(04-16-2018 06:49 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote: Not an expert on NAIA but wouldn't this decision push the top NAIA schools into the arms of NCAA D2?
It's a concern. But the stats suggest that there aren't many NAIA DI schools that are actually funding their scholarships to the limit, and I haven't heard of many complaints about lowering them. The greater and more immediate concern was that if this didn't happen, a couple of NAIA DI conferences would step down to NAIA DII, and that would force some drastic changes for the 32 team DI tournament because there would be only about 80 teams left.
Personally I would have liked to see the scholarship limits remain high...11, or at least 10. Mostly for flexibility and marketing purposes. But the NAIA might have their own research that says the NAIA would be more attractive to NCAA D2 schools thinking of moving if there was one NAIA division in basketball and lower scholarship limits.
From what I heard from coaches, they were less concerned about the official scholarship limits than they were about the exemptions. One kind of exemption is the academic exemptions, which for example allows a player who gets a 3.5 GPA or higher to not have his scholarship - athletic, academic or otherwise - to count against the official total. That's a great thing, IMHO. But there are also exemptions for transfers not yet on a team raising their grades to become eligible, and for JV players, and for redshirt players. These other exemptions theoretically allow for some schools to really go nuts with building their pipeline of not-yet-playing athletes and not have it count against them.
We have 3 years before the merger takes place. I am hoping they will use this time to tweak these rules, perhaps restrict/eliminate some of the exemptions and in turn raise the official maximum from eight.