The FCS Notebook is a blog-style article series featuring an assortment of news, rumblings, quick hitters, and commentary on various topics.
A new FCS Notebook will be published multiple times a week.
How Will The House Settlement Impact FCS Scholarship Limits?
A big talking point about the House Settlement is the roster limits. Specifically for football, teams that opt into the settlement will no longer face scholarship limits, but roster limits.
Athletic departments, FBS or FCS, that opt into the settlement will have a football roster limit of 105 players. With no scholarship limits, an FBS team could offer 105 scholarships if a conference doesn’t set a cap. Or, theoretically, an FBS school could have 95 players on scholarship and 10 walk-ons if they couldn’t fund all 105.
From an FCS angle, we looked at this FBS roster cap positively and negatively.
On one hand, more FBS scholarships is not a good thing for the FCS because that’s, of course, fewer scholarship players available for the FCS. On the other hand, fewer overall players on FBS rosters (the average FBS roster size is currently in the 120s) means more talent trickling down as FBS teams can’t hoard talent with bulky rosters.
But there’s another big question out there: What about FCS scholarship limits? In talking with a couple of FCS commissioners, there is some clarity there, but also more to figure out.
In short, if an FCS-level school opts into the settlement, it could go above 63 scholarships. But each FCS conference can set its own scholarship cap.
Most FCS schools will opt into the House settlement…
Right now, before the House settlement, the FCS scholarship limit is 63 scholarships that can be spread out over 85 players, AKA partial scholarships. The FBS offers 85 full-ride scholarships.
Opting into the house settlement is optional, but it’s expected that all FBS schools will opt in and most FCS schools will too. Schools must determine and notify the NCAA by March 1 of each year if they plan to opt in for the next school year.
To overly simplify it, opting into the settlement means you’ll be allowed to do some things that you’re currently not allowed to do: things like revenue-share with players, move NIL deals in-house within the athletic department, offer more scholarships, offer higher Alston payment stipends, etc.
Revenue-sharing is optional. There is no minimum, and the maximum revenue-sharing in the first year (summer 2025) is $20.5 million. A school could opt into the settlement and revenue share $100,000, $10,000, or $0. But opting in gives an athletic department more flexibility.
An FCS school could go above 63 scholarships, but an FCS conference could also cap football scholarships…
If an FCS school opts into the settlement, it could go above the current FCS scholarship limit of 63. How many FCS-level schools could afford to go above 63 scholarships may not be a lot, but in the most extreme hypothetical, an FCS program could offer 105 scholarships if its conference doesn’t implement any scholarship cap limitations. Going above 63 scholarships would not make a program ineligible for the FCS playoffs, as long as they opt into the House settlement.
It is highly unlikely an FCS school could afford to fund 105 scholarships unless they received a massive donation to do so. As these commissioners have talked with FCS athletic directors, all ADs, facing tight budgets, say they don’t have the money to move around right now to even offer 10 more football scholarships. Even the SEC, among the richest conferences in college athletics, said they will remain at 85 scholarships for the 2025 season.
That’s where the conference caps come in.
Each individual conference can cap its number of football scholarships.
FCS conferences have been advised, for legal reasons, not to work together on scholarship limits, AKA trying to set an FCS-wide scholarship limit.
Instead, each conference will have to discuss two questions: 1) Should we set a conference-wide cap on football scholarships? 63? 65? 70? 75? 85? And 2) Is it even worth it to set a cap?
The second question is twofold. The general thought among commissioners and ADs is that a majority of FCS schools won’t be able to afford much more than 63 scholarships anyway. Secondly, even if a conference capped the scholarships at 63 but a more-resourced school wanted to get to 70 scholarship-level players, there are workarounds.
Wouldn’t it make sense for FCS conferences to set a football scholarship cap?…
What happens if the few higher-FCS-football-resourced schools have 80 scholarship players while everyone else remains around 63? The competitive balance is shifted even more. Even if an athletic department doesn’t have that money right now, a school like North Dakota State or Montana State could theoretically go to its boosters to try and raise money to support 75 scholarships, or 80 scholarships, or 85.
So I asked the question, “Wouldn’t it make sense for FCS conferences to want to set a football scholarship limit so you don’t have a team or two with 20 more scholarships than everyone else??
And while, on the surface, the answer seems like it should be yes to keep some competitive balance, there would be workarounds regardless of whether a conference set a scholarship cap.
For example, if a highly-resourced FCS football program couldn’t go above 63 scholarships because the conference set that cap, they could treat 15 more “walk-on” players as scholarship-level players by offering an in-house NIL deal or offering a higher Alston payment, basically paying their tuition through other methods.
So theoretically, the FCS rich can get richer if they opt into the House settlement. Again, how many can afford to offer more scholarships? Probably not many. But even funding 10 more scholarships, or 10 more scholarship level players through other means of paying their tuition, provides a competitive advantage for programs that fund FCS football at a high level.
Even if an FCS team remained capped at 63 scholarships, more overall players could still get scholarship money…
As written above, right now, pre-House settlement, the FCS can offer partial scholarships — 63 scholarships spread over 85 players compared to the current 85 full-ride scholarships at the FBS level.
According to a commissioner, if an FCS school opts into the House settlement but its conference caps scholarships at 63, those scholarships could be spread over 105 players instead of the current 85. Or if an FCS conference sets the cap at 70 football scholarships, those 70 scholarships can be spread out over 105 players.
Opting into the House settlement would allow FCS schools to spread their scholarship money out over more players.
FCS vs. FBS games counting toward bowl eligibility needs to be ironed out…
One thing that needs to be ironed out is FBS vs. FCS games counting toward bowl eligibility.
Current FBS rules require an FCS opponent to average 80 percent of the maximum number of football scholarships during a rolling two-year period for that game to count for bowl selection. That’s around 50 scholarships right now.
As FBS and FCS teams will be able to fund up to 105 scholarships if they opt into the House settlement, the 80 percent threshold will need to be reevaluated. Because very few, if any, FCS teams will be funding 80 percent of the allowable 105 scholarships.
