The price of talent is spiking to record amounts -- again -- now with hundreds of millions at stake in college hoops' unregulated economy
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The $10 million club: College basketball's portal recruiting hits unthinkable levels of financial chaos
The price of talent is spiking to record amounts -- again -- now with hundreds of millions at stake in college hoops' unregulated economy
Three years ago, Nijel Pack left Kansas State and signed a two-year NIL deal that paid him $400,000 per season to play at Miami. It made him, at that point, the highest-paid player in college basketball and predictably precipitated geyser-like response. Shock, awe, cynicism, celebration, criticism, admiration, you name it.
Pack's publicly disclosed contract by a high-profile Miami booster made national news and signaled a dam-breaking event amid an uncertain, fledgling era of college athletics that guaranteed one thing and one thing only: NIL agreements would get exponentially more excessive in the years to come. All the way back in 2022, it was hard for some people to wrap their minds around the idea of a college basketball player with minimal name recognition earning a $400K/year contract.
Three years later, the size of Pack's payday barely registers as a headline-worthy transaction in college athletics.
Here's what $400,000 will get you for one season in 2025: a mid-major guy who averaged fewer than 10 points on a non-NCAA Tournament team. This isn't hypothetical; that very thing has already happened multiple times in recent weeks.
Nowadays, the sport is producing millionaire players on the regular.
Piloting through the portal to roster-build has never been more cumbersome — yet simple. The more money you have relative to the schools you are competing against, the easier it is to recruit the players you covet most.
More than 2,000 men's Division I basketball athletes entered the portal in the past three-plus weeks (it closes April 22). Almost all have done so to achieve a better situation and, most importantly, find more money. That is what is driving the overwhelming number of these transfers. Money, money, money ... and more money.
Five years ago, more than 4,400 Division I men's basketball players were legally and collectively paid a grand total of $0 in NIL earnings. That number is now promised to be in the hundreds of millions.
"It's insane," one high-major assistant told me late last week on the imbalance between how good a player is (or isn't) and how much money they're seeking.
This has been the feeling ever since so-called NIL compensation was made allowable almost four years ago, but it's exacerbated to cartoonish levels with each passing year. The coach quoted above had been recruiting a mid-major player who wasn't even top-three on his team in scoring. Nevertheless, this coach liked what he saw and thought the player could transfer up and maybe fight his way into the starting lineup. His school offered the player north of $500,000 — more than the coaching staff wanted, but bidding wars lead to some strange recruiting tributaries.
They didn't get the player.
A competing school swiftly came over the top and signed him for $1 million. (Another coach I checked in with to verify the story claimed the number is in fact $1.2 million.) The player was so bowled over by the offer, he signed a contract even before eventually calling and telling the other school what he'd done.
"I could hear it in his voice, just how shocked he was by the amount of money they were promising him," the coach who lost out said.
A role player on a mid-major that failed to make the NCAA Tournament will be paid at least $1 million next season. That's where we're at in college hoops. It's just one amazing story out of hundreds being swapped across the sport these days.
As one general manager at the Power Five level told me this week: "You can't even verify some of these numbers. What's real? What are we bidding against?"
"All of these numbers are insane," an SEC assistant texted Wednesday. "Going to have 4-5 guys [on our roster] making way more than me! "
While the reasons for college basketball's explosion in player pricing are many, one big culprit is the domino effect from the richest programs. Approximately a dozen schools are inflating the market because they have the capital to do so and the thirst to chase almost any player, regardless of how big the price tag. This dynamic has fattened in a matter of months.
A year ago, a handful of schools were able to easily clear $5 million. But now? That budget number has doubled — minimally — as has the quantity of programs with eight-figure accounts. A recent tweet from 247Sports' Travis Branham shed light on how much money is being injected into the fortunate upper echelon of college basketball.
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Eight will prove to be too thin a crowd for college basketball's $10 million club. Based on a variety of sources, schools believed to be operating in the realm of this golden tier are:
- Arkansas
- BYU
- Duke
- Indiana
- Kentucky
- Louisville
- Michigan
- North Carolina
- St. John's
- Texas Tech
These programs either have $10 million committed already or are easily capable of reaching that total in roster-building efforts by the end of this year's transfer cycle. They are 2025's whales of the portal, loading up on most of the priciest players and drastically inflating the market in the process.
There's another group of schools a rung below this. Don't cry for these guys, as they're still hitting at least a hearty $8 million if required. This includes (but is not exclusive to) Auburn, Connecticut, Florida, Houston, Kansas, Kansas State, Miami, Purdue, Tennessee, Texas, UCLA, USC, Villanova, Virginia and still a few more trying to get there in the coming week(s). In talking to sources at these schools, even if most aren't at $10 million, there are still a couple in this lot that told me they could get there if absolutely necessary. (So: just by asking the right one, two or three really rich boosters for even more money.)
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Just sayin': I don't see Ohio State in the schools mentioned in above article; which might be a clue to the reason that (so far) Ohio State isn't getting any "top tier" player out of the portial. Do the math: (obviously few players will get much more and several will get less, however) $10M/15 players = an average of $666,666 per player.
