New college sports roster limits revealed as House settlement expands scholarship numbers

More than 750 additional scholarships will be made available for college sports.

As part of the House settlement agreement made public Friday, university leaders are expanding scholarships to full members in each sport and eliminating scholarship limits, instead placing limitations on the number of members. The new scholarship and membership structure, an attempt to ward off future litigation, will go into effect in the 2025-26 school year. A new model of settlement that would allow schools to share revenue directly with athletes.

The commissioner finalized the new registration limits. The announcement was made earlier this week and revealed in full in a court filing on Friday.

Under the new model, schools are allowed to offer scholarships to enrolled athletes in each sport up to the new enrollment limits. The move will make roughly 790 new scholarships available across the 40-plus NCAA sports outlined in the settlement. Under the current NCAA model, there are roughly 500 scholarships available across all sports, according to Yahoo Sports calculations. With the new enrollment limits, that number is now more than 1,200.

For example, football rosters, currently capped at 85 players, will be capped at 105, with 20 additional scholarships available to schools willing to give the maximum. Baseball rosters, currently capped at 11.7 players, will be capped at 34, with 22.3 additional scholarships available.

As things stand, schools are not required to hand out scholarships to each player.

Entities that are not defendants in the settlement lawsuits — Group of Five schools and conferences, FCS and non-football Division I programs — will be bound by the enrollment limits, reporting systems and enforcement mechanisms only if they choose to share revenue with players. They can opt out of the new model if they opt out of sharing revenue.

As part of the terms of the settlement, no scholarships were cut in any sport.

Many schools are preparing to significantly increase scholarships: According to administrators from several powerhouse conferences who spoke to Yahoo Sports, programs plan to spend between $3 million and $7 million annually on additional scholarships, with a portion of that ($2.5 million) counting toward the annual revenue-sharing cap, which is expected to start at around $21.5 million.

For some elite power programs, the total cost of both adding scholarships and sharing revenue with athletes exceeds $30 million annually.To comply with federal Title IX law, scholarship increases in men’s sports would have to be replicated in women’s sports as well, potentially resulting in additional costs.

But not all programs can afford to add so many scholarships. Some administrators have moved to “tier” sports by investing less in certain programs and more in others. This includes cutting staff and salaries, and cutting scholarships, especially from Olympic sports that bring in little or no revenue.

Here is the full list of new roster restrictions: