As college basketball enters its most uncertain era yet, few believe the new rules will stop the flow of money

NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. — The coach of your favorite team has little idea about what's coming next in college basketball and that reality is stirring insecurity throughout the sport.

From a recruiting outlook, the upcoming 6-10 months are especially hazy; most coaches are trying to grasp what will be the law of their lands in this next key phase of NCAA reconstruction.

The House v. NCAA lawsuit settlement, which was given final approval in June and took activation on July 1, was the culminating act that scotched a century-old amateurism model that is never coming back.

So now what?

Well, things have gotten confusing in the past week-plus. This confusion intersected with the July live recruiting period, giving coaches plenty of opportunity to gripe, ponder and predict — with media and with each other — about where things are and where they might go in the foreseeable future.

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"I'm concerned. I don't believe it yet, because until they start enforcing any rules, no rule is going to matter," a coach with recent Final Four experience told CBS Sports. "I would suggest we should shut down our collective tomorrow if I knew that this new structure was going to work. ... I'm skeptical over it, that things are going to get there."

The event provoking this latest bout of anxiety came on July 10, when the College Sports Commission (CSC) published a reminder about its allowable payment models to college athletes. (A lot of this stuff can get cumbersome to follow, but as a refresher: It's now the CSC, not the NCAA, that oversees all things NIL-related. This major shift in responsibility was part of the terms of the $2.8 billion House settlement and endorsed by the power conferences.)

The CSC reiterated that collectives are no longer acceptable means of payment to players, at least not with how they'd evolved in the past three years. For 90% (if not more) of the basketball and football athletes who made millions the past few portal cycles, their earning power was a function of collectives. And now the CSC is aiming to stamp them out, aided in no small part by a big stipulation with a small money figure attached. Per terms of the settlement, any NIL deal valued $600 or above is subject to review via a third-party arbiter, the accounting firm Deloitte, which is one of the largest companies of its kind in the world.

The Athletic put it succinctly last week: "Officials created those rules to prevent schools from utilizing booster-driven entities to funnel payments to recruits and transfers as a way to work around the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap." Moving forward, in order for a player to receive payment through a school's collective, it has to clear discriminating parameters of having a "valid business purpose." There are already stories circulating of some stuck in NIL limbo after having deals red-X'd by Deloitte and its NIL Go clearinghouse.

The CSC's memo prompted pushback. Steve Berman and Jeffrey Kessler, the lawyers who represented the plaintiffs in the House case (and whose firms are set to earn north of $500 million (!!) for their efforts), may not be keen to let this guidance from the CSC stand. An entity called "The Collective Association" issued a statement that said, in part, the CSC's stance on collectives is "not only misguided but deeply dismissive of the collective organizations and the tens of thousands of fans and donors who fuel them."

There's belief from many in the space that lawsuits challenging the CSC's language on collectives are on the way. Nobody has any clue if those lawsuits would be successful, but they're guaranteed to make headlines when they land.

So now college basketball is sitting, waiting, wondering what's licit and what's unlawful, what's real vs. what's not, and who's going to be the first to truly challenge the new system.

As one high-profile coach put it to me: "Do you prepare like it's going to be the way they said, or do you prepare like it's going to be the way it's always been?"

At this year's Final Four in San Antonio, prominent player agent Daniel Poneman spoke at Silver Waves Media's Global NIL Conference to a room filled with a variety of power players in the college sports space.

"I said it tongue-in-cheek, with a call to action: organized resistance," Poneman told CBS Sports, "I said, 'Guys, look around the room. If none of us follow these rules, then they can't enforce them. What are they going to do about it? Really, what are they going to do about it?'"

Poneman runs WEAVE, a player agency that has quickly ascended over the past four years. He's been a thorn in the NCAA's side at times, but there's no downplaying his agility in the NIL space. In April he knew the pending House settlement was a threat to his burgeoning business. Poneman saw that 2025's portal cycle, by far the most lucrative yet, could be the last of its kind.

Now that the next phase is here, there's hesitancy in college hoops about what's going to hold. Poneman has his doubts about the legitimacy of the CSC's rulebook.

"Some think we're going to see a complete shift in college basketball, but it's not going to happen," Poneman said. "I don't know how it's not going to happen, but there are too many talented, powerful, motivated basketball coaches who have spent their whole life getting to this position to allow some arbitrary, nonsensical legislation totally impact their career in irreparable ways."

Will collectives actually go away? As a result, will cheating heavily come back into style? What does "cheating" mean in 2025? What will the loopholes be? What will the punishments be? How far will agents or boosters or players or coaches go to keep funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the sport?

"The most pressing thing is, can it withstand the legal challenges?" one prominent SEC coach told CBS Sports. "Because if it loses to the legal challenge of being able to cap someone's NIL, that's gonna be the first lawsuit, and if that goes away then all we've done is say we have to pay the 20.5 plus what we're already paying."

Whether Congress can solve the problem remains unknowable. The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act is trying to get pushed through, to give the NCAA antitrust protection, but in reality it's probably going to be the next piece of legislation to die on the House or Senate floor.

