Open any social media app, search up “portal” or “NIL” (name, image and likeness) and there will be a host of opinions lampooning today’s college sports landscape, with comparisons often being made to the Wild West. 

The last half-decade in the industry has been defined by uncertainty, turbulence and endless legal battles. The introduction of NIL policies in 2021 have turned educational institutions into dueling bidders, waving money at student-athletes to either get them to transfer to their school or, if they’re already at the university, to prevent them from going on the open market. There’s been little to no regulation on who can spend – or how much. 

Calls for change were louder than ever, to the point where house representatives and senators offered up their two cents on the issues. Ultimately, it appears the Supreme Court will have the final say through House vs. NCAA, a case heading towards a settlement that looks to provide the stability many across the country are looking for. 

Scheduled to take effect in the next month, the settlement will permit colleges to spend up to around $20 million on their own student-athletes yearly. That money can be paid out through direct payments to athletes, NIL benefits or through increased scholarships, although any spending on scholarship benefits past $2.5 million won’t be counted.

Don’t let the number fool you: most Division I schools have nowhere near $20 million to spend. Universities in the “Power 4” conferences (Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12 and Southeastern) can hit that mark, but very few, if not all schools outside of them can’t. 

These non-power schools have dealt with adversity throughout their entire existence. The only response they know of is to fight back, and in the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s case, to not only survive but thrive in this new climate. 

“We’re going to be in a really positive position as it relates to our [Mid-American Conference] peers from an additional benefit, scholarship and NIL standpoint in our investment there,” athletic director Ryan Bamford said. 

“In a sport like basketball, we want to compete with the Big East schools, and we don’t just want to compete with the MAC schools. We want to compete for student athletes: for acquiring them, recruiting them and then retaining them with those in the Big East and some of the [Power 4 schools].” 

Overall spending

According to Bamford, the University plans to spend $5-to-6 million of the approximate $20 million cap on its athletes in 2025-26. He plans on that number rising to $8-to-10 million the following academic year. 

While few non-power schools have gone public with their numbers, it’s safe to assume that even $5 million puts UMass in a good spot. At the very least, it’s likely one of, if not the top number in the MAC, the school’s new home as of July 1. 

“[Our finances give us] a pretty good head start and advantage,” Bamford said. “I think we [have] to spend those resources strategically and smartly.” 

However, money will not instantly give UMass a winning team. On the extreme end, Kansas State set aside one of the biggest war chests in men’s college basketball this past season just to finish with a losing record. Schools with the deepest pockets, though, typically have the best odds of succeeding. 

“My assumption is that they’re going to want to be in the top 10 percent in [the MAC in] basketball spending because they want to come here and run this league, which is doable,” sports enterprise reporter and founder of Extra Points Matt Brown said. “[The MAC] is the poorest [FBS] league in the country … these are mostly not healthy institutions.” 

Where the money comes from

Getting to that $5 million mark, or any number that schools aim for, has been difficult for many departments. Costs have to be cut somewhere, leading to programs being shuttered, staff pools being downsized and more. 

A popular option nationwide to cut costs has been to limit non-conference travel for Olympic sports, an idea that Bamford has considered but hasn’t committed to yet. More likely, he said that some athletic support systems will face minor budget cuts. 

“Some of the nutrition and dining programs, the academic support services, we’re in a really healthy spot in a number of areas that if we were to adjust, pare it back by five percent, it’s probably not going to change the operational posture,” Bamford said. 

“We’ve already talked to our coaches about [it], that if you could do away with five percent of something, what would it be? … It’s just going to get reinvested into something that probably, by measure, would impact winning a little bit more.”

On the flip side, schools are also looking for new revenue streams to boost their monetary bases. For UMass, the primary source of this extra income will be the new Script U Scholarship Society, an initiative founded by the Minutemen Club. This will allow fans to pay a certain amount yearly for student-athletes’ scholarships and/or additional benefits, such as covering team travel costs. 

“In the past, you had to give to the Gridiron Club to get football benefits, you had to give to the Court Club to get basketball benefits … We’re trying to build a holistic UMass fan,” senior executive director of development Drew St. Aubin said. 

If a fan puts a certain amount of money into Script U, they’ll get benefits in return. This will range from preferred parking to team travel opportunities at the $10,000/year “Flagship” level. It will cost a little more out of donors to get a little less, and Bamford acknowledged that, but he said the majority of the fanbase understands what’s needed to keep UMass competitive. 

