholarships – by five in football – were defeated. It would seem that savings in this area would have provided money to fund the $2,000 stipend at many schools, but that analysis might be too simplistic and naïve, I realize. And, of course, a reduction in scholarships would eliminate opportunities for some student-athletes to play college football in roles other than walk-ons that pay their own way.  Bummer.

  

Comments?  Insights?