If you include all college athletes in all divisions, the average scholarship is ~$5k per male athlete, with what I’d expect to be the majority of athletes receiving no scholarship. However, the actual numbers vary dramatically by sport and division/school. For example, div I permits a maximum of 4.5 men’s volleyball scholarships per college. One would expect most volleyball team members to have either no scholarship or a partial scholarship. In contrast up to 85 scholarships are available for div I football teams. A well funded div I football team has most of the roster on full scholarships. Of course the rate of high school athletes getting a full or partial scholarship is abysmal for popular sports, lower than the acceptance rate of Stanford or Harvard. If you compare how exceptional a HS student needs to be get an athletic scholarship to how exceptional a HS student needs to be to get a comparable academic scholarship (or acceptance to stellar FA college), many would conclude that the academic route is the easier path.
They do, and they are regulated as to when they can provide and when they can’t. This year they loosened the rules a lot. The ones who really suffer are the non-scholarship football players. They can’t eat with the team, except I think they can on game days. Gatorade rules for games might be different than practice, and I’m not sure drinks are restricted even at practice as that would be medically stupid.
Rules used to be different. Back in the day…I worked at the student dining hall where the football/basketball players had training tables. The ate breakfast with the regular students (and I knew them not only because they were it enormous but because they had no idea and grunted ‘foobul’ as they walked by) but they had lunch and dinner in their own dining room in back of the kitchen. They didn’t eat the same food we did, had steak several times a week and much more food overall than the other students. That all changed when the NCAA said they couldn’t have better dorms or food than other students. Now most schools house the athletes right with the other students. Those would be other students who don’t need to be up at 5 am and think it’s fine to blare music at 11 pm. They eat the same food under the same rules as the poor students who have full ride scholarships.
My daughter is thrilled to be a student athlete, but she’s not living the high life. She eats in the dining hall, she sleeps in the freshman village. Her merit award is larger than her athletic one. All students eat at the one and only dining hall. I think a student on a Gates scholarship probably has more of a paved path than my daughter. She has no extra money for travel or toothpaste or even books.
Football and basketball players are a minority of college athletes. Outside those sports, the great majority of college athletes relieve no athletic scholarships. Both my kids were recruited athletes but neither saw a dime of athletic money.
“The majority of athletic scholarships are not full ride.”
Right, but the thread is about the Ole Miss football team. They are.
85 football scholarships at Ole Miss (maximum) are full ride (if the school hasn’t lost any due to punishments from the NCAA, and I don’t think they have). If that’s all we’re talking about, then we should only be asking if there are 85 full ride academic scholarships at Ole Miss, or 85 financial need scholarships at Ole Miss given to students who might not be at the top of the statistics. The football gpa would also include the 30 players who get no scholarship at all, so if you are going to compare the football gpa to the scholarship students, you’d have to average in 30 random students at the school.
This discussion has gone way past that.
Ole Miss has many non-athletic scholarships and financial need scholarships. For example, very low income students with a 3.0+ GPA are eligible for a tuition + room + board scholarship as described at http://finaid.olemiss.edu/umopp/ . They also give scholarships of varying sizes for having a 24+ ACT, being student body president, being an eagle scout, etc. Overall the amount of money spent on athletic scholarships is a small fraction of the money spent on non-athletic scholarships.
@northwesty wrote
This is a statement by Rich Rodriguez:
After the NCAA investigation in 2010 Michigan proposed self-imposed sanctions which included significantly reduced mandatory practice time which the NCAA accepted. In 2011 Rich Rodriguez was fired from Michigan.
@northwesty wrote
Northwesty I think you should ask Rich Rodriguez that question. This situation is covered by the following NCAA rule:
quote The student-athlete may not be subjected to penalty if he or she elects not to participate in the activity. In addition, neither the institution nor any athletics department staff member may provide recognition or incentives (e.g., awards) to a student-athlete based on his or her attendance or performance in the activity.
[/quote]
The following is from the Ohio State athletic department website:
@northwesty wrote
Bob Bowlsby is discussing exceeding the NCAA 20 hour per week mandatory practice rule. Given his work history his comment appears to suggest that this rule is violated at Stanford and the Big 12 athletic programs. Based on current events I believe he regretted making those remarks:
The Big 12 was shut out of the College Football Playoff.
Condoleezza Rice is one of the members of the College Football Playoff selection committee and a former Provost at Stanford.
Here are some recent comments by Bob Bowlsby (from ESPN):
As far as I know neither Ohio state, Alabama, Stanford, or Northwestern has ignored the 20 hour per week NCAA limit for mandatory practice. In 2009 Michigan violated the NCAA Voluntary Athletically Related Activities rule, and shortly after the NCAA concluded its investigation the head coach at Michigan was fired.
Actually Old Miss’s grad rate is a wee bit higher than Cal’s and Cal has the lowest graduation rate in the PAC12 Conference according to NCAA records!
I counted 24 non-red-shirt freshmen on the Ole Miss roster, so the question really is whether there are more than 24 non-athletic full-ride scholarships/financial aid grants per year at Ole Miss. I don’t know, but it seems likely that there are.
Also agreeing that scholarship athletes usually are not allowed to have jobs to earn extra money like non-athletes, and they often do live on a shoe-string because they do not get extra spending money (I would like to see them get a small monthly stipend). It is ironic that comments on this thread lament the onerous time commitment required of athletes, and while others at the same time describe their opportunity as “paved with gold.”
At S’s u, all athletes are required to log in and out 10 in-person-hours per week at the athlete center study facility. The football players do their time, because S sees them there. So add that to the NCAA practice and game time hour limits. These players don’t really have a life of their own. Having said that, if they didn’t like it, they could all quit. Instead, they continue to clamor for the opportunity so it must be what they want, or at least the positives obviously outweigh the negatives.
You can be a red-shirted athlete and be on scholarship. Red shirt just means you aren’t playing that year and retain your eligibility.
NCAA allows a D-1 football team to have 85 scholarships (and they are full tuition/r&b/books/fees) and they can have 105 total on the roster, so 30 of those non-football scholarships and maybe no scholarships at all. There are rules about what kind of other scholarships those 30 can have because they don’t want a school to award a full need based scholarship that is really just another football scholarship. I think only 25 of the 85 can be to freshmen. In the years when Miami had only 7 or 8 football scholarships allowed, several of the players were on track scholarships, but the A.D. made sure they were fully qualified as track athletes to stay inside the NCAA rules.
The 5 biggest football conferences are now going to give scholarships for 4 years and are going to give stipends to EVERY athlete on scholarship, even if the student isn’t on a full scholarship so those extra funds should really help. It is up to the schools, but those in the PAC 12 are talking $2-5k per year. Some of the players might also qualify for Pell grants so would have some extra spending money.
How they handle nutrition at Ole Miss:
http://www.olemisssports.com/sports/sports-perf/spec-rel/073113aad.html
How about UF?:
http://homemagazinegainesville.com/dont-feed-the-gators/
These student athletes are willing to make these sacrifices, not only for the scholarships, but also for the world class coaching, training, nutritional advising/support and facilities. If you read both articles, especially the second, you can see the huge impact a nutritionist can have on an athlete.
The following link has the before and after pictures. 
How much do students pay for these athletic department budgets (via student athletic fees)?
FGCU, UNF and UWF don’t support Div 1 football teams.
http://collegefootball.ap.org/sharonherald/article/florida-schools-biggest-sports-donors-students
We can compare this to Ole Miss and Mississippi State (both SEC schools). Ole Miss collects by far the least amount in student fees (less than 1/2 million):