How College Baseball Scholarship Expansion Hurts Mid-Majors

Image credit: Tennessee Vols (Photo by Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

In late July, college baseball coaches learned that the much-despised 11.7 scholarship limit is going away. Beginning with the 2025-26 academic year, Division I schools will have roster limits of 34 players, all of whom can be given full scholarships.

The demise of the 11.7 scholarship limit is almost universally popular. For generations, college baseball has been a sport in which 25 or more players saw playing time, and almost none of them were on full scholarships. This change will ensure that fewer players have to go into student debt—or rely on their parents—to play college baseball.

That’s great news, as pretty much everyone agrees.

“I think it’s an important issue,” Charlotte head coach Robert Woodard said. “I look at all of this through the lens of: 20 years ago, I was a freshman on a $1,500 scholarship. People have been complaining about 11.7 since I was in middle school.

“Now that it’s expanded . . . It could have gone the other way . . . Now isn’t the time to complain about the challenges in front of us.”

While scholarship expansion is great news, it might be too much of a good thing for many. Woodard may not want to complain, but there are a lot of coaches feeling stressed.

The jump from a limit of 11.7 to 34 available scholarships may be way much too much of a good thing. It’s as if the largest college athletics departments designed a new rule to ensure that no one else will be able to compete with them. They are pulling up the drawbridge and leaving everyone else outside the moat.

The near tripling of the number of potential scholarships is a decision that was made by the remaining power conferences—the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12 and Southeastern—as part of the settlement for House v. NCAA. But it will apply to all D-I conferences.

In recent years, college baseball has become a game of haves and have-nots. Schools in power conferences have massive financial advantages, meaning that mid-majors now face an even greater challenge.

At many programs, the only way to be fully funded at 11.7 scholarships is if the baseball coach raises enough money every year to fund some of those scholarships. For most schools, the jump from 11.7 to 34 scholarships would require raising an additional $1 million to $1.2 million per year, every year.

And that’s not all. Because of Title IX regulations, an increase in baseball scholarships requires a commensurate increase in scholarships for an equivalent sport for women. As one coach described it, his ability to increase scholarships through fundraising would be dependent on either the softball coach raising an equivalent amount for softball scholarships, or sharing the fundraising between the two sports.

So fundraising for six scholarship increases could mean three for baseball and three for softball.

“I’m at the point of adapting,” said one Division I coach who said he was not comfortable speaking on the record. “That’s the way we think in this program, and we will make it happen. But it can sink some ships.”

Said another coach who also requested anonymity: “The playing field is separating itself.”

In some ways, that’s already happening. College baseball has long been a sport where a top-notch coach with administrative support could build a mid-major into a power. The game has never been truly fair, but it’s always been one in which the imbalances were never enough to keep a team from having a realistic hope of reaching Omaha. And once or twice a generation, one of those schools could even win it all.

One-bid leagues had a realistic chance to dogpile in Omaha not all that long ago. Coastal Carolina (Big South) did just that in 2016. So did Fresno State (Western Athletic) in 2008. Pepperdine won a title representing the West Coast Conference in 1992.

Stony Brook (American East), Kent State (Mid-American) and the Big West trio of UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara and Cal State Fullerton all made it to Omaha between 2012 to 2017.

It’s never been an even playing field, but for a long time, it was enough to give teams all around the country a chance to dream. Most warm-weather schools’ fans could believe that with the right coach, the right support and a little bit of luck, they could have a season to remember. That was also an alluring sales pitch for athletic directors and school presidents.

That sales pitch is now as obsolete as a corded phone.

While Oral Roberts reached Omaha in 2023, it is the only non-Power Five school to make it to the final eight in the past six College World Series. In that time, 21 of the 48 teams in Omaha have come from the SEC.

From 2001 to 2017, only once—in 2011—was there a CWS in which all eight participants were Power Five schools. In most years, there were multiple teams from smaller conferences. This year, all eight teams came from either the ACC or SEC.

Since Coastal Carolina won it all in 2016, Oregon State is the only non-SEC school to win a title. Since 2017, 11 of the 14 teams in the championship series have come from the SEC. One of the other three was Oklahoma, which is joining the SEC.

The increasing prevalence of transfers in addition to name, image and likeness (NIL) opportunities at college baseball powers has already created these disparities. But none of that compares with what will happen when some schools have 30 or more full scholarships while many others field just 10.

It used to be that Omaha was an optimistic but hopeful goal for a team. Now, the concern is that even super regionals will become unrealistic. As multiple coaches pointed out, a team with 11 or 12 total scholarships will have a hard time ever having enough pitching to survive in a regional against a team with 15 pitchers on full scholarship.

For the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten, these changes will open up a lot of opportunities. The consolidation of top college talent onto fewer rosters is likely to continue.

For a lot of other schools, there are concerns. Some see it as an intentional effort to ensure they cannot compete with the biggest schools. Others just see themselves as unintentional collateral damage.

But all agree: College baseball has changed more in the past five years than it had in the previous four decades. And many are concerned about where the sport will be five years in the future.