Penn State may be living in the basement of Big Ten basketball spending, but it’s not in the very last room.
CBS Sports’ reporting from Matt Norlander and Isaac Trotter shows that no Power Conference men’s basketball team is spending less than $5 million on its roster this season. Based on Mike Rhoades’ offseason comments about the university’s lack of support for his program, Penn State looked like a candidate to land near that floor.
Instead, the Nittany Lions cleared it comfortably. Penn State sits in the next spending band, landing in the $7.1-9.9 million range for a roster built around veteran transfers and European talent for the 2026-27 season.
That puts Penn State in a crowded pocket of the Big Ten’s lower end. Washington is the only league team below $7 million, while Northwestern, Purdue, Rutgers, and Iowa are all alongside the Nittany Lions in CBS’s “Tier 6” of Power Conference roster spending.
The bigger picture isn’t exactly flattering for the Big Ten, either. The conference’s average roster spend is $12.7 million, which trails the Big East’s $13.6 million average.
The Big East’s number gets boosted by St. John’s and UConn, but it still sits ahead.
The SEC is operating on a different level entirely. Its average roster spend is $17.3 million, and four programs - Kentucky, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, the preseason No. 1 team - are all spending more than $20 million.
That gap between the Big Ten and SEC is wide enough to be a story on its own. CBS’s reporting notes that some of the Big Ten’s spending is tied up in hockey and wrestling, while the SEC is pouring money into baseball and softball. Even so, the difference on the basketball side is striking, and Penn State is part of what drags that league average down.
Purdue stands out as the exception in Penn State’s spending tier, though the Boilermakers are expected to take a step back after losing a historic senior class that included Braden Smith, Fletcher Loyer, and Trey Kaufman-Renn, who somehow wound up at Kansas after becoming the No. 59 overall pick of the Minnesota Timberwolves in the 2026 NBA Draft.
For Penn State, the spending profile makes a kind of sense. It’s a football school, and athletic director Pat Kraft seems to know where the priority lies. Donor money isn’t likely to flood into a costly men’s basketball build, so the real decision would be whether to push more revenue-sharing dollars toward the hardwood or keep directing those resources to Matt Campbell as Penn State tries to get back to the top of the Big Ten.
Still, the number of Big Ten programs sitting this low is notable, especially when one of them is Iowa, which just reached the Elite Eight in Ben McCollum’s first year running the program.
The conference split also raises a larger question: if this spending gap keeps widening, the SEC could keep separating itself as the sport’s dominant league, just as it appears to be doing in football this year, even with the Big Ten having produced the last three national champions.
Behind the Big Ten, the Big 12 averages $12.6 million per roster, while the ACC sits at $11.9 million.
That leaves Penn State with a simple but awkward dilemma. Being above the bottom tier does not mean it is competing at a level that changes much. Spending around $8 million may be better than scraping the floor, but it does not put the Nittany Lions in the same orbit as Illinois or Michigan, and it probably does not get them close to the expanded NCAA Tournament picture either.
So the uncomfortable question remains: should Penn State spend even less on basketball? It’s not an easy thing to ask of a head coach, but Rhoades has already said enough to make clear how steep the climb is. And if you asked plenty of Penn State fans, they’d probably tell you those dollars are better used elsewhere - even if the return on the football side might only be a trip to the Duke's Mayo Bowl, at best.
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