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.
Coaches claim a new economic reality; many agents aren’t buying it
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…
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