Understanding college hoops rosters is about to get even harder

If resource allocation is opaque now, just wait for the real mess

Photo credit: USA Today Network

On this second-ever edition of the Basket Under Review Podcast — available on your preferred podcast app now! — Will Warren and I discussed one of the major themes that’s been rattling around my head all offseason:

The next step in understanding college basketball roster construction will involve a clearer idea of not just how much programs are spending, but how they are specifically allocating that money across their rosters.

The key example was North Carolina, which has reportedly spent upwards of $14 million on its 2025-26 squad, all for the privilege of ranking No. 18 in Bart Torvik’s preseason ratings. Maybe Carolina will be better than that, of course. Who knows? It’s July. Still, there is no mistaking this roster for the one you would imagine if all you knew about it was that one of the most storied programs in the history of the sport had spent more money this spring than anyone else. It’s a fine group. It’s pretty good! But you can’t help but look at this team and wonder where, specifically, all that money actually went.

This is not to pick on UNC (again). It is just one example among many that makes me — to say nothing of the fans and boosters whose donations float these money pools in the first place — wish there was a maybe bit more to analyze here than thinly sourced reports.

If you care about the NBA at all, you can’t listen to five minutes of a podcast without learning how much a recently signed free agent is going to make by the third year of their deal, and how that affects the signing team’s overall cap situation, and how many pick swaps they have, and what their apron status is, and on and on. The market position of every NBA player is perfectly known, almost to the point of mental exhaustion, a culture we’re hardly asking the college game to replicate. But a small sliver of that transparency, and the roster composition analysis that could flow from it, would be both useful and fun.

Such knowledge could also, more importantly, become data coaches would love to have handy each April: Which positions are the priciest to fill? Which are the least? Where can you bargain-shop? Where is the supply most scarce? The Division I men’s basketball talent market is huge and diffuse and almost certainly super inefficient. Everybody is flying half-blind.

We had hoped that the imminent arrival of revenue sharing, standardized budgets, and the contract clearinghouse might at least indirectly shed a bit more light. The rough NIL frontier was having centralized authority forced upon it. Bureaucratic modernization couldn’t be far behind.

Ha. Nope! Wrong. Wrong.

In fact, from everything coaches anonymously told reporters from the sidelines of the Peach Jam last week, it sure sounds like college basketball is about to become an even bigger, more unknowable mess.

(Update: While writing this Tuesday and Wednesday I missed the news that the CSC and House attorneys had come to a “preliminary” [though not yet confirmed] agreement to allow collectives to submit NIL deals through the clearinghouse like every other kind of business, which sounds like the good outcome hoped for later in the column, and would alleviate a lot of the concerns expressed below. So we’ll see, but worth updating all the same.)

A quick primer: