NCSA College Athletic Scholarships Blog

As I’ve stated in the past I am a big fan of Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Monday Quarterback.  However, his piece this week contained the following segment that while true, does not paint the entire picture of a high school football player going on to play in college.

 Do Your Math Homework — Because the Math on Reaching the NFL Isn’t Good: So 1.1 million boys played high school football in 2007. That means about 275,000 varsity high school football players graduated. NCAA-regulated schools had about 4,300 scholarships to hand out for football for the Class of 2008, plus a few hundred more paid opportunities from the Ivy League and Patriot League, which officially ban football scholarships, but by the most amazing and astonishing coincidence, find that a high share of football recruits qualify for need-based or academic aid. All this means about one graduating high school varsity football player in 60 received a football scholarship or football-based financial aid for college. That, in turn, means roughly one kid per high school football team got into college with a football scholarship.

So high school players, enjoy the glory of Friday night lights — playing under the lights before your hometown, family and friends is a wonderful experience. Otherwise study, study, study, because a college education means far more to your future than athletics.

While Gregg’s rough estimates are correct he fails to point out the additional opportunities at every division level.  By adding every Division I, II, III and NAIA that plays football you come to 813 schools.  Factoring 85 players per team you come to 69,105 opportunities to play college football.  Using the same 1.1 million High School players you come to a 6.3% of playing in college.  However, this is where Gregg’s point about academics come back into play.  The majority of these opportunities do not have full scholarships to hand out.  But, much like the Ivy’s there is plenty of academic and need based aid that can drastically reduce cost of a college education.  So if you dream of playing college football don’t despair, it isn’t just for blue-chip athletes, but it is ONLY for student-athletes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 7:06 pm and is filed under College Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.