In a way, Script U serves as another de facto NIL collective for the athletic department, joining the external multi-sport Massachusetts Collective. 

There was a tumultuous relationship between the school and the external football-centric Midnight Ride Collective. The handling of the two parties’ dissolution was considered to be controversial, but there are benefits to an internal setup. Primarily, older donors may feel more comfortable donating their money directly to a university. 

The other focus of the department financially is to gain incremental revenues from existing sources. Whether that’s through ticket sales, multimedia rights, their Adidas contract or a different area, anything that brings in money will be analyzed to see if UMass can further capitalize on it. 

Team-by-team payouts

With this revenue-sharing money, according to Brown, the standard benchmark for colleges is to give 75 percent of funds to football players, 15 percent to men’s basketball, five percent to women’s basketball and the remaining five percent to be split up between other sports. 

But UMass is not your typical school. 

“If you’re spending 75 percent of $5 million or 75 percent of $8 million on football, the players that UMass is going to be recruiting and probably retaining are about the same,” Brown said. “You’re still going to lose anybody that Penn State wants or Boston College wants for that matter.”

“But UMass can win a national championship in men’s hockey … So the question then becomes ‘Do I spend less on football so I can make more meaningful investments in hockey?’ … or do I put it in for football because if football gets cooking, we’re going to have a lot more money for anything else anyway.” 

Bamford thinks his school can operate in both areas at once. 

To be clear, Bamford’s stated plan is more like Brown’s first scenario. He said that if UMass does reach its $10 million goal down the line, closer to $5 million, or 50 percent, would likely go to the football team.

Though that split means the team will inherit much less than an FBS team’s average cut – 75 percent of revenue-sharing money – it doesn’t automatically mean it will extend its 14-year streak of losing seasons. 

According to Bamford, head coach Joe Harasymiak has over $2 million in NIL money exclusively for next year’s roster, which Bamford claims is around double the next-closest MAC team (likely Toledo or Ohio). If that’s true, then coupled with additional benefits like education-related Alston payments, UMass will operate in the best of both worlds: saving money on football to give to other sports while having enough invested in the program to be one of the MAC’s elite. 

The men’s basketball team will be a major benefactor of the department’s decreased emphasis on football, with head coach Frank Martin taking over 15 percent of the pot. Although schools like Akron and Ohio have built up respectable mid-major budgets, there’s confidence within that UMass will be a big fish in a small pond in the MAC, carving out a path to NCAA Tournament appearances. 

“We’re going to be in a position in two or three years where we may be spending more than potentially some of the high-end [Atlantic 10] schools and maybe even lower-end ‘Power 4’ schools in basketball,” Bamford said. 

There’s endless discussion surrounding college football and basketball teams’ NIL budgets, as stories like Matt Norlander’s in April that bring up specific numbers give fellow reporters and fans talking points for months. The regional nature of college hockey, however, means not much is known about what top programs need to spend to build a championship-contending roster.

For the Hockey East – widely considered an elite conference on the ice – the outlook on revenue-sharing is mixed. Schools with FBS football or power conference basketball (UMass, Boston College, UConn and Providence) are likely set up a little better to compete in hockey, given their expanded pools. That same reasoning has led some to believe that the Big Ten could dominate in hockey in short order, with most, if not all of its schools having the full $20-plus million in revenue sharing to work with.

Schools outside of that realm, like Merrimack and UMass Lowell, have to be much more strategic in how much they want to spend on the ice. With a smaller pool that could be at two million dollars or less for the entire department, hockey could take a football-sized share at these universities. 

Then there’s last season’s Western Michigan squad, which won the NCAA championship without a cent of NIL money being spent. It’s risky, but not fruitless, to build a legitimate roster solely through culture and strong recruiters like UMass has in head coach Greg Carvel and his assistants.

The verdict from Bamford is that below five percent of funds will go to the school’s hockey team in 2025-26. In the following year, that cut will jump to between five and eight percent. Using the low end of financial projections, that gives Carvel $400-640,000 to work with in 2026-27. Those numbers, Bamford estimates, would make UMass a top five spender on hockey in the nation.

Since power-conference schools are worried about supporting and advancing their football teams, the opportunity is there for UMass to spend more on the ice compared to other schools than in years past.

Women’s sports in Amherst will be supported as well. The women’s basketball team will lead, receiving around five percent of funds, but UMass can gain more of a competitive advantage through its planned support of other women’s programs.

