NIL

College basketball is benefiting a lot from new NIL landscape

NIL problems have to be taken seriously, but the positive aspects of the new economic structure are creating a better, more robust product in college basketball Remember the 2025 NCAA Tournament? Not even two months have passed since it ended with Florida beating Houston in a thriller. During that basketball bonanza, a lot of people […]

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NIL problems have to be taken seriously, but the positive aspects of the new economic structure are creating a better, more robust product in college basketball

Remember the 2025 NCAA Tournament? Not even two months have passed since it ended with Florida beating Houston in a thriller. During that basketball bonanza, a lot of people spent a lot of energy emphasizing how bad the product of college hoops was becoming. NIL was tilting the playing field instead of leveling it. The new reality of college sports economics was creating more imbalances, enabling the SEC to put 14 of its 16 teams into March Madness. This was supposedly awful for college hoops. Is it? Is this the way to view the new landscape?

One could be highly skeptical of the direction college basketball is taking in the new NIL era. One conference getting 14 teams into March Madness and having seven of them in the Sweet 16 does reflect an imbalance of power. Yet, we have to wonder if the SEC being great was less a product of NIL, and more a product of the SEC being really smart in its investments, coaching hires, and rebuilding a basketball brand which wasn’t in good shape several years ago.

It could be that the new NIL environment is actually a net positive for college basketball. We don’t have to be hyperbolic and say it’s the best thing ever for the sport — that would oversell the positives of this reality — but we can say something substantially beneficial is coming from the NIL architecture created in recent years. Let’s go through this discussion.

Alex Condon back at Florida

Florida retained one of its elite big men from its 2025 national championship roster. Florida will reload instead of rebuild this coming season and will field a very strong roster with Alex Condon in the middle.

Milos Uzan back to Houston

Kelvin Sampson and Houston are getting one more season from Milos Uzan, which means the Cougars should once again be a Final Four contender and a top-10 team.

Tahaad Pettiford comes back to Auburn

Pettiford eschewing the NBA draft to return to Bruce Pearl makes Auburn a serious national player for yet another season.

Labaron Philon returns to Alabama

Otega Oweh back to Kentucky

You can see the pattern

The point being made is obvious: With NIL funding in place, players who might have been late-first round or early-second round NBA draft picks have an incentive to come back to school, make very good money playing a 35-game season (instead of an 82-game pro season), and improve their draft stock for next year. Roster retention is a very good thing for college basketball. Having teams which bring back prime players obviously improves the quality of the product, instead of having players bolt for the NBA at the first opportunity.

Worrying about the big dogs versus the mid-majors

Power conference strength compared to weakening mid-majors is the best and most relevant argument from anyone who thinks the overall quality and charm of college basketball will suffer under the current NIL reality. It is true that mid-majors will struggle to compete to acquire elite talent in this environment. We won’t ignore this point, and it’s certainly something everyone in the industry needs to think about when considering reforms to the current system, such as it is.

Blue-blood programs aren’t the ones ruling the world

Though Power Four conferences are thriving in the NIL landscape of college basketball, it’s not as though this is a small and exclusive club of blue-blood schools.

This is not a world in which Kentucky and Kansas, North Carolina and Duke, UCLA and Michigan State, are the teams dominating everyone else.

Florida wasn’t elite a few years ago. Houston was in the AAC not that long ago, trying to make its way up the food chain. Auburn is an outsider, not an insider, in the larger workings of college basketball history. Iowa State, BYU, Texas Tech, Arkansas, St. John’s, and a bunch of other schools which aren’t regularly seen at the Final Four are making forward strides.

In other words, this is not college football a decade ago, in which we knew at the start of every season that Alabama and Clemson were going to meet in the championship game or a playoff semifinal. There is still balance and parity in college basketball, with the usual suspects not necessarily being the schools that benefit.

North Carolina has actually struggled. Kentucky has had its ups and downs. Bill Self and Kansas had their worst season in two decades. There’s a lot of competitive balance in the new NIL world. It’s not perfect, but it’s substantially robust.

There are problems with the current NIL setup, but let’s not pretend college basketball is going to hell in a handbasket. There’s a lot to like about the new reality.

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