Forget power conferences, the basketball spending at most Big 5 schools lags behind conference rivals

This isn’t an article about football, but something Eagles general manager Howie Roseman said Tuesday during his predraft media availability bears mentioning.

“For the first time in really the history of the National Football League,” Roseman said, “you are taking players who are taking pay cuts.”

That is what the highest levels of college football and basketball have become. They are professional sports — the minor leagues for the NFL and NBA. Except a select few of those minor leaguers are being compensated better in the minors than the pros.

It is transfer portal season in college basketball, and agents and their clients are like little kids fighting over the fruits of a piñata that seems to be gushing like a geyser with U.S. currency. High-major coaches and general managers told The Athletic that the cost of building a competitive men’s basketball roster for the 2026-27 season is in the range of $10 million to $12 million. One GM guessed that many schools have added at least $2 million to their budgets year over year. According to Evan Miyakawa, who runs an analytics site and has a tool used by coaches and GMs that provides valuations for players, the market is up 65% from last year.

The appropriate responses here probably are: When does this end? When does the market correct itself? When will someone come galloping in on the horse of reason and rein in the Wild West?

That’s a conversation for a different day.

What we do know, what the modern college athletics landscape has revealed, is what we have known all along, that Villanova is the only Big 5 men’s basketball team that can compete in the upper levels of the sport. It is the only Big 5 team that can spend in the ranges necessary to field a team that can make the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament by merit and not chance.

For the rest of the non-’Nova Big 5 schools, competing in the high levels of Division I basketball is impossible. The goal should be to compete within the individual school’s conference. That, to be sure, has always been the goal. Recruit well, develop well, win a title here and there, get into the tournament here and there. Everyone would be happy.

» READ MORE: 2026 men’s college basketball transfer portal tracker: Latest Big 5 moves, where Philly-area recruits are heading

Now, that model has changed. It’s all about dollars and cents, and using those dollars and cents to rebuild a roster every year. But it’s there where the majority of the programs are struggling within their own conferences.

Drexel guard Shane Blakeney and Temple guard Aiden Tobiason are good places to start. They were the two top eligible returners at their respective schools, but neither program had a prayer at being able to keep them around. In fact, both might fetch on the open market as much money or more than their previous team spent on its entire 2025-26 budget.

Blakeney hasn’t yet found his next destination, but a 6-foot-5 guard who scored 14.2 points per game in the Coastal Athletic Association, who rebounds well and shoots efficiently from three-point range, is likely to garner offers in the mid-to-high-six-figure range, if not more. Drexel, for context, spent somewhere in that range on its roster last season. Of course it couldn’t keep Blakeney around, even if it increases its roster spending for 2026-27, which most programs are doing.

» READ MORE: How Shane Blakeney went from deep reserve to Drexel’s leading scorer

But even a sizable increase in Drexel’s spending still would have the Dragons lagging far behind UNC-Wilmington, Charleston, Hofstra, and some others within the CAA. Zach Spiker’s job is to continue to do more with less.

Tobiason, meanwhile, who scored 15.3 points per game during his sophomore year at Temple, is signing with Syracuse. Sources say he was fielding offers of more than $1 million after entering the transfer portal. For context, Temple spent right around $1 million on its roster this past season, according to sources. That number is believed to be far behind the spending of Memphis, South Florida, Charlotte, and Wichita State, and even behind the majority of the 13-team American Conference.

The Owls have one remaining player from last season’s roster who averaged more than three points who is either not in the portal or not out of eligibility. That’s Gavin Griffiths, a junior who scored 10.1 points and grabbed 4.9 rebounds in his first year at Temple after playing at Rutgers and Nebraska.

The university seems to be committed to slightly increasing basketball spending in 2026-27, and there is some positive momentum in more money being raised, according to sources. But even moving into the middle of the pack in spending in the American from where Temple was only moves the needle ever so slightly.

Temple needs to raise more money. Its fundraising arm needs to improve drastically if it wants to have any hope of competing in the American, let alone making the NCAA Tournament anytime soon.

There are some who think going back to the Atlantic 10 and divesting from football is the answer, but that idea ignores some of the logistical and financial hurdles that leaving the American would present. It also assumes spending $1 million on a basketball roster is anywhere close to good enough to compete in the A-10.

It’s not.

Saint Louis was able to keep head coach Josh Schertz around and away from a high-major program in part because it apparently has the resources and financial commitments to spend around $10 million on its roster next season. That will be at the top of the A-10. It will be more than several power conference programs.

St. Bonaventure, meanwhile, is paying its new head coach a lot less than it paid its old head coach because it wants to be able to squeeze every dollar it can into the product on the court to try to win more than the four conference games it won this past season.

There are two sides of the A-10.

Where do St. Joseph’s and La Salle fit?

The Hawks won’t be spending $10 million like the reported Saint Louis budget. They won’t be spending half of that, which means they likely will be trailing VCU and Dayton. But St. Joe’s is relatively well financed to compete in the upper half of the A-10.

St. Joe’s is believed to have spent more than $2 million on the 2025-26 roster, one that finished third in the A-10 and reached the semifinal of the conference tournament, where a VCU team that knocked off North Carolina in the NCAA Tournament was too talented to overcome. The Hawks were able to retain Jaiden Glover-Toscano, and freshman standout Kevin Williford is still on the roster, but others have left the program and there is plenty of work still to do in the portal.

La Salle, meanwhile, is closer to St. Bonaventure. The Explorers didn’t reach $1 million on last season’s roster spending but could eclipse that number for 2026-27.

That’s probably welcome news to second-year coach Darris Nichols, whose task isn’t all that dissimilar to that of his peers. Do more with less. It’s like asking the Marlins to win the National League East. It’s possible, just unlikely.

Fran McCaffery’s first year at Penn was a major success. The Quakers won the Ivy League tournament in dramatic fashion and went to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2018.

But it was also a success in a different way. McCaffery helped get a new NIL initiative off the ground and has Penn positioned to compete in the Ivy League.

Penn has lost multiple players to the portal, but the majority of them were no longer eligible because of the Ivy League’s archaic rules that prohibit graduate students from playing. You may notice that TJ Power, who almost single-handedly got Penn to March Madness, is not in the portal. It’s certainly not because he’s playing at Penn for free.

A few blocks away in University City, it was Giving Day Tuesday at Drexel, and the school put out a video of Spiker on Monday asking for donations to the men’s basketball program so it could “enhance the experience of all of our players, whether it be equipment we use in practice, meals when we go on the road, or technology we use ...”

That is the name of the game right now for most athletic departments like those at Drexel, La Salle, and even Temple. They are not overflowing with cash from television deals and ticket sales. They need money from donors to improve their teams. They need to reach their fans and supporters and ask them to put money in the pockets of student-athletes like never before.

It’s not an easy task. It just would have been more genuine if Drexel had Spiker say “so I can replace my backcourt.”