https://www.cougarboard.com/board/message.html?id=33421933

Basically all athletes on a roster of any NCAA sanctioned team can be given a scholarship. There are no longer any scholarship limits. The only limit are caps on the number of players on a roster.

There will no longer be headcount sports. There are currently 2 mens headcount sports, and 4 women's (football, m/w basketball, w volleyball, tennis, and I think w gymnastics). Anyone who gets a scholarship in a headcount sport currently has to be given a full ride.

All of the rest of the sports currently are equivalency sports. Schools have a cap of funds based on the school's cost of attendance times the number of allowable scholarships that they can spread out among the athletes.

With all sports becoming equivalency sports, coaches can decide to give full ride scholarships, or partial money, regardless of what sport it is. They will be free to give full rides, but they don't have to. They can give the entire team half tuition scholarships. Or they can give the starters full rides, and then give the backup players partial scholarships.

Many sports do not have roster caps right now. Football and basketball do. Baseball does as well. But right now, you could have 70 players on your softball squad. Most of them would be walk-ons who don't have any scholarship support. Under the new rules, every sport will have a roster cap. The football roster cap is going to fall from 120 to 105. Baseball is going to fall from 40 to 34. Track and cross country currently have no roster cap, but they will next year. Consequently the team will not be as deep because you don't have these extra athletes that you can carry on your roster and train and develop for 2 years before they need to contribute.

Basically in football you get 20 new potential scholarship players for football, but you also lose 15 walk-ons that you used to be able to carry on the team to act as the scout team or practice squad.

Other sports (basketball) are largely unaffected. Basketball has the same roster cap as before (15), and the number of scholarships increase from 13 to 15. A lot of the other more marginal sports will have their rosters shrunk, even though there will be more scholarship money available to them hypothetically.