Well, you have a really, really good point with the scholarship thing. I still submit that he had the best of all worlds with the MSU offer, and he didn't take it. I concede that you know far and away more than I about the state of things, but I am simply puzzled by the idea of him jumping ship now. Doesn't make sense given what he's passed on in the recent past.
If I’m LSU I don’t fire manieri after this year. But if they’re looking for a coach I call Mike Bianco first and make him say “hell no” before moving on. Imagine that’s the only job he’d consider outside of Oxford.
I think a lot of schools couldn’t “afford” it (their claim, not mine), so the unlevel playing field would only get exaggerated even more. I don’t believe any of the fantasy numbers schools throw around these days but that’s the counter argument.
I've never understood the "we can't afford more baseball schollies" argument. I'm not expert at academic institution accounting, but it seems like a simple enough cost to offset in a host of ways. If you add 18 schollies to a baseball team why not add 18 slots to the freshman classes you bring in every year. Then you still get the same amount of revenue as you budgeted for and the only additional cost burden is meals and lodging, which could be further offset by adding another handful or two to the freshman classes. It's hard for me to believe that almost every school that plays baseball couldn't find a way to add 25 - 30 more students to offset this cost. It's not like the university loses money by adding additional kids to class who get to go for free. They just lose the opportunity at revenue when kids going for free take spots from kids who will pay.
Apparently the majority of scholarships for baseball aren’t currently fully funded as things stand now. Triple the number of slots and that problem gets worse. Or so I have been told.
I fully understand that. Only 11.7 scholarships per NCAA baseball team. It's always been a ridiculous joke. But what does it really cost the university to fully fund those 18+ schollies? Free tuition isn't really an expense. If you add 18 students to the freshman class you aren't going to be forced to hire more faculty and offer more courses. So if the cost of more faculty/courses doesn't go up by adding 18 students to each freshman class then the cost to the university from a tuition standpoint is $0. The only other costs at that point are books (which I'm sure is a lot different in the digital age than even 15 years ago), meals, and lodging (you aren't building more dorms for 18 students so this is essentially a negligible increase for electricity and water). So if you can add 18 students to each freshman class to ensure the same amount of revenue originally budgeted and you can essentially do it without increasing any costs to the university, why can athletics programs not afford to fully fund baseball programs with a scholly for each player on the roster?
I cannot like this enough.
