For most of the NIL era, college basketball has been awaiting a correction.
That has always been the underlying assumption around this market: eventually, the market would become too aggressive to sustain. Donors would tire of writing bigger checks, collectives would become more disciplined, and schools would decide that the cost of building rosters had grown too expensive to keep chasing.
It is an understandable instinct. Over the last few years, player price tags have climbed, roster budgets have expanded and coaches have started talking about talent acquisition in ways that sound much closer to professional payroll management than traditional recruiting. At some point, the money feels like it has to hit the ceiling.
But what if that ceiling is much higher than people want to admit?
I wrote a column last week about NIL donors and what they are actually getting back for their money. The most common response I received had little to do with return on investment. It was more of an exhausted question about where the sport is heading: this spending can’t continue, can it?
I understand why people ask it, but college basketball spending may not be plateauing. In fact, there’s a good chance the ceiling is significantly higher than anyone can comprehend.
Let’s revisit Nijel Pack’s college career, because he was the first poster child for NIL. When Pack transferred from Kansas State to Miami in May 2022, reports quickly linked him to a two-year, $800,000 agreement with LifeWallet, plus a car. Back then, it felt like a warning shot. Not because players weren’t worth real money, but because the scale seemed so far removed from anything college basketball had ever looked like financially.
The reaction was predictable. NIL was still new enough that many people treated deals like that as early outliers — splashy headlines which would grab attention before the market settled into something more reasonable.
Four years later, an $800,000 deal barely registers. And that may be the clearest evidence we have that college basketball is nowhere near the top of this market.
Most NIL conversations still rest on an assumption nobody has actually proven — that schools, donors, and collectives will eventually run into some kind of wall, and spending will level off on its own. The problem is that almost everything happening around the sport points the other way.
Opendorse pegged NIL spending across men’s and women’s college basketball at roughly $932 million for 2025-26; in the first year of the NIL era, that figure was closer to $314 million.
Whatever that trajectory is, it is not a market running out of steam. If anything, college basketball looks like a sport that is still figuring out exactly how expensive it can become — and if that is the case, the future probably looks very different from what most people are picturing right now.
For a long time, the financial divide in college basketball was something we discussed almost entirely through conference affiliation. The power leagues had the money, facilities, audiences, and the most exposure. Everyone else did not, which was a driving force behind the expansion and realignment of leagues.
The increased spending is now drawing a second line, and that line runs straight through the middle of the power-conference tier itself. Duke and Boston College share a conference, yet they do not share anything close to the same financial reality.
That gap between the handful of genuine national brands and the broad middle class of power-conference basketball may end up being one of the defining stories of the next decade. It will not be simply because some schools care more than others, though that matters, or because a few of them were clever enough to figure out NIL before everyone else. It will be because the biggest brands are sitting on advantages that have very little to do with how generous their collective happens to be.
They have bigger audiences, deeper donor pools, and stronger alumni networks. More importantly, they carry more national visibility and more media value, which simply gives them more ways to turn attention into money. They have also started behaving like organizations that no longer treat any of this as a temporary spike.
Duke’s recent moves are worth paying attention to when viewed through that lens. The Blue Devils’ new arrangement with Amazon — three exclusive neutral-site games on Prime Video starting next season — is not just another media partnership to file away. It is a signal of something larger happening at the top of the sport, where the biggest brands have decided to build new revenue streams around themselves instead of waiting for the old ones to grow.
The proposed Diamond Cup gets at the same idea from another angle. The eight-team event, organized around blue bloods like Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and UConn, reportedly pays participating schools somewhere around $4 million a year, and it is exactly the kind of fresh inventory the top of the sport is racing to invent.
Duke was in talks to be part of that event, but walked away from a guaranteed blue-blood payday because the deal they could strike on their own was worth more than what they would take home sharing a stage with seven of their peers.
The important part is not just the money. It is who is creating the opportunity.
For most of the modern era of college athletics, the conference has been the organizing force behind a school’s media value. Conferences negotiated the television deals, packaged the inventory, built the distribution model, and sent schools their share. The biggest brands benefited from that system, of course, but they were still largely operating inside a collective structure. Duke’s value helped the ACC. Kentucky’s value helped the SEC. Kansas’ value helped the Big 12.
What we are starting to see now is something different.
The biggest basketball brands are beginning to look at their own value and ask why they should wait for a conference office to monetize it for them. If Duke can create a package of neutral-site games with Amazon, and if a group of blue bloods can build an event like the Diamond Cup outside the normal conference ecosystem, that represents a meaningful shift in how power is being exercised. The schools are no longer just waiting for the next media rights cycle or hoping their league office finds more revenue. They are trying to create their own commercial inventory, which matters because it gives the biggest brands another way to separate.
