Trenton Luera, a former college quarterback, breaks down the six levels of college football from FBS down to junior colleges, explaining scholarship availability at each tier. He recommends recruits set clear goals first, then cast a wide net and work backwards from their timeline: start at the top if you're early, work up from the bottom if you're running out of time.
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One of the most important things about being successful in recruiting is understanding each division level in its place. Because if you don't understand that, then it's really hard to find the right school for you, target the right schools for you other because then you're just kind of going clueless. So if you don't know who I am, I'm Trent Lamar, I'm a former college quarterback. I run your first scholarship, but we help families get their first scholarship more. And so let's talk about each division level. We're going to walk through it step by step. I'm going to share some of my takes which you don't have to agree with and we'll go from there. So first off, everybody knows about Division 1 schools. So Division 1 schools are categorized into two groups. FBS, which is a Football Bowl Subdivision, which doesn't really make sense because they have a playoff now they also have the bowl system. But anyway, these are the top tier teams. These are Power 4 schools, Alabama, Texas A and M, et cetera in the group of five schools. Now the group below that is the FCS is the Football Championship Subdivision. These are smaller D1 schools. I don't know is really should be D1, D2, but it's just the system they have. I don't really know the whole history behind it. Now these are schools that are like the Big sky, so Montana, Montana State, North Dakota State, etc. These are so very talented programs. By no means are they bad, they are very good programs. And so from there then we have the D2, that's Division 2 schools. Then we have Division 3 and then we have NAIA, which is its own thing. It's outside of the NCAA. That's why I just really have a division. And then you have junior colleges as well. These are two year schools that you can go to still play football. And then if you, once you get out of those two years can transfer to a four year. And so from there as far as scholarships go, and this is changing a little bit with some of the rules, but Division 1 FPS, any scholarships they offer are our full rides. FCS, they can be broken up into partials, D2s broken with partials. And this gets less and less. I think again this is changing now because there's no more scholarship limits. There's only a roster limit of 105. But so you will see the scholarship, more scholarships be handed out at the Division 1 level than before. But before it was about 85 at the FVS level, 63 at the FCS. Level I believe it was 45, 46. At the D2 level, the Division 3 level, there's no athletic scholarships. There are academic scholarships and needs based scholarships which most of the time means that you will have to pay something out of pocket. And at the NA level I believe it was 24, 32 maybe, I don't know, somewhere around there. And so at the junior college level there are some junior colleges that offer scholarships. California junior colleges do not offer athletic scholarships, at least at this time. So with that understanding, you have to understand what your goal is and what separates each division level, because I was talking about this on TikTok is if your goal is to play in the NFL, if you really want to play at the big time level, then it makes sense for you to go to the high school possible. It makes sense for you to pursue that dream of playing power forward football because that's going to give you the best possible position to play in that phone. Now people argue and say, well, if you play really well, they'll find you. If you're a dog, they'll find you. That's not wrong. There's D2 guys that do get drafted, very few, most of them will be unsigned free agents if they do go. And same with the FCS level, but it is extremely harder. You have to stand out much, much more because your level competition is lower, people do not take you seriously. So if you want to play in that fall, your best chance is to go to the best school possible that allows you to do that, which is the top tier schools. So but if your goal isn't to play in the NFL, if your goal is hey, for me a lot of it was really came down to a few things. It came down to hey, what was going to pay the most for my school so I didn't have to pay as much out of pocket what was going to give me a good opportunity to play and I was going to have a good time at and what coaching staff that I like the best. And for me that's where I found my fit. And for you, if you're looking for a school that gets you out of pocket, then you're really worried about hey, what is that scholarship amount looking like? And so if you're not going to be a D1 guy, then you're probably not going to get a full ride scholarship. And so you have to figure out okay, how can I pair academic with athletic and be able to piece this together into a scholarship that allows me to get to that goal. And so D3 is probably not as much of a fit for you. There are some D3s that will be able to give you a great amount of merit based scholarships that allow you not to pay a lot of pockets. So don't count them out. But it may not be as great of a fit for you. And so now you may be like, okay, well why would I take a D3 scholarship? D3s are high academic schools. A lot of the very academic institutions are Division 3 schools. So that way they can provide sports for that school, but they just can't afford the actual scholarships that they could give athletically. And this is the same reason why there are actually, this is a little bit nuanced. There's actually FCS schools that do the same thing. This is the, the Pioneer League and the Ivy Leagues do not give athletic scholarships because the Pioneer League was actually built to allow bigger institutions that have football teams and still be able to afford it without having to give out the scholarships. So just a little bit of stuff there. So with that being said, recognize where your goal is, what is actually going to help you best. Now with that you should just recognize that. Don't put all your eggs in one basket too early. Obviously like you should test around, see what's exactly going on, who's actually interested in you. Because too many kids and families will focus solely on Division 1 schools, top tier schools, getting whole responses for a full year and go, well, they just don't understand. They don't see, they don't, they're missing something and it's like, no, they're just not interested in you and you have to set your sights lower. So the best piece of advice is don't get too caught up on this, use this scale and this kind of explanation that I'm giving you as more guidance as once you come to make that decision. But the biggest thing first is getting interest and offers first. Because if you don't have any interest and you don't have any offers, then the decision you make will be null because you won't have any decision to make. You'll just be going to school somewhere. And so always cast a wide net. Make sure to try and catch as many schools as possible. So that way you have the interest and offers beforehand. And then once you do have the interest and offers, you can make that decision that's in relation to your goal. And of course if you have a very narrow goal and you know that only a few schools are going to be the one for you, that's fine. I, I don't necessarily agree with that strategy because it just wasn't what I'm looking for. And a lot of families we work with don't have those goals. But then you just really want to specifically target those schools very heavily, very personalized, very nuanced in what you're doing. An example of that is just consistently following up with them time over time, giving them, like, personalized stuff, because you can put more time into that than anything else. That way you can finally get a response, get some interest, and hopefully turn that top or later down the line. Um, so with that being said, hopefully you learned something from this. As far as the division levels go, my take personally is that most time in your recruiting process, the D3s will come automatically because they recruit backwards. They recruit the ath, the. The student first and the athlete second. So if you have this, if you are the kind of student that D3 schools are looking for, which I was at a 4.19 in high school, what happened is a lot of D3 schools would just reach out to me automatically. I didn't really have to generate interest from them. So you don't really need to worry about them until, like, if you want to reach out to D3s, you could do so during your senior year. It's much better to start at the top and then work your way down. Then start from the very bottom and work your way up. Unless you're running out of time. If you're a senior right now, do not do that. Start at the bottom, work your way up, so that way you have some security first. If you're ahead, you should start from the top and work your way down because you got a lot of time to work with and you might as well explore as many options as possible. So hopefully this all helped. If you got something from this like it, be sure to like and subscribe and I will see you in the next one. Peace.
