Excuse St. John’s athletic director Ed Kull if he’s highly skeptical of the suggestion that the Big East is poised to become men’s college basketball’s big-budget bully.
Kull can’t fathom a scenario where the sport’s deep-pocketed traditional powers allow Big East programs to outspend them for top-tier talent.
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“Unless you’re telling me their collectives are all folding and shutting down, I can’t see how that’s going to happen,” Kull told Yahoo Sports.
The idea that Big East basketball is among the big winners from last Friday’s House vs. NCAA settlement stems from the structure of college sports’ new revenue-sharing rules. Schools can directly distribute a pool of up to $20.5 million to athletes in year 1 (July 2025 to June ‘26) and can give out even more money subsequently as the annual cap escalates.
SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC schools are preparing to spend most of this year’s sum on football in an effort to remain competitive in the sport that rakes in the most money and bankrolls the rest of an athletic department. The University of Georgia earlier this year revealed that football players will receive 75% of the available money, compared to 15% for men’s basketball, 5% for women’s basketball and 5% for the school’s remaining teams. Texas Tech has previously earmarked 74% to football. Other power-conference football programs are expected to gobble up 70 to 80%.
Those projections leave most Power Four men’s basketball programs with pools of about $2 to $4 million to pay their players. Schools with richer tradition in basketball than football — a Kansas, Kentucky, Duke or North Carolina for example — could conceivably exceed that and distribute up to $5 million to men’s basketball players in an effort to stay ahead of the competition.
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The calculus is very different for schools who don’t have to feed the football beast, schools that either don’t have FBS football programs or don’t have realistic aspirations of competing for titles at that level. Big East schools, as the theory goes, can invest heavily in basketball with however much cash they can raise. In the Big East, only UConn has an FBS football program. Butler, Georgetown and Villanova compete in football at the FCS level.
“Basketball is in fact our priority sport here, so that’s where the money’s going first,” Big East commissioner Val Ackerman told Yahoo Sports.
“We’re lucky that all our members are focused on one sport,” Kull added.
The same goes for Gonzaga, perennially men’s college basketball’s best program that doesn’t hail from a power conference. Gonzaga athletic director Chris Standiford acknowledged the “structural advantage” of Gonzaga being able to distribute a higher percentage of its revenue sharing pool to men’s basketball players, but he also deemed the idea that the Zags could now outspend SEC and Big Ten programs a “false narrative.”
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Whereas schools from the Power Four conferences are all gearing up to pay their athletes the maximum $20.5 million they’re allowed to, neither the Big East schools nor Gonzaga are likely to even approach that cap figure. They may not have the financial burden of football, but they also don’t have the revenue that comes from massive football media rights deals, sponsorships and ticket sales.
How close to the $20.5 million cap will Big East schools get? There are Big East schools “approaching half,” one source told Yahoo Sports. Another source estimated that Big East schools will ultimately pay athletes anywhere from $7 million to $12 million in revenue-share money, with the majority going to men’s basketball. Both sources noted that Big East schools are raising this money through pleas for alumni donations and corporate sponsorships.They can’t simply rely on existing revenue streams.
Standiford declined to estimate how much Gonzaga will pay men’s basketball players, but he made it clear that without the benefit of football revenue, the Zags also won’t come close to the $20.5 million mark. Gonzaga, Standiford said, is “committed to being competitive.” That doesn’t mean always being the highest bidder. It means raising enough money to make competitive offers to priority recruits and hoping that Gonzaga’s winning track record and history of player development prove persuasive.
Bryan Seeley, a former assistant U.S. attorney who has served for more than a decade as MLB’s vice president of investigations and deputy general counsel, has been announced as the CEO of the College Sports Commission, college sports’ new enforcement entity. (AP)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
“When our coaches are out recruiting, we want to be in the conversation financially with student-athletes that our coaches see as a good fit for our program,” Standiford said.
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While Gonzaga and the Big East schools may be able to directly allocate more money to men’s basketball players than their Power Four peers, they’re not naive enough to think that an SEC or Big Ten juggernaut is just going to concede a recruiting battle. They expect Power Four schools to try to make up for any financial disadvantage via third-party and booster-backed name, image and likeness deals.
The House vs. NCAA settlement calls for the establishment of a new enforcement entity, the College Sports Commission (CSC), which oversees the rev-share cap management system and NIL Go clearinghouse. The CSC, headed by former MLB vice president of investigations Bryan Seeley, will be responsible for stamping out the pay-for-play deals that have dominated the NIL era of college sports, theoretically capping the market for athletes and ensuring that schools do not exceed the $20.5 million they’re allowed to distribute.
Athletes are required to submit to the clearinghouse all third-party NIL deals that exceed $600 — so basically all of them. The clearinghouse then must determine which deals are for a valid business purpose and are within a “reasonable range of compensation” and which are simply a recruiting incentive.
How will the clearinghouse determine which deals are circumventing NIL rules and which are legitimate? Nobody knows. College coaches and administrators are also in the dark on whether the clearinghouse’s decisions will hold up in court against a legal challenge and on what sorts of investigative or punitive powers the new enforcement arm will possess.
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Caitlin Clark appearing in a State Farm commercial or Cooper Flagg hawking New Balance shoes almost certainly wouldn’t trigger any red flags. But what about Tyson Chicken brokering a seven-figure deal with an incoming five-star point guard at Arkansas? Or Nike doing the same for a coveted quarterback transferring to Oregon? Or some school’s collective connecting a wide receiver with a car dealership owned by an affluent alum?
“What everyone is waiting to see is how this NIL clearinghouse will work,” Ackerman, the Big East commissioner, said. “If schools are capped per the terms of the House settlement but they can circumvent the cap through these third-party payments, then I think that any quote-unquote ‘advantage’ that anyone has is out the window. That would threaten this structure that has been crafted, which is intended to create some guardrails and to allow schools to responsibly manage their money.
“If the Wild West we’re in now can’t be managed through this clearinghouse and schools can supplement in significant ways what they’re spending directly, it will remain to be seen who the advantage goes to.”
For either Gonzaga or the Big East to have any semblance of a financial edge, the clearinghouse must be able to combat pay-for-play NIL deals and power-thirsty boosters who flout the rules by depositing money into athletes’ bank accounts under the table.
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Count many in college sports circles as having serious doubts that will happen.
Ohio State donors reportedly raised $20 million to pay for the 2024-25 football roster that went on to capture the national championship last January. The men’s basketball rosters everywhere from Kentucky to North Carolina to BYU reportedly will cost well over $10 million next season. As Kull, the St. John’s athletic director noted, it’s hard to give big-money donors the power to help assemble a team for a few years, only to yank it away out of nowhere.
“I know the thought process and the hope was that the settlement would remove collectives from the equation,” said Kull, the St. John’s athletic director. “I don’t see that happening. An SEC football program might get 80% of the revenue sharing money, but it’s not going to dissuade their boosters in how they’re currently doing NIL for basketball. So I don’t see it being the advantage that we all in the Big East would love it to be.”
The way Standiford sees it, third-party NIL deals are about to be “the new battleground” in college athletics. The Gonzaga athletic director envisions athletic departments investing heavily into telling the stories of their star players, building their individual brands and trying to make them attractive to corporations seeking to partner with college athletes.
“You can compete in an open market for the advantage of your program, versus trying to beat the rules,” Standiford said. “Play by the rules — just do it better than anybody else.”
