Gonzaga won't have financial edge in revenue sharing era, and that's OK

On a Friday night in early June, Gonzaga and the other 360-plus Division I schools across the country were informed that starting July 1, they would be allowed to share their own revenue directly with their student-athletes in just about any way that they see fit.

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken granted final approval of the landmark House settlement on June 6, upending the NCAA's 119-year-old amateurism model while implementing a salary cap that will likely cause the NCAA more headaches and trips to the courtroom down the road. Regardless, institutions have been given the all-clear to share as much as $20.5 million per year with their players starting with the 2025-26 season.

How schools and athletic departments decide to divvy up their revenue is completely up to them, though, given how much college football drives in annually, power conference schools are expected to distribute a majority of their wealth to those players. Some institutions, like Georgia, have already publicized their intentions to share at least 75% of their revenue after scholarships with their football players — a popular percentage that most top-end schools are expected to allocate for their football players as well.

And as for the 100-plus members of Division I that don't sponsor football? They're also allowed to spend $20.5 million per year — if they can — on their student-athletes. But just because some places like Gonzaga and certain members of the Big East conference won't have to worry about tying down 75% of their revenue to 105 student-athletes moving forward, that doesn't necessarily mean basketball-centric schools will have a financial advantage over their football-playing counterparts in the new revenue-sharing era.

"I think that if you're in the Big East, if you're a Gonzaga, you're waking up every morning, you're saying 'How do we win in basketball every day?'" College basketball analyst John Fanta said Tuesday during a public spaces session on X. "Do these schools have football money? They do not. I think to say that there's this significant advantage that they have over the football schools — that's not true. That got overblown."

The idea that schools like Gonzaga and UConn would have a leg-up on football powerhouses when it came to basketball recruiting stemmed from the notion that the Zags, Huskies and others in their position could reserve more of their funds for top-tier hoopers, as opposed to an SEC or Big Ten school that has aspirations of qualifying for the College Football Playoff.

Fanta doesn't envision the Alabamas and Ohio States of the world missing out on many highly-rated prospects because of money constraints, but he could see non-football schools that prioritize basketball use that to their advantage out on the recruiting trails.

"I do, however, think that if you want to play basketball at the next level, you know that if you go to UConn or St John's, or a Villanova or Creighton or a Marquette — you know where the bread gets buttered," Fanta said. "You're going to be the king of the hill at that place. And that, to me, still is a selling point."

The authorization of college sports' first revenue-sharing model has paved the way for a new kind of NIL arms race, and one that the Big East has been winning on the basketball front. According to a report in April from ESPN's Dan Wetzel, Big East schools on average designated $5.7 million to their men's basketball players for the 2025-26 campaign, while the other power conferences came in at less than $4.5 million on average.

At the Global NIL Summit run by @SilverWaveMedia, Blake Lawrence of @opendorse said conference average of revenue share allocated to men’s basketball for 2025-26:

1. Big East $5.7m
2. ACC $4.4m
3. B12 4.3m
4. B10 $3.2m
5. SEC $3.1m
— Dan Wetzel (@DanWetzel) April 4, 2025

At a school like Kansas, where success on the hardwood has taken priority over the gridiron historically, football players will still receive a bigger slice of the revenue share pie in comparison to Olympic sport athletes, but the Jayhawks men's basketball program will be prioritized accordingly as well. Kansas athletic director Travis Goff said he expects to start out in the "top-10 percentile" of spending in men’s basketball.

"This revenue sharing is a massive challenge, and you still need supporters, and you still need money, and you still need donors," Fanta said. "You gotta have the right support staff, the right administration, the right people that also the coach trusts to say, 'You know what, I trust that they're going to get the job done and here's how we're going to do it together.'"

Gonzaga, which officially opted into the revenue-sharing model, will navigate its way through a new landscape while making its anticipated transition to the Pac-12 conference in July 2026.

The move out of the West Coast Conference and into a league on the fringe of gaining autonomy status should help the Zags bring in more revenue and provide more exposure opportunities in the regular season. The financial details of the Pac-12's renewed media rights contract with CBS were not disclosed, but according to Yahoo! Sports' Ross Dellenger, the annual per-school figure is slated to fall on the lower end of an $8-15 million projection that the league showed its expansion targets last year.

With recruiting, roster building and player retention driving college basketball into a year-round sport that's centered around NIL and securing funds, Fanta believes the non-stop nature of the sport will pave the way for a younger generation of coaches to rise to the

"You can no longer just sit in your office, watch film and draw up a practice plan. You can no longer just go to one dinner. You can no longer just go to one golf outing," Fanta said. "This is tireless, and in my opinion, it's why we're going to see more Todd Golden-Jon Scheyer; you know, younger, different archetypes step up and get it."

"If you're running a professional-like operation day to day, from November to April, that might be better off and healthier than going for four hours of practice. If it means your guys are happy, they're getting paid [and] they know what they're supposed to do."

MORE GONZAGA NEWS & ANALYSIS