(01-13-2021 09:26 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(01-13-2021 08:59 AM)ken d Wrote:  

(01-13-2021 04:08 AM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(01-12-2021 10:13 PM)DoubleRSU Wrote:  

(01-12-2021 08:19 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  I think two things will help.

1) Go to the 5-1-2 eight team playoff format.

2) Drop the FBS total scholarship limit to 70 per school---and 20 per year.

The first makes sure every portion of the country has a rooting interest and insures that the forgotten third of the hard core college football viewing audience (the 65 G5 team fan bases) is engaged in the CFP process.

The second forces the talent to be more dispersed and less concentrated hopefully resulting a more interesting race every year.

If you eliminate 15 scholarships per FBS team, that’s almost 2000 players. Care to guess what race most of them are? Good luck trying to cut back on football scholarships. Really benefits nobody.

I get that—but right now the administrations could be sympathetic to that move given the financial pasting they took this year due to Covid. These financial issues due to vastly reduced ticket sales will certainly extend into the Spring and could potentially still be a lingering issue during the fall 2021 football season. Then there is always the effects from the national economic fall out from Covid—-I suspect there will simply not be as many people financially able to buy season tickets coming out of Covid than there were going into Covid.

Cutting scholarships might make a lot of sense at this point—-and we haven’t even discussed the possibility that the Supreme Court decision could increase player compensation (not to mention Congress has shown interest in more player compensation). There are currently an awful lot of potential triggers for this kind of austerity move made in the name of improving “competitive parity”.

As long as there is a college football playoff, there will be a great disparity of talent. The same handful of schools will dominate every year, because the very top players will all want to play for that national championship, and will realize that works better if they coordinate their recruiting with the other top athletes (and they all know who they are).

Cutting scholarships will help fix this, but its most important benefit is cost savings, because every football scholarship cut means two fewer scholarships for the school because it allows a corresponding reduction in scholarships for women's sports under Title IX.

I would also do away with the requirement that all football scholarships be full scholarships. Reduce the number of FTE's even further, and cap the number of players who can have either a full or partial scholarship. If ever there were a time when this kind of change could be politically feasible it is now.

This is where sports fans need to step back and realize that on-the-field competitiveness are a minuscule concern compared to the broader goals of universities.

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. It’s not even in the vicinity of being on the radar and, if anything, virtually every school would rather allocate more scholarships to football and get rid of the “country club” sports. So, you’ll see other sports scholarships getting cut (as has already happened and will likely continue to happen) long before football scholarships (which simultaneously address both societal and financial goals for colleges at least at the P5 level) are ever touched.

I think you are wrong. The powers don't want to reduce scholarships because it hampers their ability to make mistakes and still be at the top. But the faculty hates football and would just as soon see it gone. 10 football players does nothing for diversity, especially since a bunch of them are clustered in special programs. And if you look at the overall rosters and the two deep, I think you would find the bottom 10 to be a higher % white than the overall roster.