Football Coaches Get New Reason to Cut Scholarships with Proposal 2016–79

USA Today’s Dan Wolken has a column with great commentary on an annual ritual. College coaches, most visibly in football but in all other sports as well, ignore the NCAA’s legislative process and are surprised and annoyed by new rules when their compliance office (who often solicited their opinion on the proposals) tell them what will change on August 1. Sometimes those changes are big, like when phone call limits were dropped. Sometimes those changes seem big, like when the NCAA allowed college coaches to retweet prospects. And sometimes the complaints are about real minutiae, that will have little impact on how coaches do their jobs.

To be fair, the changes from the NCAA that the SEC head football coaches were discussing this week fall into one of the first two categories. A new early signing period and earlier official visits are a major shakeup to a recruiting calendar that has so far resisted many of the changes other sports have been experiencing for years. But one element of this yearly rite of passage is that coaches miss the real big change, often to their benefit. For that, let’s take a look at NCAA Proposal 2016–79.

First, some background. FBS football is what the NCAA calls a “head count sport.” Football teams have 85 scholarships to give out each academic year. Once a football player receives any athletic aid whatsoever, even a single dollar, he counts as one of those 85 scholarships for the rest of the year.

In football though there is obviously significant turnover in the middle of an academic year after the fall season ends. In general, football teams are not allowed to replace scholarship players who leave the team midyear and give their scholarship to someone else. If a player transfers at the end of the season, that scholarship is gone for the rest of the year and cannot be given to another player for the spring.

The main exception to this rule had been for players who graduated. If a player graduated either at the end of the season or a previous term and left the team, then he could be replaced by either a new initial counter (so an incoming prospect or walk-on getting a scholarship for the first time) or a previous scholarship player returning from a religious mission. These re-awarded scholarships are especially valuable since coaches have the flexibility of counting the initial counter (limited to 25 each year) in either the current year or the following year.

Proposal 2016–79 introduces a significant new exception:

In head count sports, to specify that an institution may replace a counter whose aid is canceled because the student-athlete rendered himself or herself ineligible for intercollegiate competition during a particular academic term (e.g., fall semester, winter quarter) by providing the financial aid to another student in the ensuing term (e.g., spring semester, spring quarter).

That would provide a competitive advantage because it would allow coaches to enroll more players in January, since both graduating players and athletes who rendered themselves ineligible are both sources of scholarships that can be replaced by incoming students.

With or without more early enrollees, this makes it easier and more attractive to coaches to pull scholarships from players who become ineligible after the fall. And the player doesn’t have to miss any games to be able to replaced under this rule. A freshman who doesn’t pass six hours is ineligible for the first four games of the next season under football’s nine-hour rule, but can regain full eligibility. More importantly though, that freshman is ineligible for competition during the spring. It doesn’t matter that there are no football games during the spring, they still can be replaced under this rule.

All of this creates a set of incentives that do not exist with the existing midyear graduate replacement rule. With that rule, coaches are incentivized to do something we can more or less agree is good: have their players graduate. With this new rule, coaches have a new incentive to do something less universally good: cut a player’s scholarship as soon as he falls ineligible.

That might not sound that bad. The player could not meet a set of baseline academic standards that most people who probably say are pretty reasonable. But this new rule has to be evaluated in the context of football teams bringing students who are not prepared for college on campus and will need significant help to stay eligible. Now the APR will be one of the only downsides to cutting a player loose the first time he falls ineligible vs. working with him to help him academically.

Alabama coach Nick Saban said of the recruiting rules changes that he didn’t think they had been well thought out. That definitely applies to a rule that makes it easier for coaches to have less investment in the academic success of their players.