JT Toppin had a decision to make last spring, and he made the one that would have been unthinkable five years ago.
The consensus All-American at Texas Tech was projected as a late first-round NBA Draft pick — roughly the 28th selection, worth approximately $2.1 million in guaranteed salary. Instead, he returned to Lubbock for a reported $4 million NIL deal. Not $4 million over four years. Four million for one season. The Matador Club, Texas Tech's NIL collective, made staying in college the economically rational choice.
Welcome to the new math of college basketball, where the best players in the sport can earn twice as much staying in school as they would going pro. Where a program like Kentucky can spend $22 million assembling a roster — more than some NBA G League teams — and still get bounced from the NCAA Tournament in the Round of 32.
And where the question is no longer whether money matters. The question is whether it's enough.
Ejiofor went from 1.2 PPG at Kansas to Big East Player of the Year at St. John's — then beat Kansas in the tournament
The Most Expensive Failure in College Basketball History
Mark Pope arrived at Kentucky in 2024 with a mandate: restore the program to championship contention. He had the resources to do it. Kentucky's NIL apparatus produced an estimated $20-22 million in total roster construction costs for 2025-26. No program in the country spent more.
Jayden Quaintance carried a $2 million valuation. Denzel Aberdeen, a transfer from Florida, commanded $1.6 million. The roster was stacked with five-star talent and high-profile transfers.
The result: a 22-14 record. A 7-seed. A first-round buzzer-beater just to survive Santa Clara. And then an 82-63 blowout loss to Iowa State in the Round of 32 — extending Kentucky's Elite Eight drought to six years.
Analysts noted Kentucky 'spent last spring just to spend, outbidding itself for players and shelling out salaries that were way beyond how many of its players were valued on the open market.' Money assembled the roster. Money could not make it play together.
The Counter-Example: How St. John's Built a Contender From Discards
St. John's spent roughly $10.5 million on its roster — half of what Kentucky paid — and got dramatically better results. Rick Pitino has never been shy about his philosophy. "We don't build through the high school ranks," he has said. "We build through the portal." His 2025-26 roster was a collection of players other programs had given up on, and it became one of the best teams in the country, winning consecutive Big East championships and finishing 30-7.
The centerpiece of that team, and the most compelling portal success story in recent memory, is Zuby Ejiofor. At Kansas, Bill Self sat Ejiofor down and was "brutally honest" — Hunter Dickinson was coming, and Ejiofor wasn't going to play. The numbers confirmed it: 1.2 points in 5.1 minutes per game as a freshman, a player buried so deep on the depth chart that his contributions were essentially invisible. Pitino saw something different. He recruited Ejiofor not with a sales pitch about New York City or Big East television exposure, but with a grueling workout — extended three-point shooting drills, film sessions, a detailed picture of what daily life at St. John's would actually look like. The emphasis was on the work, not the money. Ejiofor committed 10 days later.
What happened next is the kind of transformation that makes the portal's chaos feel worthwhile. From 1.2 PPG at Kansas, Ejiofor became the Big East Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year at St. John's — 16.3 points, 7.3 rebounds, 3.5 assists, and 2.2 blocks per game. And then, in the Round of 32 of the NCAA Tournament, St. John's drew Kansas. Ejiofor's old team. The program that told him he wasn't good enough. He finished with 18 points and 9 rebounds in a 67-65 victory, his sixth career game against Kansas and the first time he won.
The Red Storm's run ended in the Sweet 16 against Duke, 80-75, after the Blue Devils erased a double-digit deficit. At the postgame podium, Ejiofor broke down. "My character is the thing I pride myself on the most," he said, his voice cracking. "To all of Johnnies nation, I appreciate you guys. For the past three years..." He couldn't finish the sentence.
Pitino's approach worked not because he outspent everyone — Kentucky proved you can do that and still lose — but because he targeted what he called "culture guys that would play for the name on the front." He found players the market had undervalued, gave them roles that maximized their skills, and built a system around collective identity rather than individual talent acquisition. The portal, in his hands, was not a shopping spree. It was a scouting exercise with a $10.5 million budget and a 72-year-old coach who still knows how to identify a player everyone else has missed.
The Market Is Correcting
The story of the 2025-26 season is not that money doesn't work — it is that undisciplined money doesn't work, and the distinction matters more than any dollar figure on a recruiting board.
The early NIL era operated like a gold rush. Programs threw money at five-star recruits and top portal targets without much regard for fit, chemistry, or roster balance, operating on the assumption that talent would sort itself out. Kentucky's $22 million experiment is the most visible cautionary tale, but it is far from the only one. Washington was among the top portal spenders and didn't make the tournament. Kansas added Wisconsin's A.J. Storr and Alabama's Rylan Griffen with significant spending, watched the returns disappoint, and then "cut their losses" by moving on.
The market is starting to correct. A Big Ten coach told ESPN that "the actual money, realistically, is about 40-50 percent less than what it has been," and another was more specific: "No one's going to pay a freshman $1.5 million anymore." The programs that thrived this season were the ones that treated the portal like a precision instrument rather than a fire hose — Rutgers landed undervalued transfers from NJIT and George Washington and outperformed expectations, UConn filled a specific positional need with Silas Demary Jr. (who became "one of the best two-way point guards in college basketball"), and Michigan spent $10.5 million but spent it on the right players, with Yaxel Lendeborg arriving from UAB for $2 million and winning Big Ten Player of the Year.
The lesson emerging from this season is not that spending is irrelevant. Programs at the bottom of the spending chart still can't compete for top talent, and that structural inequality is not going away. But the programs that built championship-caliber rosters did it through scouting and cultural fit, not just by writing the biggest checks. Spending without development is just the most expensive way to lose.
Toppin's Choice and What It Means
JT Toppin's decision to turn down the NBA for $4 million at Texas Tech is the single most important data point in college basketball's economic transformation, because it reveals a truth that would have been absurd a decade ago: for elite talent, staying in college is not a sacrifice. It is a financial strategy. When a consensus All-American can earn nearly double his projected NBA rookie salary without leaving campus, the traditional developmental pipeline — play in college for free, get paid when you go pro — has been fully inverted.
The industry spent $932.5 million on basketball roster construction in 2025-26, triple the first year of NIL. Three hundred and eleven of 365 Division I programs now participate in revenue sharing, with the institutional cap set at $20.5 million per school across all sports. The SEC averages $9.7 million per basketball program, the Big 12 averages $8.6 million, and at the bottom of the food chain, a low-to-mid major scrapes by on $525,000. That structural inequality is not a temporary market distortion — it is the permanent architecture of the sport.
But the Kentucky lesson will echo through every portal negotiation this April. Programs will still spend, because they have to. The question that matters now is not how much, but how wisely. The programs that learned from Pope's expensive mistake — the ones looking for the next Ejiofor instead of the next bidding war — will be the ones still playing in April. The ones that treat the portal as a checkbook exercise will join Kentucky on the couch, wondering how $22 million bought them a Round of 32 exit and a six-year drought that shows no sign of ending.