Notafan Neal said State has some unfair advantage with baseball scholarships?

[Todd4State]

Yep. While many schools have the money to get to baseball players for their 'likeness', very few would be willing to (State, OM, LSU, Arkansas, maybe A&M/South Carolina and a few non-SEC schools). State and its baseball-crazed fanbase would be one of the first to take care of our baseball players. Vandy has the advantage right now, but they are still limited to tuition and maybe room and board. State fans will go past that and our baseball players will have cash in hand, and WE will have the advantage! Mangum would have made so much money just selling autographs to State fans.

If we formed the leadership scholarship fund now and made it 55% regular students and 45% baseball players, some SEC schools might complain, but that would be hypocritical . Vandy, LSU, Florida, South Carolina and others have HOPE-type scholarships and endowed scholarships that State doesn't have. If they complain about State's leadership fund, then they will end up on the losing end because the whole baseball scholarship thing would end up regulated and 'evened out' among SEC schools. They would lose their HOPE-type scholarship fund advantage.

Yes. That's why I think our time is coming. All we need are robo umpires to prevent what happened against Louisville too.

[ShotgunDawg]

It's really so simple. Baseball is so unique because the walk-on rules that apply to football don't apply to baseball at all. Really has been crazy to me why the sport doesn't offer full scholarships and just pieces things up. It leave a lot of room for interpretation. That's why LSU got away with their state sponsored scholarship money and why Vanderbilt is now able to use their hardship money. And everyone knows that the NCAA is aware of it and that they aren't going to do anything about it. And we get Ron Polk complaining about Title IX for years....

Cohen has been pushing for national change where baseball seniors are able to get some form of scholarship. In fact he was presenting something on that at the ABCA convention when Kendall Rogers accidentally broke that we were firing Moorhead because Cohen had to cancel the presentation. It was pretty funny.

I feel like the SEC will break away and do their own thing with baseball in the next ten years and just say "Hey, conference rule. We're offering 25 full scholarships." To me it seems inevitable anyway. Schools like MSU, LSU, Arkansas, and Ole Miss would be 100% behind it and we would all be able to rally enough support of it. We could easily convince Alabama, Auburn, and Tennessee that they could become superpowers too and make money with more scholarships as well. It's nice to see someone like Jake Mangum stand up and say "this is BS" for a change at least.

And I think the new NCAA legislation where players can now get compensation is going to potentially change the game for us in baseball. I'm pretty sure Jake Mangum, Elijah MacNamee, Ethan Small, JT Ginn, and etc. could have had their scholarships potentially paid for by our fans just buying t-shirts with those players last name and numbers on them. And we have enough fans that are willing to buy stuff like that just to help the team out legally. I definitely believe we would have some fans that would buy one of each players t-shirt just to help MSU out. It's a theory right now- but I'm very curious to see what the actual numbers look like. I could see us making a guy like Mangum "walk-on" knowing that he would easily make enough to pay for his school through merchandise sales while giving the JUCO transfer relief pitcher that appears in SWAC games only a full ride. With our baseball fanbase this legislation could very well end up being out "Vandy hardship scholarship".

Going rouge on scholarships would make us ineligible for Omaha. That's not happening and honestly ridiculous.

The "likeness" deal likely won't happen or be so irrelevant that it doesn't make a big difference.

The main thing MSU needs to do to win more baseball games is:

1. Evaluate better. Recruit twitchy live bodies.
2. Take advantage of transfers like Texas Tech has. Tech's Saturday and Sunday guys are from Arkansas and Vandy
3. Continue to find more scholarship money.

[Todd4State]

Going rouge on scholarships would make us ineligible for Omaha. That's not happening and honestly ridiculous.

The "likeness" deal likely won't happen or be so irrelevant that it doesn't make a big difference.

The main thing MSU needs to do to win more baseball games is:

1. Evaluate better. Recruit twitchy live bodies.
2. Take advantage of transfers like Texas Tech has. Tech's Saturday and Sunday guys are from Arkansas and Vandy
3. Continue to find more scholarship money.

SEC teams have been going rogue on scholarships for years essentially. Its semantics and I don't really see much of a difference at the end of the day between an academic scholarship, hardship endowment money, and lottery scholarships.