On April 7, the eyes of the college basketball world should be on San Antonio, the site of this season’s men’s national championship game.
Instead, every college program—including the final two left standing—will also be monitoring the action hundreds of miles west in a courtroom in the Northern District of California. That’s where Judge Claudia Wilken will hold a hearing for final approval of the landmark settlement in the House v. NCAA antitrust lawsuit, which is expected to bring the latest seismic shakeup to college athletics: the introduction of a revenue sharing system through which schools will be allowed to distribute up to $20.5 million directly to their athletes.
That date is doubling as a deadline for college basketball coaches to sign deals with players under the “old rules” of the past few years, in which name, image and likeness collectives associated with but not run by the schools could essentially craft pay-for-play agreements under the guise of NIL deals. In the rev-share era, those pay-for-play deals will be signed with the schools themselves, and any deals that come from collectives will need to go through a NCAA clearinghouse charged with assessing their legitimacy and “fair-market value.”
The issue is that the price of building a contender has ballooned to well above what most men’s basketball programs will have to work with from the split of their school’s revenue sharing cap. Most staffers at the Power 4 conferences are expecting about 15 percent of their schools’ rev share budget—around $3 million for a school spending to the cap across all sports—to go toward men’s basketball.
I spoke with men’s basketball coaches, general managers and administrators over the past few weeks to get an impression of this year’s player market and the challenges that will come with the rule changes. They were granted anonymity in order to speak candidly about the market in a time when very few schools openly discuss concrete numbers. Last offseason, the consensus was a team needed to spend $3-5 million on its roster to be competitive at the high-major level. This year that number is expected to fall in the $5-8 million range, with some of the top spenders expected to reach $10 million.
While it is not a given that Wilken will approve the settlement on April 7—administrators expect approval will come in the weeks that follow, and the direct revenue sharing model would take effect in July—just to be safe, coaches are using that date as a deadline to get deals signed to retain current players and, if possible, sign new ones because they know the terms. NIL deals (for both high school prospects and transfers) signed before the House settlement is finalized and paid before June 30 do not have to go through the clearinghouse.
“Right now we’re trying to get as much done before revenue sharing kicks in on April 7 as we can,” an SEC assistant said.
Once the settlement goes into effect, a school can directly pay a player whatever it wants without justifying that it’s a fair-market deal, but any payments beyond what’s budgeted through revenue sharing will need to be funneled to players through a collective.
“I wish collectives would go away for everybody,” a Big 12 coach said. “But if anybody has one, we’d better have one. I think if you’re going to try to compete, you have to have one.”
That’s especially true for basketball programs in the Power 4 leagues, which fear that non-football-playing schools, especially in the Big East, will have an advantage. SEC and Big Ten programs may have an easier time setting aside the $20.5 million for athletes because they bring in more in revenue, but what, for instance, is to stop Villanova or St. John’s from allocating $15 million for men’s basketball alone?
“You might see the Big East be back,” a general manager of a high-major program said.
What’s driving prices up?
There’s a lot of money in the market this spring. The uncertain role of collectives in the revenue sharing era has some programs operating as if they need to spend all excess funds controlled by their current collective. And players are asking for more, dating back to the fall, when the asking prices for five-star high school recruits matched what the top transfers received a year ago. That has in turn increased the asking price for transfers this year.
The consensus is that transfer price tags have risen to two to three times what the same level of player went for a year ago.
“We’re seeing some outrageous numbers on some kids that are marginal at best,” a second SEC assistant said. “Like, unproven.”
“And the number goes up every week whoever you’re talking to,” said an administrator who helps negotiate NIL deals for his school.
Roster retention is also a priority, and at the high-major level, typically every player a team wants to keep is getting a pay bump. While it’s possible to get in a bidding war for your own player, those situations are more avoidable than they are for talent in the portal.
And then there’s “the illusion of revenue sharing,” as a Big 12 assistant describes it: “Agents have been sitting back waiting on this for a long time, just the idea that programs are going to be sitting here flush with cash.”
What’s next?
A year ago, some coaches were talking about trying to get players to sign multi-year contracts to counteract the nationwide removal of transfer restrictions, but the year-to-year uncertainty of what the landscape will look like has basically eliminated that option.
Most believe that if non-football schools do exercise their revenue-sharing “cap space” advantage and outspend the Power 4, it will not be for long. The SEC and Big Ten’s television contracts alone make it easier to find the funds to supplement revenue sharing. And because the revenue sharing cap is set at 22 percent of the average of power-conference programs’ revenues, it will increase in future years, freeing up more potential basketball spending for football-playing schools flush with cash.
The SEC and Big Ten account for 11 of the 16 schools left in the NCAA Tournament, and others fear they’ll continue to be able to spend their way to dominance.
“Northwestern seemingly is going to have a much easier time getting to the max salary cap than Duke, North Carolina or Kansas,” the Big 12 assistant said.
That is assuming revenue sharing passes and the NCAA continues to change the rules, or is litigated into doing so, on a nearly annual basis. Which is one of the only assumptions college basketball coaches are willing to make.
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