“If it doesn’t matter, then schools are not going to offer it for equivalency sports. It is not like Purdue let’s say wants to just spend an extra 500k a year for the heck of it.”
I recall some of the conferences suggesting that they would only paying the full COA stipends to those athletes who were otherwise on full rides. It would save the schools money and really didn’t make all that much difference to the kids receiving partial schollies.
But that concept creates a title ix issue since the head count sports trend 2-1 male. So the schools probably have to pay partial COA stipends to at least all of the female athletes on partial schollies. If they are going to pay the female partials, they probably would pay the male partials too.