This week’s Club Sportico column looks at the growing divide in Division I men’s college basketball, where new market forces are further separating the sport’s richest programs from everyone else.
That appears clear in recent March Madness tournaments, where good teams are winning at historically high rates.
It’s also clear in spending. In 2014, the 30 biggest budgets in D-I men’s basketball were on average 13.5x bigger than the 30 smallest. Ten years later, the gap was 16.6x. It’s likely even wider today.
Faced with this reality, some schools are opting to deprioritize basketball. That appears to be the case with the Campbell Fighting Camels, whose head coach just resigned due to lack of resources. St. Bonaventure is also reportedly paying its new coach about half of what it paid his predecessor so it can adapt to the modern realities of college sports without additionally taxing its budget.
Still others are repeating the same tropes that have plagued college sports for more than a decade. In a rant this week about his basketball players, Charleston AD Matt Roberts said, “If money is your main motivator, you’re not wanted at the College of Charleston.” That came about 24 hours after Roberts hired a new coach away from Akron, a decision that the Akron AD later said was motivated by… money.
Here is an excerpt of that essay ✍️:
The Fighting Camels are a perfect proxy for D-I’s lower class—a school that doesn’t have an FBS football team and spends less on men’s basketball ($2.2 million) than some Final Four players make in annual NIL money. There’s dozens of other Campbells around the country that you’ve likely never heard of.
The team caught our attention this week when first-year head coach John Andrzejek resigned via social media. In a long post on X, Andrzejek said the school had “made the decision” to deprioritize basketball.
“Despite months of intense work and collaboration with AD Hannah Bazemore and our terrific athletics administration, and several creative options that were proposed and thoroughly explored, there are no pathways that the institution will support to fund the program appropriately moving forward,” he wrote to fans.
“Simply put—the institution now has different priorities, and they are not compatible with putting the kind of team on the floor that you deserve.”
But realistically, what kind of men’s basketball team—and at what cost?—does Campbell University deserve?
___________________________________________________
You can read and subscribe to Club Sportico here. Existing Sportico subscribers have free access to Club Sportico.