Late last week, it was announced that there was a settlement between the NCAA and many of its biggest athletic conferences filed a 100-page agreement settling three antitrust suits which lead to a new era of college sports beginning with the fall of 2025.
Get used to revenue sharing — especially amongst football and men’s basketball players — as well as the rise of scholarship limits.
Many teams in the Division I field hockey and women’s lacrosse universe have been working on and budgeting for a scholarship limit of 12 for an entire team. That has led to stories of players having been offered scholarship money to start out their careers, but seeing their scholarship money reduced over the course of a career, presumably using the savings for multiple reductions to recruit younger players.
This has been exacerbated with the rise of the transfer portal, which has led to wholesale roster changes and reports of hundreds of players sitting in the transfer portal waiting for a call which often doesn’t come.
But starting in 2025, field hockey will be allowed to have as many as 27 full scholarships per team, and women’s lacrosse will be allowed to have as many as 38 scholarships.
For schools choosing to offer scholarships, this is an enormous development.
Of course, there are some caveats to offer to the headlines here. Not all Division I schools will be offering scholarships at this level; any individual school can opt out of the new revenue model if they decline to share revenue. Too, within each team, schools are not required to use all of their scholarships.
Given the spending you’ve been seeing in sports other than football and men’s basketball the last quarter-century or so, it is going to be an interesting era. Just about every NCAA Division I field hockey team plays on a water-based turf surface, each built at a cost of more than a million dollars or more. Many soccer and lacrosse teams play in specially-built intimate stadia with amenities and training facilities akin to professional sports teams.
If there’s one thing I’m interesting in seeing, is the degree to which schools not in Power Five conferences will be allowed to offer more scholarship money to compete. Will we see Division III schools offering scholarships for the first time? Will we see full scholarships in Division II? Will we see the Patriot League and Northeast Conference go to full scholarships?
And, perhaps, will we see the Ivy League — eight very rich and prestigious schools — start offering scholarships for athletes in order to compete with schools in and around them?
The Ivies are a definite wild card — and a bellweather for what other schools will do. I think, the first time a mid-level school on a full-scholarship level wins a national title for the first time (say, New Hampshire in ice hockey or Western Kentucky in women’s basketball), everyone else in the college sports world will react.