With the college basketball season still far enough away on the horizon — 49 days to the Nov. 3 opener — we’re trudging through the biggest offseason lull before the eager spell of the preseason arrives in mid-October.
But don’t go thinking everything is calm and copacetic in the world of college hoops. Just the opposite. Right now, many a program and many a coach are semi-reluctantly lurching forward in a new frontier of recruiting amid this messy, undefined era of revenue sharing. Diehard fans who follow recruiting should have seen their social media feeds regularly popping with commitment announcements from five- and four-star players …. but that pattern has been mangled as the majority of coaches are squirming over the ever-shifting contours to the sport’s altered recruiting landscape. To put it plainly: high school recruiting is in a weird place. It’s been that way for the past couple of years, but September 2025 is inducing a rubber-meet-the-road reality that is entirely new territory.
The state of play has rapidly evolved over the past four years. Now, it’s changing once again, which has led to a big-picture standstill. Here’s why.
An uncontainable spring 2025 spending spree — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars promised to players across the sport — preceded the summer’s official shift to the revenue-sharing era after the House case was formally settled. With that, uncertainty and angst permeated heavily, and immediately.
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Summer’s unease set the scene for college basketball’s next stage, right now: a nationwide “game of chicken” that’s playing out with the recruiting of high school seniors in the Class of 2026. Seventeen-year-olds are going on official visits to schools nationwide and hoping for big pitches and bigger money, only to get half-answers and wait-and-sees from coaching staffs. That’s not what was happening the past three Septembers. We’re two weeks from October and just six of the top 50 players in the country have committed. Expand that out to the top 100 prospects and it’s a mere 20 names, with November’s signing period less than two months out.
The reasons are three-fold:
1. With the exception of 10-or-so five-star freshmen, older players acquired via the portal are considered better assets than first-year guys, so a high-major transfer’s value has skyrocketed since 2021
2. The mandates of revenue sharing have inarguably ebbed the market, which is creating friction between players (and their agents) and the coaches and general managers trying to find common ground on value in 2025 vs. what it’s been the past two or three cycles
3. The high school class of 2026 is, on the whole, considered much weaker than the ones from the past few years
“This week was the first week we talked a specific number with any recruit,” one SEC coach told CBS Sports. “It’s a game of chicken. So many schools aren’t throwing out a number because we don’t know. Everyone’s apprehensive.”
Said one Big 12 assistant: “I only talk about guaranteed money. Leave some ambiguity for the unknown. There are so many different avenues to gray areas that we have no idea if they’ll be blocked later down the line.”
Nearly a month into the academic calendar, some schools — places with Final Four banners — haven’t even had official visits yet.
“Our visits are later, which is a good thing for us so we can see the market based on the visits they’re already taking,” one SEC assistant said. “The biggest unknown is what our budget’s going to be. We know what our rev share number is potentially going to be. But are collectives going to come back in the fold and can we get that money back? NIL Go, will there be substantial deals? Will we be able to go around NIL Go? One of the biggest things teams are working on right now is how to circumvent NIL Go, figuring out areas that NIL Go can’t touch.”
College basketball’s market went bonkers in 2025 and now the boomerang back to a much more grounded economic environment — by force of the terms of the House case settlement — has initiated an awkward multi-week run of official visits from coast to coast. There are promises that can’t be made and skepticism about what “market value” actually means in college athletics heading into 2026.
“If people do start asking for numbers, don’t let NIL be the reason you don’t come to our school,” an SEC coach said of his program’s recruiting process. “We’re not going to be the ones that are going to set the market, because we don’t know what the f— the market is yet. We’re waiting for [other schools] to set the market and match it as best we can.”
Finances still up in the air for a lot of big programs
Another reason for the lag is some schools know how much money they have and others do not. That inconsistency and uncertainty is contributing to delay tactics nationwide. Why don’t certain schools know? Spin tactics from athletic directors, some of whom are still struggling to grapple with a drastically different budgetary environment than what they worked in as recently as three years ago.
“A couple schools in the Big East know exactly the number they have,” one source in that league told CBS Sports. “We have no football, none of us will hit the ($20.5 million) cap. So, when a kid’s on a visit I can sit in front of him and say, ‘Here’s the number.’ There’s no NIL Go, no company that’s a for-profit and I have to convince them to give you 50K. More than the money, the greatest advantage we have is we can do THAT.”
What benefits schools in the Big East and some select other schools putting high priority on basketball (Kentucky, Louisville, Indiana, etc.) is the combination of the financial competitive advantage but also the clarity from school leadership. Those schools, for the most part, can recruit with a bravado — knowing their athletic department is fully behind them — that other schools fear will make a big difference in the coming weeks and months.
And that type of financial backing will probably be a difference-maker come next spring when the 2026 portal market blooms.
Schools in the Big Ten and SEC that are paying their 2025-26 rosters more than $10 million will have their official payrolls drastically cut in the next two years, barring unexpected change in protocol by the College Sports Commission. Some big-name programs in those leagues are well under $3 million in revenue sharing, sources told CBS Sports, after raising eight figures in NIL deals in the previous year.
“You have some coaching monsters out there. Coaches who were at $10, $12 million. How are you making up that $8 million? How are you going to sit in front of a kid that Xavier, Butler and Creighton are going to sit in front of and convince them they can trust you to come there when you can’t guarantee that number?” the aforementioned Big East source said. “These big schools are bitching right now and are all sitting on a path to hopefully having money, they just don’t know how they’re going to spend it yet. I don’t know when they’ll be able to guarantee it. If you were at $12 million and got knocked down to 3, how much are you able and willing to recover?”
