Auburn athletics director Jay Jacobs recently penned an op-ed for AL.com where he described a disadvantage Auburn is faced with when it comes to providing scholarships for a large contingent of players for several sports.
Equivalency sports, which are more commonly known as "Olympic sports" are not given the amount of fully funded scholarships that the larger sports are. For example, the baseball team is only given 11.7 scholarships for the coaching staff to use. They are free to divvy up those 11.7 however they wish, but every player on the 35-man roster will not receive a full scholarship. They can give one full scholarship to one player, divide a second between two players, divide another between three players, and so on.
But what Jacobs argued, is other state schools possess certain academic scholarships that can be stacked on top of those 11.7 and not count towards the overall number. So, a team could give a player half of a scholarship, and he could receive the rest of his costs through a specialized scholarship unique to that school. Auburn, however, doesn't have these.
"The people we're competing against, they have equivalency scholarships, however they get them," Jacobs said. "We don't have that. So for our equivalency sports, we've got to something in the state."
Jacobs then described an issue that stems from that in the area of swimming and diving.
"In swimming and diving, we won 16—I guess it was—straight SEC men’s championships in swimming and diving," Jacobs said. "That may never happen again because we’ve gone to a third heat in swimming and diving. All of our kids, all of our students who are in the third heat, they’re all walk-ons. At other schools, they could be on some other kind of academic scholarship. So we’re not going to have—in all likelihood, if you just look at the dollar amount—we’re not going to have the same quality of the student athlete in that third heat, so to score those points, we’ve got walk-ons competing against scholarship athletes in the third heat, and common sense would tell you that we’re not going to get the same quality of walk-on as you would with a scholarship athlete."
Although Auburn is at a slight disadvantage, Jacobs refuses to lie down and accept it.
At the SEC Meetings in May, he proposed legislation that would make those stacking academic scholarships count towards the equivalency scholarships in an attempt to level the playing field.
The proposition was shot down, but Jacobs is adamant he will continue fighting.
"I want everybody in the state of Alabama to realize that we’re at a disadvantage, a competitive disadvantage, Jacobs said. "It doesn’t mean we’re not going to keep fighting, but also at the NCAA level, it’s not equitable across every sport, and is that fair? I’ve already started fighting that. I put forward legislation in May at the SEC meeting and it didn’t pass, but I’m going to keep fighting so everybody understands the challenges that we have, and then reasonable people can make decisions on what they think is fair for the students."
Do you like this story? The Plainsman doesn't accept money from tuition or student fees, and we don't charge a subscription fee. But you can donate to support The Plainsman.
