The Duke Blue Devils are the No. 1 overall seed in this year’s men’s March Madness tournament. They are also by far the biggest financial powerhouse of the four No. 1 seeds, with a budget of $25.4 million in the most recent season with data available. Duke’s expenses were the second-highest in the country, with other No. 1 seeds Arizona ($16.3 million) and Michigan ($15.7 million) far behind. The Florida Gators ranked just 69th in the nation, spending only $9.9 million on their program.

(To include private institutions, these figures have been pulled from EADA data, which schools submit annually to the U.S. Department of Education. The 2023-24 season is the most recent data available).

Duke is regularly one of the top-spending schools on basketball, and the team reached the Elite Eight in each of the past two seasons and five of the past seven tournaments. But Florida, despite its relatively modest budget, won the national championship last season, and is a strong contender to repeat.

More generally, spending is not correlated with seed in the 2026 bracket among the 32 teams that received top-eight seeds. The average men’s basketball budget of the four No. 1 seeds ($16.9 million) is barely higher than that of the No. 7 seeds ($16.4 million) or the No. 8 seeds ($14.1 million).

Here’s how all 68 tournament teams stack up:

The graph clearly delineates between the two financial stratospheres in men’s college basketball. Every single team seeded between No. 12 through No. 16 had a budget under $5 million, while all but one team seeded at least No. 11 had a budget of more than $5 million.

The one exception is the latter group is Miami (Ohio) University, which is an outlier among teams receiving at-large bids with its $2.7 million budget. The RedHawks went 31-0 in the regular season but lost in the first round of the MAC Tournament, missing out on an automatic bid and putting their fate in the hands of the selection committee. The team was rewarded for its historic season with the last spot in March Madness, even though Miami sits at No. 93 in statistician Ken Pomeroy’s national rankings, more than 50 spots behind Oklahoma and Auburn, which were the top two teams left out.

As one of the last four teams in, No. 11 seed Miami will play in the First Four on Wednesday. Financially, this is a dream scenario for the MAC conference, which also sent No. 12 seed Akron to the tournament as the league champion. The NCAA distributes hundreds of millions of dollars to conferences each year based on the number of NCAA Tournament games their schools play (called “units”). The MAC, which is generally a one-bid conference, is not only is guaranteed two units this year, but could pick up a third if Miami wins its First Four game, even if neither of its schools advance past the Round of 64.

Speaking of the First Four, Wednesday’s other game will feature the field’s stingiest program in Prairie View A&M, with a budget of just $1.2 million, ranking 345th out of 356 Division I schools. That’s less than the approximately $2 million Prairie View’s conference, the SWAC, will receive for the Panthers’ NCAA Tournament appearance, with the chance to double that with a win in the First Four.

The most lopsided first-round matchup is between No. 3 seed Illinois, whose budget totaled $19 million, and No. 14 seed Penn out of the Ivy League, which spent just $2.2 million.

The first round of the men’s tournament tips off Thursday following Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s First Four play-in games.