By Will Vandervort / photo courtesy ClemsonTigers.com.

Clemson head football coach Dabo Swinney has been adamant that the Cost of Attendance (COA) policy the NCAA approved in January is going to affect recruiting in a way that it never has before.

Starting this fall schools will start giving student athletes money as another mean of financial aid to help student athletes pay for everyday living expenses.

Though the idea has been well received, the way in which it is being executed is a whole other ballgame, completely. The Power Five Conferences agreed the COA will be set by each individual university based on the cost of living formulas they use in assisting students with financial aid when it comes to cost of living expenses included in their academic scholarships.

Clemson has reported it expects to give student athletes from its head-count sports—football, men’s and women’s basketball,  women’s tennis and volleyball—roughly $3,800, which could be nearly $1,200 to $3,000 less than what Auburn and other schools it recruits against will reportedly give their student-athletes.

Swinney feels this gives him and others a not-so-level playing field when it comes to competing for players. He doesn’t like that it might have players and their parents choosing a school based on monetary reasons.

“There is no question it is not a level playing field and it is going to be the number one topic at all the coaches’ meetings because it is not good,” Swinney said. “Again, the intent is good, but for one school to be able to pay three or four thousand more than another school, then at the end of the day guys are going to make decisions for the wrong reasons. It should not be that way.”

One guy who can understand Swinney’s frustration is Jack Leggett. Clemson’s head baseball coach has been playing on an un-level playing field for the past five years and the affects it has had on recruiting has been a big factor in the Tigers’ recent decline. In recent years the Tigers have offered players that might have come to Clemson had others were not offering a savings at times of $15,000 to $20,000.

Since 1990, college baseball has been playing with an 11.7 scholarship rule. From that time until 2009, teams could offer as many as 35 players scholarship money. During that time offering a young man “book money,” in some cases, was enough to entice a good player to come and play for them.

That gave coaches like Leggett, who do not have the financial aid means as some other rival schools, the ability to give great players such as Taylor Harbin, Tyler Colvin, Daniel Moskos, Brad Miller, Michael Johnson, Jeff Baker and Khalil Greene more scholarship money.

But in 2010 the NCAA changed the rule, forcing coaches to only give 11.7 scholarships to 27 players, meaning the rest of the roster had to be filled with walk-ons.  To further put a stranglehold on programs such as Clemson’s the NCAA in 2011 required all school’s give each of the 27 players on partial scholarship no less than 25 percent.

Under this rule, it meant a player like Casey Harman, who went on to become a first-team All-ACC pitcher in 2010, would not have been able to play at Clemson because Leggett would not have had enough money to offer him a partial scholarship.

But like Swinney and the football program are running into now with the new COA, the Clemson baseball program has not been playing on the same field as some of the others schools it competes against on the recruiting trail.

Baseball programs at Virginia, North Carolina and Vanderbilt have found a way to get around the 11.7 scholarship limitations. How?

There is the Academic Common Market (ACM), which allows an out-of-state player whose major may not be offered at one of the in-state school he resides in, to come to another school without having to pay out-of-state tuition. There then there are academic endowments, money schools can give to its students and/or student-athletes that are eligible for it services.

Clemson has been fighting against both in its recruiting wars as well as the fact its players’ facilities has fallen drastically behind.

Clemson is in the process of building a new $6 million addition to Doug Kingsmore Stadium that will house a new players’ clubhouse, locker room, coaches’ offices and museum. In April of 2014, Clemson’s Board of Trustees, with the help of Clemson Athletic Director Dan Radakovich, passed the ACM which will allow out-of-state student athletes to be eligible for in-state tuition.

The Tigers are expected to have four incoming freshmen in the fall assisted by the ACM.

“You still need to be able to recruit and bring student athletes here. One of the ways to do that, we think, is to make sure we give them the best opportunity to grow academically and athletically through good facilities,” Radakovich said. “That, we can control. We can control that in the short run.”

