Breaking the NCAA's Two-Tiered System: Attaining Full Scholarships for Equivalency Sport Athletes

In June of 2021, the Supreme Court released the Alston decision, invalidating NCAA restrictions on educational-related benefits for Division I football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball student-athletes. Alston laid the groundwork for future challenges to NCAA rules, with Justice Kavanaugh explicitly encouraging further challenges to NCAA rules in his concurring opinion. This Comment reviews NCAA rules limiting the number of scholarships below the number of scholarship roster spots for certain sports. If these rules were challenged under the Alston framework, they likely would not stand up under the antitrust review for NCAA rules established by Alston.

Furthermore, this Comment suggests that the limits on scholarships below the amount of scholarship roster spots should be removed, while the number of scholarship roster spots should remain. Additionally, no school would be forced to add more scholarships to these programs, and individual conferences could choose to impose scholarship limits if they felt it was necessary to preserve competitiveness within the conference. These changes would allow equivalency sport athletes to receive full scholarships while ameliorating some of the financial and competitive challenges resulting from this kind of change.