ROAD BLOCK?

In late July, college baseball coaches learned that the much-despised 11.7 scholarship limit is going away.
Beginning with the 2025-26 academic year, Division I schools will have roster limits of 34 players, and all 34 players can be given full scholarships.
The demise of the 11.7 scholarship limit is nearly universally popular. For generations, college baseball has been a sport in which 25 or more players see playing time, and almost none of them were on full scholarships. This change will ensure that fewer players have to go into student debt—or rely on their parents—to play college baseball.
That’s great news, as pretty much everyone agrees.
“I think it’s an important issue. I look at all of this through the lens of: 20 years ago, I was a freshman on a $1,500 scholarship,” Charlotte head coach Robert Woodard said. “People have been complaining about 11.7 since I was in middle school.
“Now that it’s expanded . . . It could have gone the other way . . . Now isn’t the time to complain about the challenges in front of us.”
While scholarship expansion is great news, it might be too much of a good thing for many. Woodard may not want to complain, but there are a lot of coaches feeling stressed.
The jump from a limit of 11.7 to 34 available scholarships may be way much too much of a good thing. It’s as if the largest college athletics departments just designed a new rule to ensure that no one else will be able to compete with them. They are pulling up the drawbridge and leaving everyone else outside the moat.
The near tripling of the number of potential scholarships is a decision that was made by the remaining power conferences—the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12 and Southeastern—as part of the settlement for House v. NCAA. But it will apply to all D-I conferences.
In recent years, college baseball has become a game of haves and have-nots. Schools in power conferences have massive financial advantages, meaning that mid-majors now face an even greater challenge.
At many programs, the only way to be fully funded at 11.7 scholarships is if the baseball coach raises enough money every year to fund some of those scholarships. For most schools, the jump from 11.7 to 34 scholarships would require raising an additional $1 million to $1.2 million per year, every year.
And that’s not all. Because of Title IX regulations, an increase in baseball scholarships requires a commensurate increase in scholarships for an equivalent sport for women. As one coach described it, his ability to increase scholarships through fundraising would be dependent on either the softball coach raising an equivalent amount for softball scholarships, or sharing the fundraising between the two sports.
So fundraising for six scholarship increases could mean three for baseball and three for softball.
“I’m at the point of adapting. That’s the way we think in this program, and we will make it happen. But it can sink some ships,” said one Division I coach who said he was not comfortable speaking on the record.
“The playing field is separating itself,” said another coach who also requested anonymity.
In some ways, that’s already happening. College baseball has long been a sport where a top-notch coach with administrative support could build a mid-major into a power.
The game has never been truly fair, but it’s always been one where the imbalances were never enough to keep a team from having a realistic hope of reaching Omaha. And once or twice a generation, one of those schools could even win it all.
One-bid leagues had a realistic chance to dogpile in Omaha not all that long ago. Coastal Carolina (Big South) did just that in 2016. So did Fresno State (Western Athletic) in 2008. Pepperdine won a title representing the West ...