CBS Sports college basketball insiders Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander spent a month surveying 100-plus Division I men’s basketball coaches for our annual Candid Coaches series. They polled across the sport’s landscape: some of the biggest names in college basketball, but also small-school assistants in low-major leagues. Coaches agreed to share unfiltered opinions in exchange for anonymity. We asked 10 questions and are posting the results over a three-week span.
It’s hard to have a conversation about college athletics with just about anybody these days without it eventually turning into and back-and-forth about name, image and likeness. That’s my experience, at least.
Everybody wants to know what you’re hearing. Everybody wants you to try to separate fact from fiction. Everybody wants you to share the wildest story you’ve heard. So, with this in mind, we decided to ask more than 100 college basketball coaches the following question as a part of our annual Candid Coaches series:
What is the most amount of NIL money somebody has asked you or your staff to pay for a player?
| $2 million or more | 10.4% |
| Between $1 million and $2 million | 40.6% |
| Less than $1 million | 49.0% |
The takeaway
Those who follow our Candid Coaches series should know that we survey people from all levels of the sport. So, yes, head coaches who have won national championships at high-major programs annually participate in this poll — but so do assistants at low-major programs and everybody in between.
For most questions, that doesn’t hurt as much as it provides perspective from all levels of the sport. It’s an approach that usually works well. But the variety definitely led to misleading surface-level results here.
So let me provide some context.
Among the power-conference coaches we polled, the main thing you need to know is that a whopping 77% of them told us their staff has been asked to pay at least $1 million in NIL for a player. Does every power-conference transfer ask for that much money? No. Does every power-conference program pay that much money? No. But what the results of our poll showed is that impactful transfers at the high-major level are indeed routinely asking for at least $1 million to enroll. What they’re actually getting to enroll is another story. But more than three out of every four power-conference coaches we polled told us they have been asked to provide seven-figure NIL deals in exchange for a player.
The biggest number we heard was … $5 million!
Seriously, one coach told us his staff was asked to provide an NIL deal worth $5 million to ensure the enrollment of a player. Considering there’s been no reporting to suggest a men’s basketball player has ever received anything close to that, I’m assuming the staff politely passed and the price eventually dropped.
I do appreciate the boldness, though.
And that, more than anything else, is what we heard from most coaches — that nearly every player in the transfer portal worth pursuing is asking for something, often something out of line with reality. One coach told us he was informed that it would take $400,000 to get a transfer who had just averaged around five points per game at the mid-major level.
“My jaw is still dropped,” the coach said.
Another coach told us his staff offered $50,000 for a player and was subsequently made to feel like the offer was insulting.
“It was $50,000 more than he deserved,” the coach said. “He wound up going to the SEC.”
For the record, we did have nine coaches either decline to answer the question or tell us they’ve never been asked for NIL money — but literally every one of those men work at a place where NIL simply doesn’t exist.
Where NIL does exist, though, so do requests for money — even at the mid-major and low-major levels, where the opportunity to earn is more limited but definitely available. Speaking of, the number of mid-major and low-major coaches we polled also skewed the broader numbers connected to this question.
So let me provide more context.
As you can see above, 49.0% of the coaches who answered this question told us the most NIL money their staffs have been asked to provide for a player is a number less than $1 million. But one thing worth understanding is that more than 75% of the coaches who answered that way work outside of the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, SEC and Big East. What that highlights is that coaches working in those five leagues — the only power conferences college basketball now possesses — are mostly in a different world than the world where mid-major and low-major coaches reside with the gap between the haves and have-nots growing.
To summarize, at the high-major level, a good player is likely to ask for an NIL package worth more than $1 million. That’s what our polling shows. But at the lower levels of the sport, the requests are typically smaller — usually for much less than $1 million, and, in most cases, even less than $100,000. That’s what our polling also shows.
Either way, the numbers have really spiked in recent years.
We didn’t ask about this specifically for our series, but one coach I spoke with did go out of his way to make the point that the amount of NIL money being requested and paid is significantly higher than it was just two years ago. Is every player getting every penny he’s reportedly supposed to get? Absolutely not. There are lots of exaggerations in the media. That’s a consensus among coaches. But what’s also a consensus is that the so-called going rate for impactful players has increased quite a bit and quickly.
“The same player who got $50,000 a few years ago is now getting $200,000 — and the player who got $200,000 a few years ago is probably asking for a million (now) and nearly getting it,” one coach told me. “I used to have a good NIL package. About $2.5 million. That used to be good. But it’s nothing now compared to some SEC and Big 12 schools. I swear some schools are spending $6 or $7 million in the transfer portal. We can’t do that at my place. But that’s about what it takes now.”
Bottom line, it’s not even that the sport is changing. The sport has changed. What used to get coaches fired — i.e., paying players — is now one of the biggest and most important aspects of the job. I’m not going to insist you can’t win big at the power-conference level without spending millions of dollars to build a roster, but what I am comfortable insisting is that it’s very hard and improbable.
Players know this. If not, their agents know this.
That’s how we’ve reached the point where Coleman Hawkins and Great Osobor have reportedly secured deals worth roughly $2 million. A real market exists. They are good players. Good players are valuable.
But it’s not just good players asking for good money.
Mediocre players from mediocre programs are often also asking for good money, which is something one coach told us he finds problematic but also understandable considering how a lot of this stuff is reported. “Given what these kids and parents have heard, and what’s been reported, and even some of the numbers I know, it’s hard to knock some of these kids for what they’re asking for,” the coach said. “At the end of the day, it’s like a house. You are what the market says you are.”
True.
But one thing a lot of coaches told us over and over again is that there’s a big gap between the market a lot of so-so-players think exists and the one that actually exists for players of their caliber. That’s where coaches said they often find themselves rolling their eyes as conversations unfold.
This one story, in particular, had me laughing:
“I had one of my assistants come to me and tell me it was going to take $800,000 to get one kid we were after,” a coach said. “I had to make sure we were talking about the same player! I’m not against players making money; they deserve it. But you wouldn’t believe some of the players asking for crazy amounts of money. … Put in your poll I’d be happy to pay an All-American $800,000. But the player who asked us for $800,000 wasn’t an All-American. Nowhere close. And a lot of that is going on. Crazy times.”
Previously in Candid Coaches…
