The money says what a program can spend. These rules say what it can field, and they are being rewritten in real time.
Funding and scholarships are the structural rules that define the roster the money builds. The roster is now a hard-capped headcount of 105 rather than a scholarship count, the funding regime forks by level from full revenue-share down to no athletic scholarships at all, and the eligibility clock gates who is available and drives the whole roster cycle. This is the most contested and fastest-moving layer in the game, so the engine reads the rule as it stands today, builds the roster to it, and flags the boundary where a rule might not hold, carrying the uncertainty in the band.
Scholarship caps are gone. A 105-man limit replaced them.
A composite Division I program. The single largest structural change in the college game is that the roster is no longer a scholarship count. It is a hard-capped headcount, and the engine builds to it.
The college roster is now a hard-capped headcount treated as a binding constraint: a full 105 means an acquisition implies a cut, the cut-and-portal mechanism holds the roster at the limit each cycle, and the money and headcount constraints bind the build together. The money engine says what a program can pay, this limit says how many it can carry. Build to the headcount, and price every addition against the slot it fills.
Illustrative on the real roster-limit regime (the shift from scholarship caps to a roster limit, the 105 headcount, the grandfathered designated student-athletes, the build-to-the-limit constraint). Composite program, rule current-as-of, contested.
From full revenue-share to no athletic scholarships, the engine reads the right one.
A composite set of programs, one at each level. The funding regime is not one rule. It forks by level, and the engine places every program on the level whose rules actually govern it.
The engine places a player's scholarship and aid status on the correct level's rules and reads the Division I shift from scholarship-count to roster-count as the structural change of the era. The level fork is the same one the KLVN ladder spans. Read the level, and the funding regime falls out of it.
Illustrative on the real level fork (the Division I roster-limit funding, the Division II own-limit scholarships, the Division III no-athletic-aid model, the NAIA and JUCO own-body rules, the opt-in structure). Composite programs, rules current-as-of, contested.
Read the rule as it stands, and flag the one that might not hold.
A composite roster of players at different points on the clock. The eligibility clock gates who is available and drives the whole cycle, and it is changing, and it is under challenge.
The engines consume the rules as hard constraints and never override them, but carry every rule current-as-of and flag boundary risk, and they read the portal windows and the recruiting-and-signing calendar as timing constraints on the compressed roster-building cycle. Build to the rule as written, and flag the rule that might not survive the next ruling.
Illustrative on the real eligibility and governance layer (the four-in-five outgoing model, the Five-for-Five incoming model, the litigation context and contested treatment, governance as a confidence input). Composite players, rules current-as-of, contested and versioned.
The money says what a program can spend, but the rulebook says what it can field, and the two together define the roster. The single largest structural fact is that the roster is now a hard-capped headcount of 105 rather than a scholarship count, so building a college roster is headcount management, and every acquisition against a full roster implies a cut. The funding regime forks by level, from a Division I program funding up to the roster limit on top of its collective and endorsement money, down to a division that offers no athletic scholarships at all, and the engine places every program and player on the level whose rules actually govern them. And the eligibility clock, moving from four seasons in five years to five in five, gates who is available and drives the whole cycle of classes entering, portals churning, and eligibility exhausting. But this is the most contested and fastest-moving layer in the entire corpus, rewritten in real time by a settlement, by litigation, and by new legislation, so the engine refuses to treat any of it as settled: it reads the rule as it stands today, it builds the roster to that rule as a hard constraint, and it flags the boundary where a rule might not survive the next court ruling, carrying that uncertainty in the band rather than hiding it in a confident number. Constrain the build by the rules, and price the risk that the rules will change.
Build to the headcount and the level. Flag the contested rule.
Funding and Scholarships reads the roster-limit regime, the level-forked funding rules, and the eligibility clock as the constraints that define the roster the money builds, and it flags the contested boundaries where a rule might not hold, carrying the uncertainty honestly.