Some Facts About Football Scholarships

Every Division 1 College Football team receives eighty five football scholarships per year to work with. With 85 scholarships available to a NCAA football team, it's easy to imagine the team being made almost completely up of guys who are getting a free and easy ride through school. That is obviously not the case. It is increasingly more difficult to get and retain your football scholarship through all four years of college. Understand that the 85 is split among four to five classes when you consider redshirts and that is total. Not 85 per year.

So you have essentially 20 to 25 scholarships per year to work with. Now the coaches look at the potential depth chart for each position and have to weight the potential for landing that big recruit who has to receive a full ride. It is much like balancing your check book at the end of the month. X amount here Y amount here and so on...Or is it? There has long been the ability of coaches and athletic departments to find the resources to compensate or should we say make life easier for certain athletes. They are often given easy side jobs to make up for the partial scholarship they were granted. Yes, students have been caught for not showing up to jobs and still getting paid but the percentage of the athletes caught versus the recipients is grossly incomparable.

What about tuition and books? Well, books are a joke most athletic departments keep libraries of used books that all the athletes have access to. Not to mention, they either have mandatory study times with free tutors where there are plenty of books and "practice tests". So purchasing books is not a priority of a starting or back up linebacker for that matter. Tuition, now tuition is a little more difficult. The average public school with in state tuition is not that expensive so there are a number of ways to pay for this. Partial athletic scholarships along with academic and volunteer scholarships or grants can cover a majority of this. Tuition deferment also allows the student to delay the payment and use the funds from there "job" to pay for the rest. Private schools tuition is often six to ten times as much and is a completely different animal when it comes to athletic scholarships and football scholarships.

So as you can see not getting a full football scholarship is not the end of the world. If you are creative and intuitive enough to find other means they are definitely out there.