As representatives of Villanova have surveyed the college basketball coaching landscape over the past several weeks, gauging the interest of potential candidates should they decide to fire third-year coach Kyle Neptune, the potential salary is not what’s caught the attention of coaches who wouldn’t otherwise consider changing jobs.
Instead, the Villanova pitch is centered around a new force in the coaching market: Whomever succeeds Neptune would have one of the highest-paid rosters in college basketball, armed with resources to go toe-to-toe with almost anyone in the sport’s new pay-to-play environment.
“The first question agents are asking is, what are they committed to in revenue-share this year and beyond?” one person involved in multiple coaching searches told USA TODAY Sports, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the confidential nature of the negotiations. “It always used to be, ‘What do I have in facilities and recruiting and assistant salary pool?’ But now it’s, ‘How much can I spend on player acquisition?’ ‘
Though a transition in the market has been happening gradually since 2021, when college athletes were given the green light to profit off their name, image and likeness, it will play out in full effect during this college basketball coaching carousel.
In conversations with 14 people from across the industry who are actively involved in discussions among schools, coaches, agents and search firms — all of whom were granted anonymity in order to speak candidly on the state of this coaching cycle — a clear theme has emerged.
While the amount of money a school is willing to pay a new coach will always be crucial in the attractiveness of the job, it is not as dominant a factor as it once was. With the pending implementation of the House vs. NCAA settlement, which will kick off the revenue-sharing era and theoretically unwind the dominance of NIL collectives that have been funding rosters, the game has changed.
Instead of opaque promises from collectives, which have operated in the gray area of NCAA rules and whose funding mechanisms weren’t controlled by athletics departments, revenue sharing will attach a fixed percentage of the athletes’ pool to each sport. It’s essentially a salary cap, but with a catch: Each school will be able to split the money among its sports however it wants.
By definition, that means the percentage of revenue an athletics director is willing to devote to men’s basketball is more than just an aspirational statement about the school’s commitment to winning. For coaches, especially in this football-dominated world, it’s a clear marker of the likelihood that taking the job will advance their career.
“It’s the first thing coaches want to know,” according to one person who has been involved in multiple searches. “If you’re at a school spending $3 [million] to $4 million on the roster and you’re looking at a perceived ‘better’ job that isn’t going to spend that much, you’re not going to take it.”
That reality, according to industry insiders, might also explain why the three power-conference hires so far this cycle have followed a similar pattern.
In recent days, Miami hired 36-year-old Duke assistant Jai Lucas; Florida State hired 34-year-old Sacramento Kings assistant and Seminoles alum Luke Loucks; while Utah also went the alumni route with Dallas Mavericks assistant Alex Jensen, 48.
While all three decisions can be justified on their basketball merits given those coaches’ résumés and connections to the schools, it’s also true that administrations came to the decision fairly quickly they were not going to be in the market for sitting head coaches with track records of power-conference success.
It’s probably not a coincidence that those three schools in particular are heavily invested in football as opposed to a school like Villanova, where a new coach is expected to have north of $6 million to work with, according to people with knowledge of the situation. That’s why Villanova’s preliminary conversations have at least caught the attention of some highly-paid, successful coaches at good programs whose ability to spend on their roster doesn’t project to be quite as robust.
This development, should the House vs. NCAA settlement become official as expected in April, will ring in a subtle but highly impactful narrative shift.
For years, the economic story of college sports could be told most truthfully through coaching contracts. That is why USA TODAY Sports commits so many resources every year to building the go-to database for football and men’s basketball coaching salaries. Even as administrators talk publicly about an unsustainable financial model, those numbers keep going up and up and up.
But the proposed House settlement, which would allow power-conference schools to distribute north of $20 million directly to their athletes, will provide a different measure of a school’s priorities and its challenges relative to its peers.
While some schools have announced their revenue-sharing breakdowns — Georgia, for instance, plans to distribute 75 percent to football, 15 percent to men’s basketball, 5 percent to women’s basketball and 5 percent to other sports — others are still making calculations. Which means, for any active basketball coaching search, it is an undeniable factor in negotiations.
Take Indiana, for instance.
This is a program that views itself as a basketball blue-blood and whose fan base demands a championship contender, which is why Mike Woodson stepped down under pressure last month despite possibly taking the Hoosiers to a third NCAA Tournament appearance in four years.
Indiana’s donors have spent aggressively on NIL in basketball, but if the proposed House vs. NCAA settlement is implemented the way it’s intended, the booster collectives will wind down and all future NIL deals will be subject to a third-party clearinghouse run by Deloitte to ensure that they are “true NIL” and in line with market value.
The problem is, nobody knows quite what that means. There’s also disagreement across the industry about how well it will be policed. Most athletics directors hope it creates a little bit more stability and budget parity, while one coach who spoke with USA TODAY Sports believes that the rich schools in the SEC and Big Ten will ‘find a way” to funnel significantly more money to players than what’s outlined in the proposed House settlement.
“Even if the ADs are promising something, can they back it up?” one person involved in coaching negotiations said. “I don’t think they know. They’re all putting budgets and spreadsheets together, but it’s as the wind blows.”
Which brings us back to Indiana. If you’re a coach considering that job, do you see a school that has had almost unlimited resources to acquire men’s basketball players through NIL as it has the past few years? Or do you see a school that will have to make some tough choices going forward about how to allocate its pool of player revenue – especially with its football program trying to capitalize on the incredible momentum of its surprise College Football Playoff appearance?
It’s a lot of guesswork.
“We’re in a world now where Auburn and Alabama are better basketball jobs than Indiana,” one highly-connected college sports insider said.
Though Indiana has been at the forefront of the coaching searches so far, along with Virginia, they’ll have plenty of company in the coming days. NC State fired Kevin Keatts last weekend; Texas is likely to move on from Rodney Terry barring a miracle at the SEC tournament, while a third straight missed NCAA Tournament for Neptune would probably force Villanova’s hand.
But unlike past years, when a school’s desperation to be good in men’s basketball was almost exclusively tied to how much it paid its coach, the quality of a job and what kind of coach it can attract will be equally judged by the pool of money going directly from the athletics department to its players.
“Look at Louisville,” a person connected to a potential opening said. “There was a lot of talk last year that they were going to reset the (salary) market. Instead, they hired Pat Kelsey for ($2.3 million) and used the rest of the money to build the roster to give him a running start. That might be the (new model).”
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Dan Wolken on social media @danwolken.bsky.social