yes... exactly what it does.
State can offered all their in-state guys the bare minimum, and have the MTAG schoalrship cover the rest, making it like a 80-90-100% scholarship. This allows them to throw out bigger scholarships to out of state guys.
If Alabama was offering you 35% because they have to allot out their scholarships due to no help, and Mississippi State was offering you 80%, and they are able to do this because 25 guys on their roster are from mississippi where they are getting aid, where, would you go?
I have no clue what your profession is, but if you had two jobs on the table for the same type of job. One paid 35,000 the other paid 80,000. Where would you go?
I might buy that argument if they were loaded with guys from Mississippi. However, they aren't. According to their online roster, they only have 12 guys from the state of Mississippi and 26 from out of state. If they didn't give a penny to the instate guys and used all of their schollys on out of state guys, they couldn't give all of them 80%. Even if 10 of the out of state players were walk-ons, they could only give the remaining 16 guys about 70%.
The numbers are similar at Ole Miss where they have 9 guys from Mississippi and 25 from out of state. Again, if all of the in state guys didn't get any baseball money, and if 10 of the out of state guys were walk ons, that would mean that the remaining 15 out of state players would get about 75%.
I doubt that that many players from out of state are walking on at either place.
If you want to see a school that has perfected the art of using the state sponsored scholarships to its advantage, look at LSU. LSU has 22 players from the state of Louisiana and only 11 from out of state.
I am at the head of the line when it comes to complaining about the inequities in college baseball -- the biggest inequity being that the NCAA only allows 11.7 scholarships in a sport that requires 10 starters per game. I also think schools in states that produce tons of baseball talent and that have HOPE scholarships or the like have a huge unfair advantage over states that do not have similar programs.
All of that being said, I think, plain and simple, our problem is that we either (a) do not identify top talent; (b) do not do a good job recruiting and signing top talent; or (c) do not do a good job coaching the talent once it gets here. Quite frankly, I think it is a combination of all three.