A conference can lift everyone to a certain point, but individual brand monetization does not work that way. Duke can sell Duke. Kentucky can sell Kentucky. Kansas can sell Kansas. Smaller schools with smaller fan bases cannot simply borrow that value because it shares a league patch with one of them.
That is the new divide, captured in a single decision. Duke could have joined a lucrative event built around the collective power of blue-blood programs. Instead, it found a better path by monetizing itself.
The assumption buried underneath most of these conversations is that schools will eventually look at the spending, decide the proverbial juice isn’t worth the squeeze, and pull back. But the programs operating at the very top do not look anything like organizations preparing to pull back — they look like organizations trying to figure out how they can get to and sustain numbers even bigger than today’s.
The schools with the strongest brands are out looking for more to sell — content, events, streaming packages, sponsorship inventory — and more revenue they can keep to themselves. That is simply what mature entertainment businesses do, and college basketball’s biggest brands increasingly understand that is what they have become.
They are not only basketball programs anymore — they are media properties, with audiences large enough to throw off real commercial value well beyond ticket sales and the traditional television check.
The hard part for the middle of the sport is that none of those opportunities are distributed evenly. Rutgers cannot monetize itself the way Michigan can, and Mississippi State cannot do it the way Kentucky can. The same conference logo sitting next to a school’s name does nothing to create equal market power, and pretending otherwise has quietly become one of the more convenient fictions of the NIL era.
Right now, most of the NIL discussion still orbits collectives and boosters — which donor wrote which check, which collective raised how much, which program managed to assemble the most expensive roster. But the more interesting question is what happens when the richest programs stop leaning primarily on donor money and start building self-sustaining commercial machines around the sheer size of their brands. That is the moment this stops resembling traditional college athletics and starts looking a lot more like global soccer.
The comparison is not perfect, and I do not want to push it further than it can reasonably go. But parts of the structure are really hard to ignore. The biggest soccer clubs on the planet do not outspend everyone simply because their owners enjoy spending money. Those clubs command more attention than anyone else. Attention is what generates sponsorship, sponsorship is what generates revenue, and revenue is what lets them keep buying the best players — the same players who then deliver the success and visibility that pull in even more money.
The cycle feeds itself, year after year, and it is extremely difficult to break into from the outside.
College basketball is not operating anywhere near that scale yet, but the early stages of that same separation are already visible if you are willing to look for them. The biggest-brand programs are positioned to benefit from every direction NIL is moving at once. They already hold the recruiting advantages, dominate the television exposure, and now they are adding monetization tools that most of the sport has no realistic way to replicate. And they are doing all of it while roster spending is still climbing rather than flattening out, which is the whole reason it feels premature to talk about NIL as though some inevitable correction is waiting just around the corner.
Consider how professional leagues actually work. NBA and NFL owners are running businesses, and the leagues they operate have guardrails built in specifically to keep spending wars from spiraling. The NBA has its salary cap and luxury-tax penalties, while the NFL has a hard cap that is even stricter.
In a real sense, those systems exist to protect the owners from their own worst instincts.
College athletics, as of last year, technically introduced something resembling a cap. The House settlement brought in revenue sharing, so schools can now pay athletes directly up to a leaguewide limit.
On paper, it looks like the same guardrail. In practice, it has not worked that way.
Collectives and third-party NIL deals still operate freely around that cap, which means the ceiling functions more like a floor. The money did not stop — it just found a different way to get to its destination.
And the people supplying a lot of that money are not behaving anything like professional owners weighing margins and worrying about the luxury tax. They are often driven by emotional attachment rather than financial logic. They want to win, they want to stay relevant, they want to beat the schools they have always wanted to beat, and they want to feel connected to a program’s success.
Of course they do.
College sports have understood for a very long time that people will do deeply irrational things for the teams they love. NIL and pay-for-play did not change that instinct. It just put a price tag on it and dragged it into the open — and once winning is (openly) tied to spending, the pressure to keep escalating only gets heavier.
You can already hear that pressure in the way coaches and the media talk about building a team.
A few years ago, individual NIL deals dominated the headlines because they still had the power to shock people. Now, entire rosters get discussed openly in financial terms, and coaches, agents and administrators reference roster budgets about as casually as they would a starting lineup. Reports of an elite program spending $20 million on a roster do not generate anything close to the disbelief they would have a few seasons ago. If anything, the disbelief comes from an elite program *not* spending well into eight figures.
