Last week’s announcement of increased scholarships in college baseball was met with excitement from fans across the country, including baseball-crazed Arkansas, but it may not be as great as it sounds.
As part of the NCAA’s historic settlement of three antitrust lawsuits, Division I schools will be allowed to offer full athletic scholarships to their entire baseball rosters that will be capped at 34 players beginning in the 2025-26 academic year.
That is nearly triple the infamous scholarship limit of 11.7, which has been in place since being reduced from 13 in 1991.
College baseball coaches have been calling for an increase in that number for the past three-plus decades, especially as the sport has exploded in popularity in recent years, and now they have more than they probably ever imagined.
Instead of jumping for joy, Arkansas baseball coach Dave Van Horn expressed reservations about the impending change in an interview on Out of Bounds, 103.7 The Buzz’s afternoon sports talk radio show, last Wednesday.
He pointed out not every team will immediately offer 34 scholarships despite the limit increase.
“The number they’re saying, 34, that’s the roster size,” Van Horn said. “It’s up to your university to tell you how many scholarships you can get. You can have 20 fulls, 15 fulls, 34 fulls.”
There are already several Division I schools in the smaller conferences that struggle to fund the current 11.7 scholarships and Van Horn added that he thinks it’ll be “very rare” for a team to have 34 full scholarships moving forward because “that’s a lot of money.”
Despite Van Horn’s skepticism, D1Baseball’s Kendall Rogers has reported that sources told him “almost all” of the SEC, ACC and Big 12 schools will get a full 34 scholarships. It’s unknown what most of the Big Ten will do, while rising mid-majors like the Sun Belt are “expected to do all it can” to remain competitive with the big programs.
Of course, the Arkansas baseball program has long benefitted from workarounds that apply to all students, not just athletes, such as the UA offering in-state tuition to students from surrounding states and the lottery scholarships for in-state students.
In recent years, name, image and likeness (NIL) payments have entered the equation. While the Razorbacks are reportedly lacking in that area when it comes to sports like football and women’s basketball, they are believed to be doing quite well, comparatively speaking, in baseball and men’s basketball. In an interview earlier this summer, former Arkansas Edge director Chris Bauer told Best of Arkansas Sports that the Arkansas baseball program ranked near the top of the SEC — and therefore country — in NIL resources.
Those two things will likely help Arkansas when it comes to funding the roster in the 34-scholarship era.
“It looks like we’re going to have enough scholarships, but scholarships are scholarships,” Van Horn said. “There’s other money now; it’s called NIL. I think it’s a great thing to have that option, but really it’s all about NIL money..”
The Benefits of Increased Scholarships in Baseball
It’s easy to see why increased scholarships are generally seen as a positive for college baseball.
The sport has long been known for its athletes racking up student debt because very few receive full scholarships. Coaches have had to split up 11.7 scholarships amongst 32 players who, until the requirement was recently lifted, had to get at least 25% of a scholarship.
With full scholarships in play, more top high school players will choose college over immediately beginning their professional careers and more college players will stay in school longer rather than turn pro.
In the last two years alone, Arkansas has lost seven high school signees to the MLB Draft. Some of them – especially the four who received signing bonuses of at least $3 million – might have still signed professionally, but the Razorbacks will have a better chance of getting them to school if they can offer full scholarships in addition to NIL.
The Downside for Arkansas Baseball
On the flip side of things, starting next fall, college baseball rosters will be reduced from their current size of a flexible 40 players to a potentially hard cap of 34.
Not only is that less than the pre-pandemic limit of 35 players, but there’s a chance coaches will lose the flexibility aspect of their roster, as well.
Traditionally, the 40-man rosters just have to be set by the start of the season in February. Schools, especially in the SEC, commonly go through the fall with more players than that, but get down to the limit when players transfer to junior colleges or get left off the active roster as redshirts.
For example, our tracker has the 2025 Arkansas baseball roster currently projected to include 55 players this fall. Some of those players won’t make it to campus, some will leave the team after the semester and some will redshirt, getting the Razorbacks down to the 40-man limit.
