Feb. 4, 2026, 2:35 p.m. PT
College basketball isn’t exactly a level playing field these days, and UCLA coach Mick Cronin will tell you that. With NIL collectives and wealthy donors tipping the scales in favor of the programs with the most money. Rutgers has seen both sides of that coin. Last year the Scarlet Knights had Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper, but this season their roster doesn’t have the same top-level talent.
This year the Rutgers are 9-14 but have gone just 2-10 in the Big Ten, including a 98-66 loss to the UCLA Bruins on Tuesday. UCLA spent big on their roster, throwing millions at transfer Donovan Dent. Dent showed on Tuesday why he received the NIL deal he got, scoring an efficient 13 points while dishing out 11 assists.
After the game, UCLA head coach Mick Cronin discussed the landscape of college sports, comparing it to different professional sports leagues and how it creates an uneven playing field, even for conference opponents.
“There’s haves and have-nots in the money world,” Cronin said. “It’s a shame we don’t have a salary cap and everybody is playing even. This is baseball, not the NFL. This is MLB.”Cronin says that because the NFL has a hard salary cap, which withholds teams from simply out-spending others. In MLB, there’s a luxury tax but no hard tax, meaning teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers are able to continuously out-spend other teams in the league.
It wasn’t too long ago that college programs were all on a level playing field, but that was pre-NIL, when student-athletes couldn’t profit off of their abilities while at the collegiate level. Perhaps someday the NCAA will impose a salary cap but for now Cronin and the Bruins will try to take advantage of being the haves, rather than the have-nots.
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