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The reverberations are already being felt as most top-100-level high school seniors have obtained representation. Here’s an anecdote: One SEC coach told the agent of a high-end 2026 prospect he has a budget of $3.5 million as things stand now, looking ahead for 2026-27. The agent is purportedly hoping the player can be signed for north of $1 million, but this SEC program can’t commit that much to a high schooler, not knowing how much money will actually be available come the spring of ’26.
“This is about who can sign players that can guarantee money, and as you look deeper, if you can’t guarantee money to incoming guys, how can you guarantee it to your returnees?” one source in the Midwest said. “Things are going to start shifting quick. The power schools, usually when they get frustrated, action follows. Will we see the collectives run wild? Nobody knows what to do right now.”
Shy of that SEC coach convincing himself to fork over more than 25% of his budget on a player with zero college experience, he’s probably going to lose out on what might be his top high school target. The agent will find $1 million plus for his client elsewhere because he believes the market will exist, even if it’s not there right now.
“There’s a level of education that we’ve been trying to do with agents,” one Big Ten coach said. “You have some that understand and some that refuse to hear it. Three-fourths don’t get it or they think you’re lying to them.”
Here’s another tale from the past few weeks: A school that would objectively be viewed as a top-10 program in the sport is recruiting a four-star prospect in the class of ’26. They’re recruiting against at least two Big 12 programs and a Big Ten program, if not more. One school apparently has offered a package to the player that includes $750,000. Another is said to have put up $1.4 million, at least verbally. And another school involved, a nationally relevant program, is yet to give the prospect a number.
The aforementioned top-10 school feels like it’s in a recruiting standoff because it doesn’t so much believe that the $1.4 million from its competitor is doable, considering the school that is making that offer and the fact it’s in the Big Ten with a limited budget. What’s more, the top-10 program has no interest in offering that much to the player … but doesn’t want to step away from the recruitment just yet.
Across the country, hundreds of recruiting standoffs like this are taking place. And there seems to be a widening gap between what players in 2026 think their value should be vs. what coaches are willing to pay. Who blinks first?
“I’ve got a set mark of a percentage and I’m running it like a business model,” another SEC coach told CBS Sports. “There’s a number for freshmen and this is what I’m going to spend on freshmen, and if it doesn’t fall into it, I’m not going to overspend. “I just heard a school offered an incoming freshman $2 million, and it’s not in the Big East. How. Literally, how?”
The befuddlement stems from the overwhelming majority of power-conference schools (that have FBS football) not going north of $4 million (and plenty not exceeding $3 million) in revenue sharing. Ergo, theoretically, no team with a projected budget under $5 million should be offering almost any freshman close to $2 million. Of course, for as frustrating as this will be for many coaches, none of them are surprised.
“If you’re involved with a top-100 kid and they’re down to six schools, someone’s going to act like there’s no rev share and throw out a huge number,” the SEC coach said. “Agents I’ve talked to are acting like this won’t hold up and it will 100% go back to what it was last year. That’s the sentiment from 75% of the agents I’ve talked to.”
Then there’s the coach in the Big 12 who recently visited with four of his primary recruiting targets in a 48-hour span. He doesn’t actually know his money allotment for 2026-27 yet, certainly not a specific revenue-sharing amount. At his school, that number hasn’t been deduced yet and could be affected by how well the football team does this season. I spoke with that school’s GM, and his view is: Most high-end recruits should be holding out into the fall.
“Why would any top-50 guy commit anyway? It kills your leverage,” the GM told CBS Sports. “I think every school is in that boat. We have a guy, we may cancel his visit. He’s at the bottom end of our budget and we may cancel because he’s not worth it.”
Keep in mind, this season dozens of players who won’t be remotely close to All-American status agreed to deals months ago worth $1 million-plus. A lot of money — millions and millions and millions — will be wasted in 2025-26 on overpaid players.
That inevitability is what’s contributing to everlasting anxiety within college basketball. House settlement be damned, there is uncertainty over whether the hellish, drunken spending frenzy last spring was the climax of college sports’ most uncontrollable era, or if its precedents will lead to a lot of the same behavior — even if that means flagrantly breaking the rules — come next February, March and April.
In an effort to find workarounds come 2026 and 2027, schools have looked into trying to pay out freshmen before they get on campus, before their student-athlete status is activated. If that’s rule-breaking, how can it be proven and how would it be enforced? There are also schools looking into if and how players could be made employees of a collective and the shortcuts therein, in addition to schools bringing in money through events at their home arenas and siphoning off some of that revenue, which might be outside the parameters of NIL Go.
Coaches aren’t in front of microphones and holding press conferences right now, so you’re not hearing about this, but I assure you it’s dominating the conversation throughout the country. Some are handling it better than others. Some are looking for fixes on the calendar, in an effort to evolve and adapt. One Big Ten assistant floated the idea of eliminating November’s early signing period, as that seems outdated with rosters being more portal-oriented than ever. The thinking being: Any player could commit whenever they please, but the commitments wouldn’t be in ink until the spring, when programs had a true sense of what their roster would look like in March and April.
That coach’s prediction: The downturn in money means some of his contemporaries are lying to players right now. Those lies will become clear in the spring, and when other schools have the money those players were promised, they’ll defect.
“I could see there being a kid committed and, ‘Hey, we can get you $500,000 or $1 million,’ whatever, and that money comes back and they say, ‘Man, I just got my salary cap I can only pay you $300,000,'” the coach said. “Their AAU guy or their agent knows they can get more than that at Michigan State, Michigan or St. John’s and they’ll just de-commit and go there.”
We’re all eager to get to the games, but these offseason recruiting battles are how the sport is built. They’re how teams get made, how the hierarchy of every season is created. Peel back the curtain and you see how the economics of college sports continue to enable more chaos. The new rules aren’t so much helping as they are fostering more distrust and confusion.
This isn’t normal. Then again, things have never felt less normal in this sport than what’s transpired in the past six months.