The school’s plan leaves a healthy portion of money (15-20 percent of the total pool) to be handed out even after football, basketball and hockey are taken care of, and Bamford has decided to use that capital to continue to chase success in other women’s sports.

A group of six women’s programs (softball, field hockey, women’s soccer, women’s lacrosse, rowing and tennis) will receive money in an era where peer institutions may shut those teams out from revenue-sharing plans entirely. MAC schools likely won’t touch UMass here: if some do shell out for women’s Olympic sports, their reduced finances and more aggressive spending on football will leave their programs lagging behind the Minutewomen.

Long-term challenges and opportunities

An important message: Increased funding does not mean UMass athletics will immediately succeed. Especially for a non-power school in today’s environment, such results are near-impossible. 

A good chunk of the initial money put up for revenue-sharing will come from Script U, taking the biggest share of that pot outside of payments coming from the MAC. With the benefits donors receive, the vision is for them to spend enough to help teams create or build off of winning cultures. Over time, the department hopes this will lead to renewals at similar or higher price points.

But what if in the near future, the wins don’t arrive? What if football spends $3 million on another losing season? What if basketball has a first-place budget for a fifth-place MAC finish? It’s tough to imagine the Script U benefits will be enough to keep people invested at the same level. 

“We’ve got to be very strategic [with our donors] in how we time it out and what we ask for, knowing that for the most part, it’s ‘How many times can we go to the well?’” St. Aubin said. “ … As tough as it can be, it can switch overnight if we’re throwing some teams out there that are winning and they’re exciting.” 

There may be issues getting long-time donors to spend money in the first place. Some people might have been fine with donating $5,000 in 2010 to build better facilities at their alma mater, but they’ll hold on to that money in an era where unpaid labor has been replaced with sizable payouts. 

“How do you convince somebody to donate money to pay for a salary that makes more money than you?” Brown said. “Especially if you’re not very good … Once the school can [pay], I think that becomes a harder sell.”

Retention will also be an issue unchanged from the NIL age. If a donor believes their investment will keep players around and they’re consistently proven wrong, that will be disheartening. The more money poured in, the greater the odds are that top players stick around, but continually failing retention could be another cause of donors backing away. 

The talent gap between mid-major and powerhouse schools also poses a concern. While the rich get richer, schools like UMass can face issues trying to keep up and build a program that can compete.

Does winning the MAC basketball title in a conference that’s twice as weak as it used to be feel the same? Did millions need to be spent? If the answer is no and the budget can be reduced, is it okay to acknowledge that UMass will never again be on the level of a power conference team? 

Revenue-sharing solves problems, but it also raises many questions.

For mid-major schools and their athletic directors like Bamford, it may be easier just to live in the moment. Win now, or win soon, and the money likely keeps coming in. 

They’ll always be at a money disadvantage, yes, but for now, Brown says there’s one saving grace: “Nobody actually knows how the f*** to spend this money [on players].” 

The rulebooks and collective bargaining agreements present in professional leagues don’t exist in college, Brown said, so nobody can find loopholes in CBAs that get them talented players for cheap. 

“It’s entirely possible that a school with less money finds some market inefficiencies and distributes and spends their money better than someone with a lot more money, just like we saw in baseball,” Brown said. 

Find the right players, create a culture, raise the money and it’s only a possibility that consistent success will come. That’s asking a lot to go right for non-power athletic departments, more than has been asked of them in the past. 

To be fair, non-power schools have never had it easy either. In a subdivision of college athletics that supports over 350 departments but is consistently led by the same 50 or so spending-wise, the remaining 300 need to get creative if they want even a chance at knocking off high rollers, such as finding those market inefficiencies. It’s been that way no matter what NCAA rules have been in place, and it certainly won’t change now.

There’s a bit of a paradox with these new regulations, though, signifying that another creative response may be for non-power schools to lean harder and harder into the status quo.

As power schools spend more and more money, a school content with spending $4 million on sports every year will likely need a miracle to get itself into the limelight. To ensure the highest odds of success, smaller schools need to embrace the new climate and chase after unique revenue streams and innovative funding ideas.

UMass has enough money to where major innovation isn’t required immediately, but it may be needed at some point to ensure the department’s long-term success. That will mean even more of a buy-in into this new landscape, one that industry experts and other voices in college athletics say will impair non-power schools.

To Bamford, that mindset couldn’t be further from his own.

“I think we got a chance to be the best UMass we can be.”

Dean Wendel can be reached at [email protected] and followed on X @DeanWende1.