Did the NEC Eliminate the Football Scholarship Limit?
The short answer here is: we still don’t know. But we’re a little closer to determining exactly what one school is doing from a scholarship perspective.
We recently obtained documentation of Central Connecticut State’s athletic scholarships from 2023-24 and 2024-25. The hypothesis was this: if the scholarship limit was removed, we might see a noticeable uptick in Central Connecticut’s athletic scholarship offerings.
Before we continue, I need to emphasize something: These are certainly NOT the correct numbers. If you feel there’s anything in here that reflects negatively on CCSU, you need to look again. Law prevents the complete numbers from being shared, and it’s a good thing for privacy.
There are two problems with my approach, although I maintain that it is the best such approach we have.
In the NEC, there are only two public schools, and just one currently plays football. That’s Central Connecticut State. We’re able to get records from them, but none of the other schools, which means our sample size is limited to one public school. Definitely not the full picture.
Due to laws preventing identification, any demographic group receiving less than 10 scholarships as a whole is not counted among our totals we received. Hypothetically, if several groups all had 9 scholarships, our totals could be off. And not by a little.
Still, with no other way to obtain data and no other schools to compare it to, let’s work with what we have.
In 2023-24, Central Connecticut awarded a known 157 athletic scholarships to men and 109 to women. That doesn’t mean there’s a large disparity- as you’ll see in a moment, I don’t think there is one- but it does highlight the issues we have with identifying numbers with existing laws.
In 2024-25, there’s what I believe to be a much more accurate number of women athletic scholarships up to 150. At the same time, athletic scholarships for men remained at 158 known.
It’s possible that there was an uptick in scholarships for football that isn’t clearly shown in the data. The problem is that we don’t have a breakdown by sport and we can never have precise numbers due to existing laws.
It’s just a guess, but my suspicion is that the original reports of the scholarship limit being removed is probably accurate, but regardless of a “hard” limit, schools in the NEC are for the most part not going to increase how many scholarships are available for football.
Again, with 7/8 schools in the league being private, we’ll never get hard scholarship numbers- at least, not anytime soon. It’s something we’ll continue to work on, but to be honest it’s not a high priority for me.
I just don’t think that having an exact number changes my earlier sentiments on a soft limit being self-imposed by every school. And if that’s the case, it’s not something I recommend losing sleep over.
