To be more specific on a sport, I'm familiar with swim because my daughter swims at D1 level. For a women's D1 team they can divide 14 scholarships among the team. Typically you can get close to a full scholarship if you can score at the NCAA level. Of the top 25 swimmers in a given year powerhouse swim school will do well to land 2 to 3 at best because pulling that caliber of swimmer in requires a full scholarship. Yet Stanford landed 5 of the top 20 swimmers this year and 5 of the top 15 swimmers last year and 2 of the top 20 swimmers in 2015. How do they do that? They are a powerhouse swim school but still. That typically would require 12 full scholarships and you still have about 20 other swimmers on the team that should get some $ - especially if they are scoring at NCAAs which most of them are. 14 athletic scholarships is not enough.

The only way I can figure that Stanford can do this over the other powerhouse swim schools (such as UGA and Cal) is with the "needs based" scholarships. So instead of costing them 12 full athletic scholarships it may have only cost them 6 full athletic scholarships (50% each) because 50% of their cost of attendance was covered by the "needs based" scholarships.

Or maybe these swimmers want to swim at Stanford so badly that they will go there on a 50% scholarship and pay the difference or take loans. But that would be baffling to me.