When America tunes in to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on Thursday, the dominance of schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision – and particularly the four power conferences – will be immediately noticeable.
Of the 37 at-large bids handed out by the selection committee this year, only five went to leagues that don’t sponsor football: Four to the Big East and one to the West Coast Conference.
It’s not an anomaly. Over the past five NCAA tournaments, a combined 28 at-large bids went to non-FBS leagues. The five before that, the number was 38.
But the decline may not be permanent. If the House vs. NCAA settlement is approved in April as expected, opening the door to revenue-sharing with athletes, the game will change once again.
And this time, it might work in favor of schools and conferences that care more about basketball than football.
“I really look at where we’re positioned as a huge advantage,” said VCU athletics director Ed McLaughlin, whose school is the Atlantic 10’s only representative in the field this year.
It’s easy to understand why.
Though nobody can pin down the exact numbers yet, the House settlement will essentially establish a salary cap of more than $20 million going to athletes, which schools can divide up however they choose.
Naturally, big-time football programs will absorb most of that money at schools where football is the main driver of revenue. Georgia, for instance, has already announced that it will direct 75 percent to football, 15 percent to men’s basketball, 5 percent to women’s basketball and 5 percent to other sports.
So if the cap ends up at $22 million and Georgia spends up to the cap, that would be $3.3 million for men’s basketball.
VCU, and a number of other basketball-centric schools that don’t have to financially support a football program, will be positioned to spend more if they choose.
“We fully anticipate the revenue-sharing number for us next year to be between $4 (million) and $5 million,” McLaughlin said. “I think we are positioned from strength as this goes forward because we can share revenue with our men’s and women’s basketball, student-athletes at an incredibly high competitive level, to make sure we are a top 25 program. We will never get to the bigger cap, and that’s OK. But we will certainly be able to invest in a high level for the programs that matter financially the most to us.”
Is it romantic? Not in the least. But college sports crossed that rubicon years ago, and the NIL-based system of paying players has been chaotic and opaque.
NIL, of course, won’t go away. But if the new system is implemented and enforced as it’s designed, the booster collectives will be phased out, with a third-party clearinghouse approving so-called “true NIL” deals for players to endorse products or companies.
As always in college sports, schools will be looking for loopholes and other ways to create a recruiting advantage. Even though it might appear on paper that SEC schools are paying men’s basketball players less than some schools in the Big East or A-10, a lot of coaches suspect that rich schools with big fan bases will find ways to eliminate that gap.
Still, it’s potentially a great dynamic for schools whose athletic departments rely on success in men’s basketball to pay the bills.
For the last 20 years or so, administrators at those schools have seen the separation between haves and have-nots generally work against them because they don’t have big-time football and the tens of millions in media revenue it brings to the power conferences.
A small number of schools like Gonzaga have been able to maintain national relevance without big-time football, but they generally find that any success is hard to maintain. Over time, whether it’s coaching salary, recruiting budget or facilities, they simply get out-spent.
Revenue-sharing, at least in theory, changes the equation a little bit because the amount of money committed to player acquisition will be the ultimate barometer of administrative commitment to a program. One head coach currently in a power conference, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, shared a lament about his recruiting budget for next year and suggested he’d be better off at one of the better A-10 schools.
“The Daytons, the VCUs, they’ve always been good jobs,” a person connected to multiple coaching searches told USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of their clients.
“But they’ll have money to compete with the so-called blue bloods. Schools like Florida State or Miami, they’re not going to resource basketball at that level. There are coaches in the Big Ten saying, ‘Hey, I think football’s going to swallow up all my money and I may need to get out.’ ‘
New frontier in recruiting wars
At the moment, it’s still a bit of a guessing game how much each school will put into its men’s basketball roster. While a handful of schools have announced percentages, most are still budgeting or keeping it private, at least until the settlement gets approved.
Greg Christopher, the Xavier athletics director, said he does not expect the conversion from an NIL-based payment system to revenue-sharing will dramatically change the amount of money Big East schools have been investing in their men’s basketball rosters.
Based on his conversations with colleagues in the four autonomy conferences, the Big East has been competitive with the football schools in NIL and will remain so under revenue-sharing.
“I sense top to bottom that we’re probably directionally in the same bucket,” Christopher said. “I haven’t heard of anybody being (an outlier) one way or another. But we have sat around a table and talked through that basketball is our highest priority from a revenue-sharing standpoint.
‘It’s probably a little early for us to get down to a Xavier-specific number, but I would say that from what I’ve heard this year for NIL purposes in our league, the bandwidth is generally in that $3 (million)-$5 million range.”
It will be interesting to watch whether that holds true as the settlement gets implemented or whether schools – especially those that play in 17,000-seat arenas like Creighton or Marquette – can generate enough revenue to kick a couple more million into the player pool and try to gain an edge.
It’s a whole new frontier in the recruiting wars, and schools without football are likely going to spend 90 or 95 percent of their revenue-sharing budget on men’s basketball, based on conversations with coaches and administrators across the spectrum. The hope, at least in leagues like the Big East and A-10, is that it will translate to more NCAA Tournament bids.
But in other leagues, it could cause issues and lead to more conference realignment if some schools opt in to revenue-sharing and others don’t. If schools that aren’t offering revenue-sharing drag down a conference’s power ratings to the point where it has no chance of multiple NCAA Tournament bids, can that league stay together?
That’s one reason why American Athletic Conference commissioner Tim Pernetti became the first to announce a minimum standard for his league, requiring every school except Army and Navy to provide a total of $10 million spread over the next three years.
It wouldn’t be shocking if other leagues did something similar because of how clear the competitive implications will be.
“You want everyone in your league to be trying to win at a high level because all the sudden, what happens is your numbers are naturally just going to be better overall and you’re going to be more competitive nationally,” VCU coach Ryan Odom said.
Given what VCU is prepared to commit to men’s basketball, that shouldn’t be an issue for the Rams and other schools in the A-10 that are making huge fundraising pushes, as we saw recently with Steph Curry’s $10 million donation to Davidson.
Despite the financial model changing again, schools that are truly committed to basketball should have the resources to compete at the highest level, even without football revenue backing them up.
“Our basketball focus in some ways has allowed us, schools in the Big East, to punch above their weight in some ways for a long time,” Christopher said. “I think that will remain true to some degree.
‘We don’t have football, so we don’t have the expenses that come with that. We also don’t have $70 million in annual media-rights revenue. But if the governor is ultimately the (revenue-sharing cap) and not having to feed football and all that comes with that, it does help us prioritize our basketball programs.”