Not a ton of college baseball players get full scholarships. It has changed some in the past few years, but it is not uncommon for college players to get partial rides and supplement it with financial aid of some sort. I am curious how NCAA baseball coaches feel about this. Were they surprised when the "no drafting high-school kids" made the news?
I don't know what the NIL game is for college baseball, but cannot imagine that it is as lucrative as basketball or football. This is from an article I found online on baseball NIL. I have no idea how good the information is.
Why the Top Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story
Here’s the part the rankings miss. That Top 13 represents 13 players. College baseball rosters average roughly 42 players each — and programs split just 11.7 scholarships among all of them. Men’s basketball, by comparison, has 13 scholarships for rosters of about 16.
Partial scholarships are the baseball norm. For most players, NIL income isn’t a windfall on top of a free ride — it’s how they close the gap on tuition, housing, and the cost of staying in school. As Royals pitcher Chris Stratton put it, NIL can genuinely help “the kids whose parents don’t have a lot.”
And the real market reflects that. The headline valuations belong to a tiny group of draft-eligible stars. Below them are thousands of D1, D2 and D3 baseball players whose NIL reality looks nothing like the SportsGrid list. For them, a deal is more likely to be a few hundred dollars from a local business or a hometown fan than a national apparel partnership.
Source: https://blog.rallyfuel.com/highest-paid-college-baseball-nil-deals-2026
My final point is that I think a lot of what we are seeing from owners is them getting ahead of the public relations battle before the real negotiations. Some of these changes being floated are probably not realistic, but can be used as a chip later to come off of it.