With the House Settlement expected to go into affect this year, most of the focus has been on how it will change the landscape in college sports. However, Nebraska baseball fans, and really fans all over the map are going to want to pay attention, because a big change could be coming to college baseball this year when talking about how many scholarships college baseball team gets.
Currently, the answer to how many scholarships does a college baseball team get, is different than really any of the other “major” sports. Football and basketball have a few walk-ons here and there, but the vast majority of their rosters are made of scholarship players. Its much less in college baseball.
How many scholarships does a college baseball team get?
For one more year, the limit to the number of scholarships on a college baseball team is the rather odd 11.7 number. Usually, most college baseball teams will divvy out these scholarships as piecemeal as they can. In other words, generally it’s not 11 players get a scholarship and one player getting a partial schollie. Instead, several players will all get a portion of a scholarship but have to pay their own way for the rest.
The NIL era has made this a bit easier, either picking up the slack on partil scholarships or freeing schools up to give schollies out to those who need it more while the better players are paying their way through school from outside money.
With the House settlement, teams will see the limit go all the way up to the full roster, 34 scholarships. The caveat here is that not every school will be able to afford to do that, so there are some conferences that are putting different scholarship limits in place.