What Big Ten basketball coaches are talking about, from roster strategies to scheduling struggles

The vibes are different around Big Ten men’s basketball this spring, both individually and collectively. Michigan ended the league’s 26-year run without an NCAA title by knocking off UConn 69-63. Six league members reached the Sweet 16, four made the Elite Eight and Illinois joined the Wolverines in the Final Four.

At the Big Ten spring meetings in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., coaches and administrators projected universal confidence in the league’s on-court product.

“The Big Ten obviously has been a top-tier league for a long time, but we did have the national championship drought,” Michigan coach Dusty May said. “Now we have that off of our backs, and I think the league continues to gain momentum in basketball and football and women’s basketball.”

“I think the game is in a good place even with all the stuff on the periphery,” Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg said. “You take that away, that’s a pretty good product on the floor right now, and I think you saw that in the tournament.”

But the chaos surrounding runaway spending, the transfer portal and the proposal to give all athletes five years of college eligibility dominated conversations. The Athletic talked about these topics and more with six Big Ten men’s basketball coaches at the Terranea Resort, where the meetings were held.

Nonconference scheduling

The 2026-27 men’s basketball regular season tips off on Nov. 1, which is earlier than ever before. Teams can schedule 32 regular-season games, an increase from 31. But the extra game hasn’t made finding nonconference contests any easier.

Hoiberg, who led Nebraska to its first Sweet 16 in March, has tried to bring a power-conference opponent to Lincoln in early November because the Huskers are traveling to in-state rival Creighton. But nothing has materialized.

“We’re playing a lot of neutral-site games,” Hoiberg said. “It’s a great way for us to build up our (NIL) pot, so we can build a roster.”

Iowa has a similar issue. Ben McCollum, who guided the Hawkeyes to their first Elite Eight in 39 years in his debut season, continues to search for power-conference foes but thus far has settled for a game against Creighton in Des Moines, which is located about halfway between the campuses.

“We’re working on trying to get some more marquee games,” McCollum said. “If not, we’re going to try to play some neutral games closer to Iowa City so that we can get our Iowa fans there.”

Players can collect name, image and likeness money from neutral-site games and tournaments, such as The Players Era in Las Vegas, which has nudged coaches toward those events and away from traditional multi-team events. Those MTEs often require a $100,000 or more to participate and sell their own media rights.

“Everyone’s transitioned away from the traditional MTEs for obvious reasons,” May said. “Our league has been more of an adviser to us of not giving away free inventory that has value to ourselves.”

“It’s like, do you play one neutral game for a lot of money, or do you go to an MTE that you have to pay money?” McCollum asked.

Big Ten play

Travel has been an unavoidable headache since the league’s West Coast expansion, and more than any other sport, men’s basketball coaches have made their thoughts on it public. It’s particularly rough for the four former Pac-12 members, who make three (in USC’s case) or four (for UCLA, Washington and Oregon) trips to the Central or Eastern time zone for conference games each winter.

The four West Coast teams went 7-21 on their trips east last season, with a 14-point average margin of defeat. USC coach Eric Musselman requested a three-game road trip, which was granted, and the Trojans lost at Michigan and Michigan State by a combined 59 points before knocking off Minnesota in overtime. Musselman thought his team had adjusted the right way by the third game, and he wants the Big Ten to allow four-game road trips, which he dealt with often when he coached in the NBA.

“I’m just following people that have been doing it for a long time, meaning the NHL, NBA, like they do it for a reason,” Musselman said. “Economically, it makes more sense. It’s better for your body.”

UCLA coach Mick Cronin, never shy about expressing his opinions, is on the opposite side of that issue. After his Bruins upset top-five Purdue at home last January, he called out the league office for scheduling five of UCLA’s first seven Big Ten games on the road. He said in May that he later received a helpful answer on the league’s rationale.

“What they were trying to accomplish was keeping us home towards the end, anticipating that we’ve got to go to the Big Ten tournament, and then we might have to go (east) again to an NCAA site,” Cronin said. “They front-loaded us on the road, so there’s a thought process to it.”

The league office sent each program a survey requesting feedback on the scheduling sequence. Among the questions included is whether the teams wanted more games in December than the two currently sandwiched in between nonconference matchups before the new year.

One area of difference among the coaches: one-day preps. The West Coast coaches would prefer only one day of prep between games on their trips east, which was granted once to Oregon and once to Washington last year. Among the Big Ten’s old guard, the two-day prep became a core scheduling principle and remains the coaches’ preference.

Recruiting

Should the NCAA Division I Council give final approval to eligibility rules changes that have been in the works for months, thousands of college athletes will receive a fifth year of competition. In basketball, that change would directly impact the current recruiting cycle.

“The 5-for-5 rule is a huge one for how we’re going to construct our rosters moving forward,” Hoiberg said. “It’s going to obviously put hundreds of more players available to build your roster with next year.”

More veteran players on the market mean more opportunities to win immediately, but they’ll be more expensive, and their presence will push hundreds of 2027 freshmen down a tier, sending some three-star prospects to lower levels. As one of the coaches quipped, “I guess they’ll go to a mid-major for a year and then we’ll sign them.”

Transfers powered Michigan’s first national title since 1989, but the Wolverines are going strong with high school recruits in this cycle. Their six incoming freshmen, including a five-star and three four-stars, rank as the nation’s No. 4 recruiting class per the 247Sports Composite. May said freshmen will provide “the foundation” of his future recruiting classes. The success of his first two seasons has helped him look at prospects differently and not “make too many concessions on certain players.”

“If you have to go another direction from a guy you’re recruiting, there’s going to be a lot more options,” May said. “Before it was almost like, if we don’t get this guy, we may not be able to replace this level of talent.”

Cronin chooses his recruits more carefully as much to preserve his own sanity as to comply with UCLA’s strict admission standards.

“The lack of rules, the lack of guidance, the lack of guidelines, you’ve got to raise all this money, nobody likes any of that, so I gotta like something, right?” Cronin said. “I want to like my players. So for me, it’s just make sure they’re good kids and coach them up and enjoy them and try to help them chase their dreams and make sure they get a UCLA degree. It just simplifies it for me because the rest of it will drive you nuts. It’ll drive you out of coaching.”

The financial ‘arms race’

Every college coach is thinking about money, and there’s a general paranoia about what other programs are providing their players amid the overall lack of clarity.

“With revenue sharing coming into play this year, you thought there’d be some rules in place, but there really hasn’t,” Hoiberg said. “The deals have gone up. It’s really hard to operate in today’s landscape.”

Wisconsin coach Greg Gard bemoaned the lack of “guardrails” pertaining to outside payment for players and called the atmosphere surrounding the sport “a constant survival of the fittest.”

“Until we get to a point where you have salary caps and arbitration and players associations and everything that governs professional sports that tries to create the equity, there’s going to continue to be the haves and the have-nots, and there’s varying levels right within our league,” Gard said.

“At Wisconsin, we continue to compete and do things with maybe less resources than some other competitors have, and we’ve been doing it that way for a long, long time, long before all this really had the curtain pulled on it.”

With two players earning more than $2 million, Iowa provided significant resources in McCollum’s first season, but the Hawkeyes still fell far below what many traditional powers pay.

“I think the arms race is important,” McCollum said. “You do have to embrace somewhat of what’s happening and make sure that you are ready to compete with that, and if you don’t compete with it, then you’re going to fall behind, unfortunately. And you just got to embrace it, and hope that eventually they’ll come up with some sort of rules and guidelines and salary caps and all those things.”