Cody McDavis’ life was changed forever with a few strokes of pen.
McDavis grew up in a single-parent household where his mother worked three jobs to provide for the necessities, and without a basketball scholarship to Northern Colorado, there was no hope of paying for college.
“The conventional wisdom was that if you didn't get a scholarship you couldn't go to college,” recalls McDavis, who now works as an attorney at a Los Angeles law firm.
Scholarships aren't going away in college sports, but how many there will be and which sports they will apply to are among the many questions raised by the billion-dollar antitrust settlement and player revenue-sharing plan proposed last week by the NCAA and its top five conferences. The damages, estimated at about $2.8 billion over 10 years, have to come from somewhere.
The cap on scholarships for individual teams is expected to be lifted. That could mean more scholarships from certain schools for money-making sports like football and basketball. It could also provide more funding for programs that have to split scholarships by season, like baseball and softball. But even the deepest-pocketed schools could have to make tough choices about which sports to invest in.
The days of the simple Letter of National Intent, first introduced in 1964, are likely a thing of the past.
“I think athletic scholarships will change. I think the relationship between universities and athletes will change,” said Gregory Kalis, a writer and researcher at York University in Pennsylvania who has written a book about college sports.
Scholarship Analysis
According to the NCAA, Division I and II member schools provide more than $3.6 billion in athletic scholarships annually to more than 180,000 athletes. But not all scholarships are created equal.
For example, a Division I Bowl Subdivision football program can award 85 full scholarships. Championship Subdivision programs can award 63, but these are considered “equal scholarships” and can be split or broken down to give partial scholarships to more players. Division II programs tend to split their 36 scholarships among multiple players.
It's a familiar step for coaches in charge of much smaller rosters. Currently, schools can distribute 11.7 scholarships across the 32 players on their baseball roster. The men's soccer team can offer 9.9 full scholarships and the softball team can offer 12 full scholarships.
What will happen once the terms of the settlement kick in, perhaps by the fall of 2025? Will schools increase their enrollments but commit to increased scholarships? Will they seek out players who may not need the assistance because they have lucrative name, image and likeness contracts?
“We have a limited time to prepare for these changes,” Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman said in an open letter. “All athletic programs, including those in the Big Ten, face very real financial constraints. Our campuses must determine what they can afford to do, who will receive the benefits of these new scholarships and revenue sharing, and to what extent.”
Tim Walton, coach of the Florida softball team that competed in the women's college world championships last weekend, said he has visited campuses where programs have been cut for financial reasons and believes revenue sharing is the right thing to do, but that it could lead to the elimination of Olympic sports.
“That's the reality. We just don't have a model that's sustainable for every athlete, every coach, every university, every program,” he said.
How big is too big?
Administrators from the two leading conferences told Yahoo Sports they plan to add more than 100 schools with scholarships worth between $9 million and $10 million annually. Clemson, which has 21 sports and is smaller than a school like Stanford (38), plans to spend between $5 million and $7 million in additional scholarship money annually if the settlement terms are implemented.
That will significantly change the recruiting landscape. With uncertainty, prospective students and their families will likely need advocates and advisers to ensure schools abide by the agreements, said McDavis, who graduated from the University of Northern Colorado and earned a law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. He worries the new spending could cause problems.
“These parasites will emerge as professionals on the street,” McDavis says, “and suddenly they know best and are looking to extract a handsome fee from you. You'll also see scammers emerge.”
Ninety-six percent of teenagers who play high school sports don't play in college, said Carisa Niehoff, CEO of the National Association of State High School Associations, which is helping state federations to help overwhelmed parents and expects the same to happen once the details of the settlement are solidified.
“We're doing our best to stay on top of what the reality is,” she said. “We're not there yet with this deal.”
McDavis said he understands the work college athletes put in and that they deserve to be compensated, but he also spoke nostalgically about something that's been lost with the move to more professional contracts — the notion of the joy that comes with an amateur achieving success at the next level.
“There's something that we can all recognize as beautiful,” McDavis said. “I think that's what we're destroying.”
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AP Sports Writer Mark Long contributed to this report.
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