Things are “far from official at this point,” but D1Baseball’s Kendall Rogers has reported he’s heard teams will have to declare their 34-man rosters before the fall, meaning teams will have to cut down to that mark in August.
It sounds like that’s what Van Horn is expecting — and he’s not particularly happy about it.
“What they’re doing is they’re really hurting our rosters,” Van Horn said. “That doesn’t mean when the first pitch is thrown, but that means walking through the door in August. It’s going to be rough. A lot of kids are going to be leaving a lot of Power Fives at the end of the season next year because they won’t have enough room.”
With rosters shrinking from 40 to 34 and the SEC expanding to include Oklahoma and Texas, simple math shows the conference will shrink by 96 players next summer.
Some of that will be taken care of through natural turnover. Not including the Sooners or Longhorns, the SEC saw 98 players taken in the MLB Draft and another 150 entered the transfer portal, with some overlap.
However, with limited spots and teams constantly reloading via the transfer portal, in addition to traditional recruiting from the high school and JUCO ranks, there will undoubtedly be even more turnover than usual. That could lead to a trickle-down effect for mid-major conferences and smaller levels of college baseball, rather than major programs gobbling up all of the talent.
“There are going to be more players who can’t be on a Power Four baseball roster because of the roster decrease, and that means they’re going to have to find another avenue in which to play college baseball,” Austin Peay head coach Roland Fanning told D1Baseball. “That’s a win for guys like us, that’s a win for DII, NAIA and especially junior college baseball. By doing this, you’re really going to force the bigger conferences to really evaluate those slots. This will benefit the player, and the mid-majors.”
That may be good for the sport as a whole and individual players, as they won’t be at risk of being cut after the fall, but it hurts Arkansas baseball and programs of similar prestige.
The Razorbacks will have to be much more selective with their roster slots because they won’t be able to bring in an excess of players who then battle it out for a spot on the team. That probably means taking fewer chances on borderline prospects who come in as walk-ons.
At Arkansas, that could mean guys like Carson Shaddy or Kevin Kopps never getting a chance to prove themselves, as both of them joined the team as walk-ons and redshirted their first year on campus before becoming stars.
Having fewer players in the fall will also make it tougher to hold intrasquad scrimmages. The Razorbacks could probably make it work with 34 players, but if a player or two have injuries, it becomes next to impossible.
“It’s going to change how we practice in the fall, how we are going to scrimmage,” Van Horn said. “We won’t be able to scrimmage very much. You’re going to have kids that are hurt coming in from the summer and high school. Basically what it’s saying is there’s none of those walk-on kids. Those type of kids, it’s just going to be slim to none. You just won’t be able to do it.”
The Intricacies of College Baseball
That could be interpreted as a privileged program complaining about something helping the greater good of the sport, but it’s also important to understand that Arkansas — and other top programs — must deal with other difficulties that those smaller schools don’t.
Every summer, the Razorbacks have numerous current and prospective future players get selected in the MLB Draft. However, they don’t know exactly which ones will get picked and/or sign professionally, so it’s impossible to know exactly how many players they need each offseason.
Making it even tougher is the fact that the draft has recently been pushed into mid-July to coincide with the MLB All-Star Game, much to the chagrin of Van Horn. Every opportunity he gets, the veteran coach advocates for it to return to June because the later date keeps the program in limbo.
Van Horn probably knew he had a chance to retain some of his talent, but he had no way of knowing that Carson Wiggins, Cole Gibler, Gabe Fraser, all of the JUCO signees and all of the transfer commits would make it through the draft. Throw Kendall Diggs returning for his senior year and the Razorbacks had one of their better drafts in years.
It was so good, in fact, that they asked Milwaukee transfer Carson Hansen to look elsewhere, resulting in him flipping to Kentucky.
“We kept a lot more than we expected to be honest with you,” Van Horn said. “This is a really good problem to have… We had a couple kids committed through the transfer portal and we talked to them and talked to their agents and said, ‘You better not come now. It’s not going to be a good idea.’”
Another reason Arkansas over-recruits is to account for the years it gets hit hard by the draft — something the mid-major programs don’t typically experience.
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Listen to Arkansas baseball coach Dave Van Horn’s full interview on The Buzz at 7:00 below:
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