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THE RULES CHANGED. MOST FAMILIES ARE STILL PLAYING BY THE OLD ONES.
Three things happened in the last two years that changed college recruiting more than anything in the previous thirty: schools began paying athletes directly, scholarship limits became roster limits, and the transfer portal turned every open spot into a national competition. Almost none of the advice families are getting has been updated for any of it. This page is what we tell our own families.
The walk-on spot your family is counting on may no longer exist.
Under the House settlement approved in 2025, Division I schools that opt into revenue sharing replaced scholarship caps with hard roster caps. A program can now fund more athletes than before, but it can carry fewer bodies. The practical effect is the opposite of what most families were told: more money at the top of the roster, and the bottom of the roster deleted. Preferred walk-on offers are the first thing to disappear.
How many walk-ons did you carry last year, and how many made it to spring? Does your school operate under the roster caps? Will you put the roster spot in writing before I enroll? A walk-on plan without written answers to all three is not a plan — it is a tuition deposit on a maybe. The late-cycle playbook covers the alternatives.
Caps apply to Division I programs at schools that opted into the settlement, and each school confirms its own numbers. Divisions II and III, NAIA, and JUCO are not governed by these caps and in many sports now have deeper rosters than the D1 programs above. Confirm the number with the program before you plan around it.
What it actually pays, by level.
Revenue sharing is real money and it is concentrated in a very small number of programs and sports. If your athlete is not a football or basketball recruit at a power-conference school, the honest planning assumption is zero. Budget for the scholarship and the aid package, not for NIL.
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A recruiter who leads with NIL is selling you the exception. Ask what the scholarship is, what the aid package is, and what the four-year net cost is. Those are the numbers your family will actually live on.
Your seventeen-year-old is competing against twenty-two-year-olds.
When a coach needs a starting shortstop, they now have two options: recruit a high school junior who will contribute in two years, or take a proven junior-college or Division I transfer who will contribute in August. Under a roster cap, that choice gets made against your athlete more often than it used to.
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Six adjustments, starting this month.
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