Scholarship Limit Loophole
Question: could you bring a two-sport player onto the football team and apply his scholarship to the other sport he plays? Then for the football team he could be considered a walk-on since he already has a scholarship?
This could be further exploited by just arbitrarily putting football players in other sports they can't play. For a variety of reasons, a school like Michigan probably wouldn't go that far, but I could see less self-righteous schools doing it. A Kansas State swimming team consisting of 300 lb guys with dreadlocks springs to mind.
Anyway, my guess is I'm missing some safeguard in the NCAA rulebook. Thoughts?
I'm fairly certain if a scholarship athlete plays any sport at a school, his scholarship is attributed to that sport. More than one sport, he uses up more than one scholarship. That's because your scholarships are marked out by sport, not university. So no, I don't believe you can do that.
I'm pretty sure that one athlete can't take up two scholarships. In the second sport, he/she is considered a walk-on, so it would save the coach a scholarship. But if the second sport is football, the scholarship gets counted against the football total if the athlete wants to compete as an underclassman.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's really that practical unless the university had no problem in completely sabotaging another sport. If you look at a sport like wrestling, I believe Division 1 teams are only allowed 9.9 full scholarships (that's probably not the exact number, but I think it's close). A lot of these guys work their tails off just for a quarter or half of a scholarship since the scholarship money is few and far between in comparison to 85 full scholarships for football. I'd assume that, in theory, a school could get away with it, but it'd be a slap in the face for the other athletes and their teams.
as far as i know, the scholarship would be credited to higher revenue sport.
The NCAA has a provision that if an athlete signs to play any sport other than football, he can't play football until his junior year. This rule exists to prevent the situation you describe. Football players, OTOH, are allowed to participate in other sports from the start. There actually was some discussion of this back when Kelvin Grady signed a basketball LOI. A lot of people were surprised that he'd give up his right to play football as an underclassmen, when he could have signed a football LOI and played both sports as a freshman.
Interesting. So where does that leave Joe Reynolds who is coming to Michigan to run track, but has been invited to be a preferred walk-on on the football team? http://www.freep.com/article/20090524/SPORTS06/905240503
My guess is that would likely receive a scholarship from the football team (and forsake his track one) if they wanted him to play this year, or "red shirt" him this year (though I suspect that is not the exact action, but something similar) and sign him for next year. I know RR has some scholarships available this year, so that is the obvious possibility. No idea if that is how it works, though.
Joe Reynolds will be at the University on a track scholarship. It is not a loophole as that person must participate in the sport that they got the scholarship in. Coaches are not going to risk their jobs to recruit for another sport. If Reynolds decided to leave the track program he would no longer be on scholarship.
I read something about this some time ago. My fuzzy recollection is that if an athlete from another sport plays football, they still count against the football scholarship limit (no matter which sport is technically paying their way.) Thus, the fact that we have open scholarship spots allows for the current possibilities of track/B-Ball athletes playing football.
On one hand, as Maize and Blue said, coaches may not risk their jobs to recruit for another sport, but (at a different school) they also may not be willing to risk their jobs if the AD tells them that a certain number of their scholarship spots are going to be used by athletes who are primarily football players. There would certainly be schools where this would happen
I wish I could find the site where I read about this. I these rules came to be when the football scholarship reductions happened.
Go here:
http://www.ncaapublications.com/Uploads/PDF/Division_1_Manual_2008-09e9…
See page 192
Thanks, that clears things up. For those that hate Adobe Acrobat Reader, here's the lowdown:
1. football
2. basketball
3. men's ice hockey
4. women's volleyball
5. men's water polo and/or men's swimming
6. everything else
There is some tricky fine print that I won't go into, but based on the rankings above, the highest sport an athlete plays is where the scholarship is applied. That's good, because the system would be abused otherwise.
However, it's kinda unfair for those that aren't football players first and foremost but want to play.
that we could sign Denard to a track scholarship and let him walk on for football. I mean, he's probably gonna run track anyway. Kind of like the Reynolds situation.
If he plays football this fall, he automatically becomes counted against the football limit. The only way to not count him against the football limit is to not let him play football until he's a junior. So I don't think that's a good idea.