College basketball’s transfer portal opens with prices rising again. Which schools will keep up?

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.

The Athletic 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.

“You need $7 million to be in the mix, when last year $4 million could get you a really good team,” a general manager of a high-major program said. “Everybody’s coming up with all this money to front-load in addition to the back end of rev share. So if your rev share is $2.7 million from the school, people are trying to raise $5 million in addition to that, where you can pay to retain guys, plus go out and spend a whole bunch of money for transfers.”

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. “Because obviously what we have to operate with is going to be drastically reduced through the rev share — partially because we are in the SEC and football is king in this conference. For this year’s team specifically, we’re trying to get as much done before April 7. And then whatever we are allotted through the revenue share we will then use for the rest of the transfer portal class we have to bring in.”

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 back,” the GM said.

Even several Atlantic 10 programs are expected to set aside $3-4 million in revenue sharing for their men’s basketball programs.

“This is a line item we’ve never had,” an A-10 coach said. “It becomes an institutional choice: What do you want to put towards your men’s basketball program?”

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.

“Some of these guys have the same agent, so the agents ask for more for the players who’ve already done it, which I get,” the GM said. “It makes sense. If a high school All-American is worth $1-5 million, what’s a collegiate All-American worth?”

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.

“I’ve heard Conference USA kids getting offered $1 million,” the GM said. “Sun Belt kids getting offered $1 million. The high-major ones sound like they’re going for $1.5 (million) plus.”

“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.

And that’s for players not even in the portal yet. Most of these interviews were conducted before Monday, when the portal officially opened, but agents have been working the market for months.

“I’ve heard numbers already for kids in the (NCAA) Tournament right now, where they’re going and they’ve got a number already,” the GM said. “It’s pretty cut-and-dry. For the good ones, you see more going in with a no-contact tag than last year. A lot of it is driven by the agents. And the agents are using the same analytical tools we’re using to figure out who’s good at these lower levels in December and just grabbing them.”

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.

The coaching carousel’s upheaval also spurs inflation.

“Brand-new coaches are in brand-new situations with a brand-new, more robust NIL situation than the previous guy,” the Big 12 assistant said. “And then he’s got to go fill potentially 13 roster spots. And so he’s throwing around huge amounts of money right now trying to get some spots filled.”

And then there’s “the illusion of revenue sharing,” as the same 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.

“That would be nice, but I don’t know if we have enough knowledge about our budget to know if we can even do that,” the first SEC assistant said. “You don’t want to over-leverage, over-commit yourself.”

“It’s such a gray area, you really don’t know,” a third SEC assistant said. “You don’t know about collectives going forward and how effective they’ll be. You don’t know what schools in the revenue sharing era will have more money to offer. It’s kind of like throwing a line out there and not knowing what you’re going to catch. You just have to be ready for the next steps, whatever they are.”

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.

“It’s hard to build any real infrastructure because our poles are built in sand right now,” the Big 12 assistant said. “The hardest part of NIL is that there are unbelievably smart, brilliant minds and litigators on both sides of the coin. … And the rest of us are just trying to figure out the rules to the game, and the game is in complete judicial warfare all the time. And none of us truly know what each day is going to bring in NIL. You’re asking all of the right questions, and anything I say could literally be different tomorrow.”

— The Athletic’s Joe Rexrode and Brendan Marks contributed reporting.

(Photo: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)

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