CBS Sports college basketball insiders Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander spent a month surveying 100-plus Division I men’s basketball coaches for our annual Candid Coaches series. They polled across the sport’s landscape: some of the biggest names in college basketball, but also small-school assistants in low-major leagues. Coaches agreed to share unfiltered opinions in exchange for anonymity. We asked 10 questions and are posting the results over a three-week span.
At the professional level, everything is documented for salary cap purposes. So nobody has to guess, or wonder about, what the Lakers or Celtics are spending on players. We know. And nobody has to guess, or wonder about, what LeBron James and Jaylen Brown are making. We know.
College athletics remains different, though.
Yes, schools are now using money to secure commitments via NIL deals — and the dollar-amounts connected to those deals are sometimes reported. But, honestly, who knows what’s true and what isn’t, what’s real and what’s fake, what’s accurate and what’s exaggerated? One coach put it this way when we asked for some insight about which schools are capitalizing most with strong NIL packages:
“This answer varies from week to week,” he said. “One week on the road you hear Washington is offering a kid $2.3 million, then you hear Kentucky and Louisville have offered more. At this point, no one knows what to truly believe with agents involved and trying to drive prices through the roof with false information.”
That’s a common opinion in the industry.
Few coaches try to pretend they’re completely sure what to believe as it pertains to what schools are spending on NIL and what players are getting in NIL. They know what they read. They know what they hear. But, nearly to a man, they are something less than certain that everything they read and hear is true.
That acknowledged, we still wanted to know what coaches are hearing…
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