The rapidly shrinking regional paper across the Causeway made reference Sunday to the UC Davis men's basketball program having six scholarship players. I don't blame them. Aggie head coach Gary Stewart made reference to that in his postgame comments after the loss to Northridge. It was picked up without further explanation. We're all about context here at your local paper, so I'm going to fill in the blanks here.
The Aggies are currently playing with six scholarship players because of injuries (Michael Boone), redshirting (Adam Malik, who was also injured at one point) and transfer rules (Joe Harden and Todd Lowenthal). What Stewart meant is that of the nine people currently in the rotation, six are on scholarship. The UCD men's basketball program is currently at 10.6 scholarships or 82 percent of the maximum (13). For the 2008-09 academic year it will be at 90 percent of the maximum of 11.7 scholarships. Those are in-state equivalencies.
UCD does not tier sports. So scholarships are added proportionally across the board as student-fee money becomes available. For basketball to be at 90 percent, football, soccer, swimming, golf and the rest of the 27 sports also have to be at 90 percent. And when tuition and fees rise, i.e. all the time, the adding of scholarships is slowed for everyone across the board. This is one of the athletic department's core principles. This is not, however, the way it works elsewhere in the Big West. In some of the other programs, basketball is identified as the No. 1 sport and protected. That means scholarship levels are insulated against budget fluctuations. There is also money available to give out-of-state players full rides.
It doesn't take a UCD education to understand that all 90 percents are not created equal.
The .7 of a scholarship he has for next year won't do much for the Aggies in terms of attracting talent. In the world of college basketball, UCD head coach Gary Stewart has said, a team has to offer full scholarships to attract top-level talent. Basketball is what is known as a "head-count" sport. Division I teams can award a maximum of 13 scholarships to 13 players. It's a one-to-one situation. When the Aggie men's basketball team is in a competitive recruiting situation, i.e. all the time, it is going against schools that have full rides to offer.
This is in contrast to equivalency sports, such as Championship Subdivision level football. In that case, a program has up to 63 scholarships to spread among 85 players. In fact, because of being at 90 percent, the football program's market value when it comes to attracting guarantee games against Bowl Subdivision opponents will improve. FBS opponents will no longer have to petition the NCAA to have their victories over the Aggies count toward bowl eligibility.
This post (dedicated to the seething malcontents at Aggie Sports Talk) is meant as context. So you should consider this as you judge the Aggies' 8-15 record and how it competes against the difficult fixture list immediately in front of them. But it's fair to point out also that Stewart chose to recruit transfers and to redshirt Adam Malik this year. Those decisions may pay off in the future. Even without the injuries and ineligibility of Ryan Silva, the Aggies were always going to be short of scholarship depth this season. There's little doubt that missing out on the Big West Tournament would be massively disappointing given now cognizant everyone was of not getting to go the previous few years. That would turn this into the fifth reclassification year for men's hoops. At some point the transition has got to end, right?
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