Trenton Luera, a former college quarterback, explains what a scholarship offer is, how to recognize a legitimate offer, and corrects common misconceptions—starting with the myth that all offers are full rides. He contrasts D1 FBS (only full scholarships) with lower divisions (FCS/D2/D3), NAIA and JUCO where scholarships can be split and full rides are rare.
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So what even is a scholarship offer? I'm going to break down exactly what a scholarship offer is. How you know you actually have one and some of the common misconceptions about scholarship offers. First, if you don't know who I am, I'm Trenton Loera. I'm a former college quarterback and I help recruits just like you get recruited to play college football. So if you don't know, a scholarship offer is when a college coach offers you a scholarship to their school to play college football, or it can be for any other sport, the scholarship offer essentially saying that, hey, we're going to pay you to come play for our school because we believe that you are a good enough player to play for us and help our program out. Now, this comes to misconception number one is that every single scholarship offer is a full ride. That is not true. Now, at the D1 FBS level, which is like the top of the top, they can give only full rides. They can't split up their scholarships. But below that. So D1AA or FCS or however you want to call it, D2, D3, which D3 doesn't even offer athletic scholarships, NAIA and JUCOs and split up scholarships, though you still can receive full rides. They're extremely rare. And most of the time, if you're going to get a full ride.