Is the era of parity in college basketball over, or will new revenue-sharing rules once again level the playing field? Boardroom examines the future.
March Madness has been dominated by chalk this year.
All four No. 1 seeds reached the men’s college basketball Final Four for the first time since 2008, while the women’s bracket may have been a torn JuJu Watkins ACL tear away from every one-seed making their respective national semifinals. The historical significance of Duke, Houston, Auburn, and Florida earning their way to San Antonio this weekend isn’t the only alarming trend about the future of college hoops, but it’s also in how efficient the quartet of teams have been all year. All four teams rank among the best 10 teams of all-time in KenPom ratings dating back to the ratings’ debut in 1996, perhaps making this the most talented Final Four we’ve ever seen.
But it’s not just the top seeds’ path to the Final Four setting off alarm bells in the sport, but the way in which major conference teams owned March Madness, especially the Big Ten and SEC. Half of the 32 teams that reached the men’s second round came from those conferences, and 11 of those reached a Sweet 16 that included no mid-major programs.
The transfer portal has created yearly free agency in which the best players from smaller schools funnel their way to the top schools with the deepest pockets, leading Norfolk State head coach Robert Jones to call his school a glorified junior college that needs a new team every 1-2 years. The portal has become so intense that even a major conference institution like Indiana lost every single one of its players from last year to graduation or the portal.
The overarching question in college basketball right now is whether the lack of upsets this year is a statistical blip or a sign of things to come with the transfer portal now funneling the best players to major conference schools with the most money.
The best teams can’t even afford to wait until the tournament is over before thinking about loading up their rosters for the following season. The transfer portal opened on March 24 this year, the day after the second round ended, meaning that teams could potentially be offering big money and NIL deals to recruit their current opponents for next season. With the SEC earning a record $70 million in NCAA units for tournament appearances and wins, the gulf between college hoops’ haves and have-nots is only growing wider. Could that one day lead to the SEC and Big Ten breaking away and forming a super league of their own?
This year, however, there’s a chance that this paradigm gets shifted on its head. Thanks to new revenue-sharing rules going into effect this year, the schools with the most money to spend on players may not be from the largest conferences at all.
Subscribe for the biggest stories in the business of sports and entertainment, daily.
Each school will be able to give its players up to $20.5 million in revenue sharing for the 2025-26 academic year as part of a House settlement of three separate lawsuits against the NCAA. For the biggest schools, roughly 75% of that money will go toward football players as teams want to attract the best players for their biggest revenue-generating sport. On average, only about 15% of that $20.5 million is projected to go to men’s basketball players. That may put non-football schools like Rick Pitino and St. John’s in the Big East at a competitive advantage because they can offer their hoopers a much larger piece of the revenue-sharing pie.
The NCAAÂ will no longer monitor NIL deals, but rather a new entity operated by the power conferences. College coaches are already skeptical that such a system won’t be circumvented or abused, putting into question the overall integrity of how athlete compensation and regulation will be regulated and monitored moving forward. Yet, before the system’s eventual implementation, top transfers are flying off the board to major programs, with some players reportedly demanding $2-3 million for their services.
As the country’s four best men’s teams battle it out at the Alamodome this weekend, college basketball’s future contains few certainties. Players will finally get paid directly by schools, but the way NIL and the transfer portal are regulated leaves the future of the sport in serious flux. Will revenue sharing bring parity back to college hoops by leveling the playing field for non-football schools? Or will the system permanently stack the deck for the biggest schools and conferences so that smaller schools feel like junior college farm systems?
Maybe the Final Four will help briefly distract us from the fact that the future in college basketball, despite coming changes, remains as uncertain as ever.
Read More:
How Travis Hunter Could Exceed Shohei Ohtani’s Two-Way Value
Francisco Lindor is the King of Queens
Roku Bolsters Streaming Lead with New Devices, Global Expansion
20 Years of Play: How YouTube Evolved into a Global Media Empire
Inside Jordan Brand’s Big Swing on Golf
