(01-13-2021 09:26 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  Every Power 5 school and top tier academic institution is heavily trying to increase their enrollments of underrepresented minorities and low income students, which are underrepresented at virtually all of those schools compared to the overall U.S. population. If you talk to any university president today, they will often state this as their #1 goal above all else.

Football happens to be one sport that actually has a disproportionately high number of underrepresented minorities and low income participants (on top of being a revenue generator a the P5 level). As a result, I can tell you that the desire to reduce FBS scholarships is less than zero.

You seem to be suggesting that university presidents see football largely as a means to achieving social engineering ends. The extent to which this strategy might be successful in increasing minority enrollment is minimal at best, and for the P5 schools in particular, trivial.

What I have proposed elsewhere is a reduction to 60 FTE's (full time equivalents) with a cap of 75 on the number of athletes receiving either a full or half scholarship. I also propose doing away with redshirts and greyshirts, and instead giving every athlete five full years of eligibility. Schools could award up to 18 FTEs in any given year.

I would make this change throughout all of D-I, not just the FBS. At the present composition of FBS, I calculate that this would be an overall reduction of 3250 scholarship football players, many of whom would accept scholarships at what are now FCS schools.

If you are president of a P5 school, how much does a reduction of 10-15 minority football players impact your goal of increasing minority enrollment? And if you are concerned about that, why not simply increase the number of non-athletic scholarships you award to minority students or the number of minority athletes you recruit in other sports?

I suggest that presidents' motivation is less about increasing minority enrollment and more about milking donors with big egos for donations spurred by satisfying their desire for bragging rights over their peers from rival schools.

In the end, this all comes down to money, as virtually everything does.