NCAA Approves Cost-of-Attendance Stipends

For many of New England's smaller basketball schools, a potentially huge decision was made by the NCAA last week. The governing body of college athletics approved giving Division I athletes additional funds beyond their athletics scholarships to reflect the true cost-of-attendance at college for athletes (books, etc.) The real rub of this, as far as schools in this neck of the woods go, is that conferences will decide themselves whether or not to allow schools to give that money to their student-athletes. The problem comes when this gives students an incentive to go to the so-called major conferences as opposed to conferences like the NEC or AE. UConn and BC surely won't have any problem with this as the ACC and Big East will definitely approve, being composed of big universities with major programs. Even UMass and URI in the A-10 and Northeastern in the CAA are in prominent enough conferences that they will likely be able to be the beneficiaries of this policy. Even Fairfield and the MAAC might bite at this new rule. But for schools in the AE, NEC, and Patriot League, this rule could separate them even further from bigger conferences in terms of competitiveness. I'm pretty sure a school like BU would choose to add the stipends in order to remain competitive, but would the rest of the league have the resources or desire to do so? Tenuous times to be sure for many of the region's smaller schools.