What Clemson can’t control is the endowments and how much other schools have compared to Clemson. This is where the baseball program and other Olympic sports suffer the most when it comes to recruiting.

The Clemson Athletic Department’s endowment fund is around $4 million dollars and the university’s stands around $400 million. Though those are good numbers, they pale in comparison to Virginia’s, North Carolina’s and Vanderbilt’s endowments.

Virginia has an endowment fund of $5.9 billion, while Vanderbilt’s stands at $4 billon and UNC’s is $2.6 billion. It’s documented these three schools use this academic means as a way to get around the 11.7 limitations to help with financial aid.

And it has helped.

Since 2010, North Carolina has recruited some of the best baseball talent in the country and in the process has won an ACC Championship, played in two Super Regionals and has participated in two College World Series (CWS). Twice the Tar Heels won more than 50 games and one other time they won 46 games.

The Cavaliers had only been to the NCAA Tournament nine times prior to 2010 and since then they have qualified every year, have won 50 or more games in a season four times, been to three Super Regionals and played in two CWS, including a second-place finish to Vanderbilt last season.

Speaking of the Commodores, prior to 2010, they qualified for the NCAA Tournament seven times in their history. In the previous five seasons they have won 50 or more games three different times, played in three Super Regionals, won the SEC twice and last year won the school’s first national championship in a men’s sport.

Is it any coincidence this all took place after the rule changes of 2010?

“I would say it is related, but I don’t know if it is a direct correlation to that,” Radakovich said. “Stanford has had that forever and they go up and down.”

But Stanford still uses the same high academic standards it has always used in recruiting student athletes. Vanderbilt, however, does not. They do not use the school’s requirements to get athletes into school, but instead use those set by the SEC.

“It is a different playing field, but I guess it depends on the magnitude of that difference,” Radakovich said.

That difference at Clemson, at least in baseball, is the fact the Tigers—a perennial national power prior to 2011—has not got past a regional in the NCAA Tournament since advancing to the CWS in 2010 and has only hosted two regionals in the last nine years. This year, the Tigers are in jeopardy of not even making the tournament.

So does the recent decline in the program fall on the shoulders of Jack Leggett?

“It’s not. It’s not one factor in any, whether things are going great or whether they are going poorly or not as good as you expect,” Radakovich said. “It is not one factor.”

Radakovich admits endowment programs like at Virginia, Vanderbilt and North Carolina have hurt Clemson to an extent, but he also says other schools, which at one time did not care about baseball, are putting more resources into their baseball programs.

Duke is starting to use its large endowment funds ($7.3 billion) to offer more scholarship money for baseball players, while Wake Forest ($1.2 billion) is doing the same. The Demon Deacons are in the process of building a $6 million addition to its baseball facilities.

“There are a lot more schools saying ‘we want to be competitive in baseball and how do we do that?’ Twenty five years ago there was not as many,” Radakovich said. “Thirty five years ago, you could probably predict half of the teams that would be in the College World Series in any given year – Miami, Southern Cal, Oklahoma State and Texas. If you bet those four on a parlay (card) you were doing pretty well. You were feeling pretty good on your ticket of the number of schools that were going there.”

So what is Clemson doing to offset this disadvantage? At this point there is not much it can do.

“To sit here and tell you that is in the short term for Clemson, I cannot do that. As an institution, that’s not where Clemson has been for the last 20 to 25 years,” Radakovich said. “Vanderbilt or Miami, Stanford or Duke, as private universities, their financial aid packages have been based on endowments for the last 100 years.

“We are not going to be able to run right into that market and be a significant player. But I think ‘The Will to Lead Campaign’ the university is under right now—the billion dollar campaign–part of that emphasis has been to grow endowments within the university. They have been successful in that. That would be allocated to the general student body, which our student athletes will be a part of. We will not see the fruits of that for a while.”

And that means Clemson baseball might not be too fruitful in the years to come.