Mid-major basketball programs, like CSU, could face increasing “degree of separation” in revenue-share era

They made their March exits with soft smiles, eyes dry and bright. Slowly, UC San Diego’s Hayden Gray and Tyler McGhie pushed themselves up from the podium at Ball Arena Thursday night, the seats they’d grinded for years to sit in, paused and scanned for one last memento of this feat of a season.

“Keep these?” Gray muttered at a moderator, pointing at the placard on the postgame table that proudly displayed his name: Hayden Gray.

“Uh — yeah,” the moderator responded, shortly after UC San Diego’s nail-biting 68-65 NCAA Tournament loss to powerhouse Michigan.

“Hell yeah,” Gray responded, carefully removing the card. “I’m taking that.”

They had set a new program foundation just five years after jumping up from Division II, Big West going toe-to-toe with Big Ten in Denver. A day later, Colorado State men’s basketball coach Niko Medved raised his arms to the heavens in Seattle after knocking off No. 5 Memphis, the second straight year with a tournament win for the Rams. The staple of the mid-major Cinderella is still alive and well, a few days into this year’s NCAA Tournament, through an era of unprecedented change in collegiate basketball.

In the years to come, though, the glass slipper might simply be too expensive.

“I do feel for the lower levels,” Wisconsin men’s basketball coach Greg Gard said Friday when asked about new athlete-payment rules coming to collegiate athletics. “I think it’s going to be harder. It’s already been hard. There’s been a degree of separation.”

As the concept of third-party NIL collectives continues to reshape college basketball, revenue-sharing is on the horizon, with a final hearing on the landmark House v. NCAA settlement coming April 7. If approved, athletic programs across the country can elect to distribute up to $20.5 million in 2025-26 in athletic revenue to student-athletes.

Theoretically, revenue-sharing and a baseline salary cap should help balance a college hoops talent landscape that’s increasingly widening between NIL “haves and have-nots,” as Gard put it. But the reality isn’t nearly that simple when mid-majors like CSU are operating under a different set of financial constraints than top Power 4 programs.

Take Maryland, a Big Ten program and certified hoops school that CSU is set to face in the second round Sunday. The Terrapins, who athletic director Damon Evans confirmed will pay out the full permissible $20.5 million to athletes, earned $110 million in athletic revenue in 2023-24. The Rams, by contrast, earned $48 million — a number that’d make it challenging to divert enough money to athletes to hit that revenue-sharing cap.

In simple terms, even if CSU ended Maryland’s season on Sunday, the Terrapins could go out in the transfer portal and shell out for roster improvements that the Rams couldn’t dream of.

“I think it will continue to create a wider gap,” Texas A&M head coach Buzz Williams said Friday on revenue-sharing.

As single-game tournament prep in Denver has raged on, coaches and programs continue to struggle with answers around the future of March Madness in the athlete-empowerment era. Sure, revenue-sharing might level the playing field somewhat for upper-tier programs, especially schools like Gonzaga that don’t have football rosters to fund; but even among blue bloods, each school is “working out of a different playbook,” Gard said.

Third-party collectives, in all likelihood, will continue to provide supplemental funds to schools on top of revenue-sharing. Budding power BYU, preparing for a matchup with No. 3 Wisconsin in Denver, has landed a generational recruit in AJ Dybantsa thanks in no small part to a roughly $5 million deal with BYU’s NIL collective. No. 5 Michigan, meanwhile, just handed budding coaching star Dusty May a contract extension that promised around $2 million to $4 million of revenue-sharing money to the men’s basketball program, according to the Detroit Free Press.

There’s already a growing separation between Power 4 programs. But between collectives and athletic revenue, it’ll be a serious challenge for mid-majors to keep pace.