037: Portal, Purity, and Parity
Thoughts on these three Ps are hovering around college baseball.
The ACC Freshman of the Year broke a 32-year NCAA record with 27 home runs in 2022. One season later, the same player slashed .374/.432 /.725 with 105 RBI to help LSU win its seventh National Championship.
Tommy Tanks, or Tommy White, hit a walk-off two-run home run to eliminate the number one-seed, Wake Forest, from the College World Series last week. After the game, the reaction from media and fans was curious.
Reporters suggested fans can’t get too upset about the transfer portal while the LSU head coach openly encouraged players in the portal to come to LSU. This rubbed people the wrong way.
It’s an oxymoron to suggest fans can’t get too upset. Fans are fanatical. NC State fans should be salty when a player that turned in a historic season for its team is now playing for a college baseball blue blood and winning a championship a season later.
The take that the “portal wiping away the purity of college sports” is something. Purity is the wrong word, but the portal is dramatically changing college athletics.
This year alone, we’ve seen . . .
Football players that entered the portal in January, went to a new school, and by April had re-entered the portal
Oklahoma softball, a team that has won three consecutive National Championships, has had three players in the portal
the same Wake Forest team (that White helped eliminate) already has two of its players in the portal after its historic season
Alabama basketball had a guard enter the portal earlier this week (in June!)
The portal, combined with an extra year of eligibility from the pandemic season, presents a challenge. Add in the Name, Image, and Likeness free-for-all, and it’s a legit quagmire for the entirety of college athletics.
These problems are compounded in college baseball. Major League Baseball reduced the draft from 40 rounds to five rounds in 2020. The 2023 draft features 20 rounds after the new CBA passed in 2022, and it’s now in the middle of the portal season (July 9, 10, 11).
Fewer draft picks. More players with an extra season eligibility. NIL money. The portal. And 11.7 scholarships.
College baseball uses an equivalency model for its scholarships. This means there is a pre-determined number scholarships (11.7) and that scholarship money is distributed or split up across the entire roster.
A head count scholarship model means every player has a “full ride” or full scholarship. The head count sports are football, men’s and women’s basketball, women’s tennis, women’s gymnastics, and women’s volleyball.
What is alarming is these limits have gone unchanged, outside of exceptions for the pandemic, for the last 30 years. North Carolina men’s basketball, a head count sport, has three open scholarships for next season right now. It’s late June.
It’s fair to say the model is outdated.
But how did it get this way?
Title IX was enacted in 1972. The 50-year old federal law states scholarship money must be budgeted proportionally. If there is 40 percent for men’s sports, there must be a 40 percent match for women’s sports.
Football receives 85 scholarships. There is no female sport equivalent to football. This means lots of schools have more women’s sports to adhere to the federal mandate. And that has done wonders to increase participation in women’s sports, which is a great thing. The law itself is likely out-of-date1 too.
One unintended consequence of football, Title IX, and the equivalency model is that there are fewer scholarships for other sports like baseball. At one point baseball offered 13 scholarships, so how did it get to the wacky 11.7?
In January of 1991, the NCAA announced scholarship cuts as a cost-cutting measure. The changes included a 10 percent scholarship cut in all sports, fewer number of games, and 20-hour limit on practice time.
“I don’t see this affecting the quality of play,” said John Mackovic, the athletic director and football coach at Illinois. “I think the difference you will see is parity. I don’t believe it will affect the quality of play.”
Ten percent of 13 is 1.3, and 13 minus 1.3 is 11.7.
The 11.7 limit is blurry. There are loopholes and complexity around lottery scholarships like Louisiana’s TOPS program or Opportunity Vanderbilt.
The scholarship issue was covered Matt Wyatt’s short documentary UNEVEN: College Baseball’s Scholarship Issue.
The documentary, published in 2021, is incredible to watch in hindsight knowing the SEC continues to dominate college baseball. There is a lack of parity and the SEC likes it that way. The league has won five of the last six College World Series after LSU beat Florida earlier this week.
The documentary is before a lot of the NIL rules too, which have changed the competitive dynamics. For example, see South Carolina’s Carolina Rise Diamond Fund, which shares on its website:
Also, baseball is unique in that the NCAA only allows 11.7 scholarships. Those of you who have held off joining Carolina Rise in general because you disagree with players getting paid, this may be something you are more comfortable with. Baseball players use NIL money to cover basic cost of college attendance types of things. They do not use the funds to say buy a Corvette or a Range Rover. They use it (most of the time) for things like rent, food, books, tuition, living expenses, clothing, etc. You know, the basics.
The basics!
This brings us back to “the transfer portal is wiping away the purity of college sports”. At best, that take is a joke. And at worst, it’s irresponsible.
The portal isn’t taking away the purity of college sports. Whatever purity existed was taken away a long time ago.
In the same documentary, you’re listening to administrators that make seven figure salaries talk about first-round draft picks paying off student loans.
SEC baseball coaches make more than some MLB coaches. The SEC is even poaching coaches from the professional ranks.
The purity!
This week schools have decided to pursue changing state laws because it’s easier than trying to rewrite the rules of the NCAA.
College athletics is exhausting to follow lately. Everyone is trying to find more money while executives and administrators continue to get paid a lot of money.
The portal and NIL are incoherent. We dive into grants of rights and new stories about television deals each week.
The NCAA didn’t evolve quick enough for any of these changes. It’s not equipped for the new age of college athletics any longer.
It’s never been pure.
This is a long thread about college athletics and worth a read.
The data used in the chart for this post is from scholarshipstats.com. You can find the code for the table here.