Michigan State coach Tom Izzo told me that, in his view "10 to 15%" of the sport was cheating 15 to 20 years ago. He thinks if strict restrictions are put in and they hold, the number will be closer to 40% because the money's gotten too big to go all the way back.

"If they're going to do what (Tony) Petitti and (Greg) Sankey are saying, they're going to have to have some real enforcement," Izzo said. "That means more to me than Deloitte."

About three hours after Izzo said that, I sat next to a Big 12 coach as he scouted a player. He pointed to different people in the gym as he made this point.

"His administration, my administration, her administration, his administration are all hoping and believing that the guardrails are in place and this is how we will operate," he said. "And you know what coaches are saying? Bull-f---ing-shit."

Opendorse, a company that has been at the forefront of the NIL business, reported that collectives were responsible for 81.6% of all trackable and/or reported NIL deals for the 2024-25 cycle. Those deals totaled more than $1.6 billion. That's a lot of money being taken off the table — with a portion probably slipping under it.

It's why coaches are wired to be cynical about the alleged drastic change in college sports' financial environment.

"I think collectives are going underground," another SEC coach told me. "But they're not going away."

"Going underground" is code for cheating.

Until just a few years ago, paying for a player realistically meant anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 in cash (maybe a little more in extreme cases, or so the stories go) in addition tangible items (like a car, setting up a loved one with a job or a residence) and discretely finding ways to deliver the money to a player or their family.

Those days are over; the money's gotten too big.

Highly prized transfers have gone for more than $1 million the past two offseasons. It would be ambitious to suggest rule-breaking at that level will happen, because moving that amount of money — not to be traced, and thus not to be taxed — is asking for major trouble from law enforcement. Still, coaches think something will be done outside the boundaries if collectives dissolve.

"I think it goes over the rev share cap," one Big Ten coach told me. "Moving forward, they won't abide by the rules."

Creative accounting will soon be the new rage. Coaches believe some of their competitors will be doing whatever it takes, either through loopholes or brazen cheating, to keep acquiring talent.

"I heard a school hired Deloitte to come up with an algorithm beat their algorithm," another coach with Final Four experience told me, referring to Deloitte's system that is determining what a "valid business purpose" is to clear NIL deals.

Some of these schemes are why Poneman doesn't think the CSC's current guidance will hold.

"I don't think that's going to fly, because all it takes is one coach to say go f--- yourself," Poneman said. "All it's going to take is one school to say f--- you, we're going to keep our collective, we're not submitting to NIL Go and what are you going to do? Who does it hurt if collective can spend money? Nobody! Who does it help? It helps coaches, who get better teams. Players, who get more money. Agents, who get more money. Players are waiting longer to enter the draft, they're staying in school, the product is better."

This is not so much a problem now as it will be a massive adjustment in 2026. That's because any school that could afford to put up the majority — or all — of its NIL payments prior to July 1 (when the House settlement's terms became official) did so.

One prominent coach told CBS Sports he was told by another school that it paid well north of $20 million to its roster before July 1, meaning all those players have been fully taken care of for the upcoming year. That school will be comfortably north of $6 million in revenue sharing for next year's portal cycle, putting it at an advantage against the field in rev-share capital.

"I just talked to one of the coaches, and they said they gave everyone on the team at least a million," this coach said. "Schools have front-loaded two-year deals and paid them all up front. So, they get the kid, they front-load the two-year deal: $1.5 (million) in Year 1, $1.5 (million) in Year 2, they give them $3 million before June 30 because of the settlement. They do that with the entire team, except for three or four guys. They have to sign three guys next year, now they've got this year's rev share plus next year's rev share to go get those guys."

For the very few schools that had the money on hand to do that, it put them ahead of the pack for next April, when funds are expected to be tighter sport-wide vs. 2025's free-for-all levels. Poneman predicts a 10-20% drop in contracts next year.

"Some schools are going to go into it expecting to follow this new cap, and others go into it with workarounds," Poneman said. "There will be this chaotic real-time transformation. I wonder if it happens in the portal or if it happens before that. These high school kids, is no one going to sign them?"

Word gets around. High school players graduating in 2026 are aware of the general figures five-star players in the 2025 and 2024 classes were getting. A handful of coaches I asked about this issue admitted they weren't sure what to tell 17-year-old prospects. It explains the slow in commitments vs. the trends of the past few summers. (Only five of the top 50 prospects for 2026 have pledged to a school.)

"Coaches are going to offer numbers and try to figure it out later and it's going to be a total shit show," Poneman said.

Every coach I spoke with agrees with Poneman that the numbers for high school recruits and the portal players of next spring are going to drop. But by how much is the devilish detail. Based on my conversations this offseason with dozens of sources, the average high-major transfer this year made around $600,000. So for 2026, does that drop in price mean a reduction of $100,000 on average? Does it mean $400,000 less?

Maybe the most important aspect of the House settlement moving forward is that the schools who opt into the agreement cannot sue the CSC, NCAA or Deloitte. It's the bond that holds the whole thing together. Without it, there wouldn't be a settlement at all.

