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In the Era of NIL and the Transfer Portal, Will Scholarships Limits Become Obsolete?

+1 HS
DiscerningStrawberry's picture
January 13, 2022 at 1:22pm
25 Comments

After seeing NIL take college football by storm, I’ve started to wonder how the influx of all that cash is going to affect the way that the scholarship limit promotes competitive balance in the game. We see players at schools like Miami getting blanket endorsement deals/automatic deals by position, and I imagine that trend will continue to spread to all of the big market/high budget programs.

From a financial perspective, these stipends are analogous to a school-provided scholarship. There may be fewer protections in place for players to retain those stipends, but top recruits will still have leverage and make plenty of money. 

With that backdrop, I wonder if blue blood schools will start aiming to have 100 ‘scholarship quality’ players on the team at all times. As long as its known that, say, XYZ corporation will give a curiously tuition-sized stipend to all Ohio State walk-ons, 3 and even low 4 star recruits that would otherwise go to second tier schools for the scholarship might prefer to have a shot at the big leagues and see if they can move up the depth chart. If it doesn’t happen, they still got their expenses paid for and can hit the transfer portal to try their luck elsewhere.

If that sort of trend starts to emerge, it would likely be to the benefit of schools like OSU, but it would also exacerbate an already growing concern of competitive balance and the rich getting richer in college football. What do you all think?

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