2026 NCAA Tournament General Discussion
- By ScriptOhio
- Buckeye Basketball
- 271 Replies
Teams in football or basketball that don’t invest in NIL are going to be left behind and that gap is going to increase in the next several years. The teams that had the best seasons in football and basketball this year had the biggest spending. Texas Tech has come out of nowhere with their spending in football. Schools need to adapt if they want to win. Is winning important or not? We are going to find out in the next several years.
In the NBA players are a free agent after 5 years, 4 years if the team doesn't exercise the player's 5th year option. In college basketball players are a free agent right out of high school and can transfer at will. Some players have even been known to play at 4 different schools to complete their 4 years of college eligibility.
Yeah, for those teams that want to be a "contender" for a National Championship; the spending on NIL deals to get and/keep players is only going to go up. In addition, it would be impossible for the NCAA to establish a "salary cap" and enforce it without some "collective bargaining agreement". No elite or top college player in his/her right mind would ever want to unionize since it would ultimately restrict what they could earn. I'm sure they are happy with the "status quo" of several schools bidding for their services and no limit of what they can get. Now sometime in the future I could see the ≈ 90% of the lower tier players (i.e. have nots) get extremely jealous and/or resentful of the huge amounts of money the ≈ 10% top tier (i.e. haves) are getting and want to unionize to make the distribution of NIL dollars more equitable, etc.
Note: In the United States, unionizing a workplace generally requires a simple majority vote—defined as 50% of the votes cast plus one—in a secret ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
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