The catch: What is to stop a player from suing if an NIL deal through a collective, or a separate business, is shot down by Deloitte? Should collectives cease to exist the way the CSC has outlined, the lost earning potential in the years to come would be in the hundreds of millions.

"These new rules are bullshit," Poneman said. "They benefit the NCAA and the administrators, the same stuffy white people who were trying to suppress these players in the first place, and now they're trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube."

So do we have hundreds of lawsuits from players waiting in the months to come?

That's the next big wait-and-see. Are we going to look up around Thanksgiving and see an assembly line of legal challenges overrunning college sports? How long would those lawsuits take? Would injunctions enable them to be paid while still in school? If so, this new system is built on matchsticks.

"How does anybody determine what somebody's market value is?" a coach with a national championship on his résumé told me. "They're making it seem so casual that these deals won't be accepted. And to be honest, I don't see how they can't be accepted."

The most common inquiry I got from coaches on the recruiting trail this month was: How much do you think Big East programs have to spend now?

It's gripping the imaginations of many.

"Coaches in the league are worried about the Big East," one SEC coach told me.

Most Big East schools don't have football, and even the ones that do (UConn, Villanova) aren't driven by it. This means they can't reach $20.5 million in revenue sharing, but they also don't have to allot $12 million-plus to football, which escalates their spending power.

This is the unintended consequence of having football interests dictate most of the decisions in college athletics. As things stand now, Big East jobs have bumped in value. You can claim it's "unfair," or you can acknowledge that the history of college sports has always had trends and swells that benefitted certain programs over others.

It's never been an even playing field.

And it's not the fault of St. John's, Marquette, Creighton, Georgetown — or even A-10 powers like VCU and Dayton — that they're free of football's power grip on college sports. They don't get the benefit of everything that comes with housing a football team, but they're also not saddled with the expenses either.

That's the trade-off.

Per sources: One high-major, non-Big East job that came open earlier this year told prospective candidates that their budget up until June 30 would be well north of $7 million to build out a roster for 2025-26, then funding would be sliced in half for 2026 and beyond due to football eating up a lot of the rev-share cap.

The consternation stems from most SEC teams operating below $3 million in revenue sharing for the upcoming year, according to a variety of sources. One expected exception is basketball-crazed Kentucky, which is believed to be at a 45% rev share of its $20.5 million cap for 2025-26. There was talk of all SEC programs agreeing to an equal rev-share cap, but similar to the Big East situation, if Kentucky wants to put more emphasis on its basketball program (and sacrifice for less on the football side) than the likes of Alabama, Auburn or Tennessee, that's Kentucky's prerogative.

As one Big East coach put it to me: "If I'm at $6 million for my team this year and the University of Florida men's basketball program has $3 million, how am I not an advantage? [SEC schools] are not going to cheat up to $3 million. That's a lot of money. In the old days, cheating was like 50 grand. … I understand if an SEC assistant wanted 50 grand and went to some rogue booster. You would never go to a booster now and say, 'Hey, I need $2 million for a player.' That's criminal activity."

Besides, spending big money doesn't assure anyone anything, as another Big Ten coach was quick to point out. This person estimated schools in his league will max out just north of $4 million in men's basketball for the upcoming year, with the bottom being about $2.5 million.

"If everybody stays within that, it'll tighten things up," the veteran coach said. "You're still gonna have to spend your money wisely. I don't think the teams that spent the most money necessarily won last year. Florida, Houston, Auburn, I don't think they were at the top."

This unavoidable variety of money allotment across high-major athletics has gotten some to wonder: Should college basketball have its own cap eventually as well? It seems unlikely — and let's be clear: would be blatantly hypocritical — but cynicism runs deep on this subject.

"Ohio State won't let Xavier, Illinois won't let DePaul, Virginia won't let VCU beat them for players. That's not happening," another Big Ten coach told me. "How is it not going to happen? I don't know."

That clears things up.

Coaches condition themselves to think someone is always out to skirt the rules, if not outright break them, and they're a bit paranoid at what they don't know and who's getting an edge on them. Relatedly, Izzo said he wants transparency on basketball spending when it comes to revenue sharing. Michigan State is at $3.5 million for the upcoming season, but that number will increase in a year. Why can't the public know how each school is breaking down their budget? After all, the $20.5 number is public information.

"Why isn't it transparent?" Izzo said. "You don't have to say what these players are making, but why can't we say Michigan State gets $4 million, Arkansas gets 5 million and so on?"

Inevitably, this conversation for most leads to an obvious conclusion.

"Just make them employees" was the sentiment from plenty on the recruiting trail this month.

Five years ago, you'd be hard-pressed to find a gaggle of coaches endorsing a player's union. It's funny how a true free market can zip them into a headspace where they want collective bargaining. They want players to stay for more than one season. They want to pay them a fair share, have contracts and bring stability back to college basketball.

But that future isn't coming soon.

So in the long interim, everyone's bracing for the next era, with more money — on the line, up for grabs, changing hands — than at any point in the history of college sports.