The market just keeps quietly resetting upward.
Who is to say that, in 2030, we won’t look back on where we are now and say we were foolish for thinking we were at the peak of spending?
There is real evidence to back up that notion, too.
In 2025-26, the first year of its new media deal, the NBA is generating roughly $6.9 billion a year from its television and streaming partners. College basketball's most valuable asset, the NCAA Tournament, currently brings in a little more than $1 billion annually through its deal. The rest of the NCAA's championship inventory, the women's tournament included, sits in a separate ESPN agreement worth around $115 million a year. Add it all together and the comparison is not particularly close. The NBA is pulling in something like six times what college basketball's signature event generates.
That kind of gap would make sense if the audiences were just as lopsided. They are not.
The NBA averaged about 1.78 million viewers a game this season, its best mark in seven years, and there is no reason to undersell that. But college basketball's best inventory does not trail those numbers — it beats them.
Duke's win over Arkansas on Thanksgiving drew 6.8 million viewers, and Michigan State and North Carolina pulled 6.5 million on the same afternoon. The NBA had strong regular-season windows of its own, but its high-end nights generally topped out closer to three million. And then there is March, where the comparison stops being a comparison at all. The 2026 NCAA Tournament averaged 10.9 million viewers across three weeks, and the Michigan-UConn title game reached 18.3 million. The NBA's regular season simply does not have anything that climbs that high, and the postseason fails to match up, either. Game 1 between the Thunder and Spurs was the most-watched Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals ever, and it brought in 9.2 million viewers.
College basketball is in a genuinely unusual spot because of this. It is a sport whose best games match or beat the NBA's best games, and whose postseason operates on an entirely different tier, yet its national television revenue still comes in at a fraction of what the NBA commands.
That is not the profile of a sport that has run out of financial room, but rather the profile of a sport that has been underpaid relative to what it actually draws.
The more interesting question is why. And the answer has little to do with popularity. It has to do with structure. The NBA sells one unified, league-controlled package, a single set of rights negotiated once and covering everything from October through June. College basketball's value, by contrast, is scattered. The men's tournament is one deal. The other championships are another. The regular season is carved up across conference-level contracts the leagues negotiate individually, and the most valuable of those contracts are driven primarily by football rather than basketball. The sport does not capture its own worth efficiently because it was never organized to be sold as a single product.
As such, it feels premature to assume the money is close to topping out. Inefficiencies in a market this large tend to get corrected eventually, and the inefficiency here is not subtle. When the next round of media negotiations arrives, and when the biggest brands keep demonstrating that they can generate real revenue on their own the way Duke just did with Amazon, the pressure will build to price college basketball closer to what its audience suggests it is worth.
The worry has always been that the money these programs are spending will eventually dry up. But it is worth considering that money has been the thing lagging behind all along. There is still a meaningful distance between what college basketball draws and what college basketball is paid, and as long as that distance exists, the numbers have somewhere left to climb.
There’s also the intangible dimension of understanding how college basketball’s audience behaves. The sport does not approach the NFL in raw popularity and, as we just pointed out, it does not reliably outdraw the NBA on a game-to-game basis either. But focusing solely on television ratings misses what makes college athletics commercially powerful in the first place, because the emotional investment around it is a fundamentally different animal.
March Madness is still one of the biggest events on the entire American sports calendar, every single year. Rivalries command regional attention in ways the professional leagues often cannot touch. Entire communities organize their sense of identity around programs that represent schools they attended, or grew up down the road from, or simply inherited as a kind of birthright.
Loyalty like that creates real value, and it produces spending behavior that has never followed conventional business logic. People will pour extraordinary sums into things that feel tied to their identity, their status, and their sense of belonging. College athletics have always lived off this reality. NIL simply moved the marketplace out of the shadows, taking what used to be hidden spending and indirect advantages and turning it into an open, fully visible arms race.
All of which makes it increasingly hard to look at this moment and call it the peak. It seems far more likely that we are watching an early phase of college basketball turning into something structurally different from anything it has been before — a sport where payrolls openly shape who contends for championships, where the biggest brands keep widening the distance between themselves and everyone else, and where the commercialization grows more aggressive precisely because the stakes attached to winning keep climbing.
If that is genuinely where this is headed, then the LifeWallet deal tied to Nijel Pack was never the moment college basketball went too far financially. It was simply one of the first public signs that the economics of the sport were changing much more dramatically than anyone realized at the time.
And I still don’t think we’ve grasped the scale of those economic changes.
