Candid Coaches: Which programs do you believe have the best NIL situations?

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 about different schools’ NIL packages as they navigate this new and often chaotic world. So, with that in mind, we asked more than 100 college basketball coaches the following question:

Which three programs do you believe have the best NIL situations?

(Other programs that received at least one vote: Arizona, Florida, Georgetown, McNeese State, Ole Miss, Oregon, Villanova, Washington.)

The takeaway

Please note the way the question was worded.

Matt Norlander and I didn’t ask coaches what they know about NIL, if only because we already know that nobody really knows what’s true and what isn’t. Instead, we simply asked them to tell us which schools they believe have the best NIL situations based off of what they encounter and hear on the recruiting trail.

We asked for lists of three.

Unsurprisingly, Arkansas easily appeared on the most ballots. In what is certainly a related note, the school hired Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame coach John Calipari away from Kentucky earlier this year.

“You know Cal,” one coach said. “He’s not going anywhere unless he has everything in place.”

That’s certainly true.

Calipari has even hinted at as much while contrasting the differences between the NIL resources he had at Kentucky with the NIL resources he’s been given at Arkansas. That’s not the only reason Calipari made the intra-conference move — or even the main reason. But it was likely a prerequisite to Calipari leaving UK after a 15-year run that was mostly good but had fallen off in recent years, evidence being that the Wildcats haven’t made the Final Four since 2015 or the Sweet 16 since 2019.

Exactly what Calipari has at his disposal for NIL via big-money boosters and corporate support remains unclear — but what our poll shows is that basically everybody is operating under the assumption that the Razorbacks are heavy players in the market. It’s those funds that allowed Calipari to build from nothing, in a matter of months, what I believe should be a preseason top-15 team and legitimate Final Four contender.

One other interesting thing about the results of our poll is that the programs coaches largely believe are swinging the biggest NIL sticks are either blue bloods and/or schools employing new coaches. Our top-five vote getters — Arkansas, Kansas, BYU, Kentucky and Indiana — all check at least one of those boxes. Kentucky checks both. And only six programs appeared on more ballots than Louisville, another traditional power with a new coach that is desperate to return to relevance ASAP.

“They’re handing out f-cking money like it’s Monopoly,” one coach said.

As someone who watched the Louisville program crater over the past two years, I, for one, say good for them. Louisville should be handing out money like it’s Monopoly. It’s an ACC program with a large and proud fanbase that’s been through a lot over the years — everything from the end of the Rick Pitino era to the surprisingly disappointing Chris Mack era to the disastrous couple of years Kenny Payne was in charge.

Simply put, college basketball is better when Louisville is good.

I sincerely believe that.

So spend away, Cardinals!

A sentence like that might’ve prompted an NCAA investigation 10 years ago. But what used to be outlawed is now allowed, encouraged and, broadly speaking, necessary to consistently compete at the tip-top of the sport. Like many coaches told us, what schools can and do offer in NIL can vary from one month to the next. But the largest brands, and the proudest programs with new coaches corporate partners want to set up to succeed, currently appear to be the biggest players — though most coaches seem to think this same question a year from now would likely provide different results based on how the next 12 months unfold.

Previously in Candid Coaches…

• Who will be this season’s best team?
• Who will be this season’s best player?
• Who was the best coaching hire this offseason?
• What is the most amount of NIL money somebody has asked you or your staff to pay for a player?