quote:
Let's start with the scholarship limits. The point WAS NOT that we also had no limits. The point WAS that Texas and other big schools could just bring all the talent they wanted and put them on the shelf.

You don't know what you're talking about.

The scholarship limits were meant to even the field between public and private schools.

A&M recruited as many or more Texas high school athletes as the Longhorns. The state of Texas supplemented all state school athletes through funding that private schools did not receive. Nothing nefarious.

There were times during the 1960s that Gene Stallings was judged to have brought in a better class at A&M than Darrell Royal at Texas. You won a SWC title in 1967 with many of those players.

To buttress my point, read this from 1974:

quote:
Another rules change may have a more positive impact. Last year the NCAA imposed an annual limit of 30 scholarships for football and placed similar restrictions on other sports. The scholarship limit is intended to combat spiraling costs, but in the Southwest Conference the new rule may have the additional effect of restoring balance to the league. This is the hope of many private school backers who recognize that the scholarship limit may be the last chance for their schools to regain parity.

Most of the private schools, as their followers point out, couldn’t afford to recruit many more than 30 football players before the NCAA reduced the scholarship limit, so the new ceiling won’t hurt their football programs. But Texas and the other state schools have been bringing in closer to 50 players a year. Because of the scholarship limit, between fifteen and twenty boys who might otherwise have signed with Texas will have to go elsewhere. The state schools will no longer monopolize all the talent, and the private schools will be able to supplement their teams with players who in other years were good enough to play for Texas.

One long-suffering Baylor fan sees this progression of events; the private school teams will get better, and Texas will get worse, because it will no longer be able to rely on a bottomless pit of talent—third team, fourth team, fifth team, red shirts—to make up for some bad guesses in recruiting or a devastating string of injuries. If he is right, then the gap between Texas and the rest of the league should narrow considerably within five years.

But is he right? The other state schools—Arkansas, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech—recruit as many players as the Longhorns year after year, and yet they have fared little better against UT than the private schools. Southern California has limited itself to 30 scholarships for years without damaging its standing as a perennial national power. Like Texas, the Trojans win with quality, not numbers.

Texas Monthly, 1974