Report: NCAA to increase number of scholarships available across sports

Deeper Benches Soon

Power conference commissioners met Tuesday and agreed to increase the number of athletic scholarships schools, per a report by Ross Dellenger. Here’s a breakdown of what that will look like by sport:

As Dellenger’s tweet notes, this change will apparently be in effect by next season, which will change how coaches across the country to change their recruiting approaches immediately.

Baseball scholarships are currently limited to 11.7 per team, so the jump to 34 there is the most significant change here. Softball also gets 13 more scholarships under the new agreement, which should help two Indiana programs that have flirted with sustained postseason success.

Given the nature of football and the injury risk it presents, going up to 105 players seems like common sense. It may be difficult for the recruiting powerhouses to keep that many players happy, but it should benefit programs like Indiana who need depth and practice depth to keep up with the traditional football schools.

Most interesting to me is the jump in basketball scholarships and how Mike Woodson will approach the new landscape.

Woodson has left scholarships open in the past, including this last season and the upcoming one. In three full seasons, he’s never signed a high school player ranked lower than 131st in his class and has recruited zero three-star prospects.

Part of this is logistical. It’s not easy to keep 13 scholarship players happy with their roles on a team, especially when they were highly regarded in high school. This is not a problem that’s unique to Indiana, either.

Of the KenPom top 10 teams last year, no school had more than nine players labeled as role players, which is defined as being used in 16-20% of a team’s possessions. The team with the most in their rotation was Auburn, and they’ve still been hit hard by portal departures.

A handful of teams used eight players in their rotation, but some schools near the top used as few as five (Tennessee). That’s eight scholarship players who are used in fewer than 15% of a team’s possessions.

Indiana actually had a bigger rotation than those schools, and still lost three role players to the portal in Payton Sparks, Kaleb Banks, and C.J. Gunn.

While the Hoosiers have yet to really be hurt by any portal losses in the Woodson era, save for maybe Armaan Franklin, the reality is that a lot of high-major bench players will depart for greener pastures and more playing time.

Players like Trey Galloway and Anthony Leal, who stick around no matter what role they have on the team, are increasingly rare in high-major basketball. Indiana should appreciate them when it has them, but that doesn’t answer the question of how to use scholarships 10-15 going forward.

I’m not sure how long this has been in the works or how much notice staffs may have had that this change would occur, but it will be interesting to track how basketball scholarships are used even beyond Indiana.

The easy thing to do would be to roster some of the walk-ons who were already around for the benefit of the team, independent of any individual accolades. They are honestly deserving of that anyway.

But the NCAA has, historically, not been a benevolent organization, so the commissioners likely enacted this with some competitive advantage in mind.

Programs with name recognition and strong NIL, like Indiana men’s and women’s basketball, should have something of an advantage. It’s easier to sell a spot on the bench when you can, for instance, help pay off your sister’s college debt with NIL money.

Still, there will be logistical problems for every coach that tries to load up their roster with as much elite talent – and all the expectations that come with it – as possible.