No “secret” athletic money, Ivy League?

[twoinanddone]

my understanding is this (and is applicable to @politeperson 's question on Stanford), using even numbers, college cost is 100, student family need is 75. If the kid gets a quarter athletic, 25, he can still get 50 in FA

My understanding is that once the athlete takes ANY athletic money, ANY additional financial aid counts against the team total. There are exemptions from ‘counting’ for merit based aid (conditions of gpa/test scores/rank), and federal need based aid (Pell), state merit aid (like Hope or Bright Futures), but there is no exception for financial aid from the school. My daughter had a $0 EFC and received merit aid and an athletic grant but no need based aid from the school (and the NPC showed she would have received need based FA).

Any student-athlete who receives any amount of athletic financial aid is considered a “counter” per NCAA rules. Once a student-athlete is considered a “counter” there are situations in which other types of financial aid may be required to be “counted” as athletic financial aid.
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Once a Division I student-athlete is a “counter” all other financial aid received from their institution is required to “count” as if it is an athletic scholarship, unless the student-athlete qualifies for an exemption based on the level of their GPA, their class rank, or their ACT or SAT test score.

Until a few years ago there were very strict rules on what non-scholarship athletes could take from the team at practice, so ridiculous as to allow a bagel but not bagels with cream cheese because that cream cheese made it a meal. Teams could eat together on game days but not after practice. Coaches couldn’t give them unlimited food (of course they could have school meal plans, but non scholarship kids had to pay for those themselves) Now it is a lot more reasonable and the non-scholarship athletes can have food at practice, game day, on the bus.

The headcount sports have very specific rules about walk ons and aid they can accept. If 85 Stanford football players are on full athletic scholarship, but the next 35 can be on full financial aid, why wouldn’t the coaches just put the wealthy kids on athletic scholarship and those with financial need on full need based aid? The coach would then get 120+ full scholarship players while Cal or other non-meets-full-need schools would only have the 85 players on scholarship. Why even limit the number of scholarship players on any team if the ‘rich’ schools can just put as many as they want on need based aid?