Matt Wyatt discusses "Uneven" and scholarship issues in college baseball

Key notes from Matt Wyatt interview

• The response to the “Uneven” movie has been overwhelmingly positive. I value people who appreciate the message and see it as an educational piece. Most people who watch it come away thinking they've been educated a little bit. That was the purpose. I got into this story because I was curious about college baseball. For years I've heard rumors that scholarships aren't the same across the sport. You know, 11.7 scholarships here or lottery scholarships there. It's very confusing, and there wasn't much out there that was all that educational.
   
• The lack of information handy doesn't match how the coaches feel about the situation. The coaches know it's messed up, but there is an information gap. Education is a bridge to change. Now maybe the conversation can take off. If this piece that I've done can help with that, then it will have been worth it.
   
• It's not 1985 or 1990 anymore. Back then, nobody was making any money on college baseball. Fast forward to 2021. There are 229 Division I baseball schools. A lot of them aren't making money on the sport, but the Power 5 schools are. The conferences and the NCAA governing body are raking it in. ESPN and the SEC Network are loving it. Still, at the highest level at Texas A&M, the moms and dads are footing the bill for that roster.
   
• I'm not the SEC commissioner or the NCAA president, so it's not my job to figure out a solution. When the NCAA collects a minimum of $5M from Omaha and then checks from these regional and super regional hosts every year, what are they doing with those checks? How is this sport the #2 revenue sport for the NCAA behind men's basketball, but at the same time, every player is paying to be there? It's not a situation that can continue.
   
• At the very least, if you're playing at this level like the teams in the SEC, there is no way you should have to be forking out $25-45,000 a year to be playing. This is a multi-layer thing, and it's a continuum of what you see with youth baseball. The wealthy families are the ones that can stay in. It's pushing poor kids out of baseball. If those poor kids want to be athletes in college, they have to play another sport. That's not right.
   
• John Cohen nailed it when he said to imagine if one college football team had more scholarships than another. Could you imagine if Auburn had one more scholarship player than Alabama? It would be shock and horror. It's that way and then some in college baseball.
   
• I do see a change eventually. Greg Burns said, "Never say never. Things can change." Greg Sankey has touched on it a couple of times, saying it's time to look past the old equivalency model. The question is how you should do it. Some think they should split Division I, and Sankey thinks that's a half measure. The key is getting the rest of the country to go along with something like this. There is a lot of SEC envy around the country, so it could take a while to get other leagues to come around on this issue.