CBS Sports’ deep dive into college basketball roster spending has put a sharper edge on a truth the sport keeps circling back to: the best coaches are still finding ways to win without the biggest checkbooks.
The investigation by Matt Norlander and Isaac Trotter broke programs into spending tiers for the 2026-27 season, offering one of the clearest looks yet at what high-major teams are actually putting into men’s basketball during the NIL era. And when you zoom in on the middle and lower tiers, the list of coaches squeezing maximum value out of modest budgets jumps off the page.
At the top of that group sits Purdue’s Matt Painter, whose Boilermakers landed in Tier 6, a range from $7.1 million to $9.9 million. That places Purdue in the same general territory as Utah, Northwestern, DePaul and Penn State, a reality that makes Painter’s yearly results look even more impressive.
Purdue’s model is built on continuity, and the program’s ability to keep winning with unremarkable resources speaks to how well Painter has it humming. Among Tier 6 teams, no one else is really in Purdue’s class, and in Tier 5, Iowa State is the only program that comes close.
Nate Oats checks in next, and Alabama’s spot in Tier 4 stands out in a league where money usually talks loudest. Of the SEC’s 16 schools, 13 are at least one tier above the Crimson Tide in spending, yet Oats has still turned Alabama into a regular heavyweight.
The Tide reached their first Final Four in 2024, have made it past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament in each of the past four seasons, won SEC regular-season titles in 2021 and 2023, and have never been seeded worse than No. 6 under Oats. He’s also produced five first-round NBA picks, a strong sign that the development side of the operation is working just as well.
TJ Otzelberger lands third, and the case for him is built on both consistency and transformation. Iowa State has gone 5-for-5 in NCAA Tournament appearances in his first five seasons, reached three Sweet 16s and earned a No. 3 seed or better in each of the past three years.
That’s a remarkable run considering what he inherited: a program that had gone 2-22 the season before he arrived from South Dakota State. He immediately turned the Cyclones into an elite defensive team with a roster that ranked No. 340 in KenPom’s minutes continuity metric, and his 2026-27 team is already sitting at No. 12 in Gary Parrish’s Top 25 And 1.
Fred Hoiberg’s work at Nebraska belongs in the same conversation. The Cornhuskers are a football school with little basketball history, and their Tier 5 placement fit that reality. But Hoiberg has pushed the program into territory it had never seen before: Nebraska has won 20 or more games in three straight seasons for the first time ever, and it has reached at least two NCAA Tournaments in a three-year span for the first time since the early 1990s.
Ben McCollum comes in at No. 5 after one season at Iowa, and while the sample size is tiny, the early signs are hard to ignore. He guided the Hawkeyes to a stunning Elite Eight run in his first year, and the question now is whether he can turn that into something more durable.
Replacing Bennett Stirtz, who is now with the Oklahoma City Thunder after playing for McCollum at three different schools, will be a major test. Still, in the Tier 5 and Tier 6 world, the job is always about getting more than the budget suggests, and McCollum has already shown he can do that.
Kyle Smith has Stanford outperforming its financial slot as well. The Cardinal are 41-27 overall and 20-18 in ACC play through two seasons, all while operating on one of the lowest budgets among high-major programs. Stanford just missed the 2026 NCAA Tournament, but Smith has already delivered two seasons that finished well ahead of expectations in KenPom, including one team that ended 18 spots higher than its preseason projection and another that finished 27 spots higher.
Jamie Dixon has done this long enough that it almost feels routine, but it shouldn’t. TCU has reached four of the past five NCAA Tournaments under his watch, a sharp contrast to the one Big Dance appearance the program had in the previous 30 years before he arrived. The Horned Frogs still haven’t broken through past the first weekend, but Dixon keeps turning out tough, competitive teams despite middling resources.
Ryan Odom’s first season at Virginia was as strong as anyone could have hoped. The Cavaliers won 30 games, earned a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament and finished No. 17 in KenPom after starting the year at No. 59 in the preseason. Tier 4 isn’t the bottom of the barrel, but it still demands sharp roster construction and real coaching skill, and Odom wasted no time proving he has both.
Georgia’s Mike White rounds out the list after helping the Bulldogs do something they hadn’t done in more than two decades: make back-to-back NCAA Tournaments. The investigation pegged Georgia last in the SEC in spending, yet White still got the Bulldogs to 10-8 in league play with a roster in the $10 million to $12 million range.
Greg Gard closes the ranking, and Wisconsin’s recent run makes a strong case for his place here. The Badgers are 73-35 overall and 38-22 in Big Ten play over the past three seasons despite ranking outside the top half of the league in spending. They significantly outperformed preseason expectations in 2025 and have been seeded No. 5 or better in each of the past three NCAA Tournaments.
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