At Small Michigan Colleges, More than 10% of Men Are on the Football Team
At U-M, it's a miniscule portion, but 100 players at a school of only 1,800 is significant
Michigan is home to more Division II and III schools than most Michiganders know. You have schools like Alma, Albion, and Hope College down south and out west, all of which contain anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 students, and you also have more schools of that size as you go north like Lake Superior State and Northern Michigan.
The smaller schools down in the lower peninsula all have somewhat successful football programs for their size and conferences, and the schools up north have legendary hockey programs.
The average football team at the Division II or III contains anywhere from 75 to 100 players on its roster. Interestingly, only 36 of those players are allowed to be on scholarship, and whether those scholarships be full or partial is decided by the athletic department.
Take Hillsdale College, a DII school in the Great Midwest Athletic Conference competing amongst schools mostly from Ohio and Indiana, and whose football roster in total is over 100 players. For a school that is approximately 1,800 students, that makes the football team almost 6% of the entire school.
Of those 1,800 students, just over 900 of them are men, meaning the football program at Hillsdale accounts for over 11% of the men at the college.
To put that into perspective, the University of Michigan football team had 119 players in 2025. The total enrollment for the entire undergraduate student population? Over 51,000 students. That means .02% of the entire school is essentially responsible for bringing in over $100 million to the university every year.
If over 60% of the DII football players are not on scholarship, it begs the question of how meaningful college sports is to the players who aren’t on scholarship and are paying full tuition at a small school.
According to the NCAA, 49% of division II student athletes held a leadership position in a club organization at their respective schools. At most Power Five schools, students are not given flexible enough schedules to participate in clubs within the collegiate community, opening an argument that a Division II student-athlete lifestyle could offer a more balanced experience.
