Oh boy, people are talking about @NCAA scholarship limits and I am excited because they don’t get talked about often enough and it’s easily my least favorite NCAA policy as a former D1 scholarship athlete. AND it’s just one more reason college athletes need NIL access.

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In the NCAA, there are basically two categories of sports: head-count sports and equivalency sports. Athletes who compete in a head-count sport (football, m/w basketball, w gymnastics, w volleyball, and w tennis) either get a full ride or nothing at all. Simple.

Equivalency (also called non-revenue/Olympic) sports are literally all the other NCAA sports not listed above. These programs get the dollar equivalent of a set number of scholarships, and it’s up to the head coach to distribute that funding among their roster as (s)he sees fit.

For example, a men’s track team (equivalency sport) gets a maximum dollar equivalent of 12.6 scholarships (women’s track gets 18–more on that discrepancy later) to be divided amongst a roster of 30+ athletes. A football team (head-count) gets 85 full rides for a roster of 100ish.

Astute readers might have noticed that there are more women’s head-count sports than men’s head-count sports, and like I stated above, women’s track gets more scholarship $ than men’s track.

Don’t blame women/Title IX for that discrepancy. Because it’s all the NCAA’s fault.

In college sports, Title IX only requires equal scholarship spending. So the reason it looks (key word) like female athletes are getting more $ is because so much is allocated to football. The NCAA, not women/Title IX, is crippling men’s Olympic sports with scholarship limits.

It’s not the fault of football players either, and I will die on this hill. If the NCAA were to lift scholarship limits, then schools could allocate as much scholarship money to male athletes as they wanted, as long as women received the same amount.

Plus, all the funding couldn’t only go to football, because D1 schools have to host 16 sports to stay bowl eligible. Schools would still basically have to fund equivalency sports to earn bowl revenue.

So the NCAA is holding universities and their equivalency sport athletes back with scholarship limits.

It is also worth noting that most Black female athletes in the NCAA (the athletes we don’t talk about enough) play equivalency sports. These women are severely underfunded.

Per NCAA statistics, 3,408 Black female college athletes play head-count sports. 3,541 Black female athletes participate in outdoor track (an equivalency sport) alone. You can check these stats on the NCAA’s (admittedly cool) Demographics Database here: http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/ncaa-demographics-database

So Black lives won’t matter in the NCAA until Black female athletes receive adequate funding. Period. This could be accomplished in part by lifting scholarship caps. But I don’t see that happening any time soon, which is yet another reason athletes need access to their NILs.

The majority of college athletes play equivalency sports. That means the majority of college athletes (including lots of international students) are only partially funded (and full rides often don’t cover the full cost of living). NIL money could close that gap/enhance education.

It’s also worth noting that scholarship limits are just that: limits. It’s a ceiling. Schools aren’t required to fund 12.6 scholarships for men’s track—that’s just the most they can offer. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t understand how this is legal, but I know it’s damaging.

As a former equivalency athlete, I cannot tell you how much scraping for a scholarship messes with your head. Knowing that your partial scholarship can go to a teammate if you slip up compels athletes to overtrain and to view teammates as threats.

Coaches know this, and they make sure you as one of their athletes is well aware of this dynamic. I’ve definitely heard “Katie, if you screw up, Teammate X is getting your scholarship next season.”

My therapist and I talk about it a lot bc it’s hard to stop viewing other people’s success as a threat to my own. Plenty of college athletes are literally (and legally) trained to think that way. Scholarship limits can be psychologically damaging and borderline inhumane.

But capping funding keeps things competitive within teams, which I think is strategic. College athletes are controllable when they’re financially unstable. NCAA scholarship policies make it easy for coaches to get their athletes to fall in line, regardless of the personal cost.

So I say lift the caps completely. If the NCAA wants to regulate people, they should regulate the coaches (cap THEIR salaries and impose recruiting limits to avoid roster inflation). The NCAA is, as usual, regulating the wrong people. And athletes suffer as a result.