A new look at college basketball’s NIL spending landscape has put a spotlight on a simple truth: some coaches are getting far more out of their rosters than their budgets should allow.
CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander and Isaac Trotter dug deep into high-major roster spending for the 2026-27 season, sorting programs into tiers and giving the sport its clearest snapshot yet of who is really spending what in the NIL era. The reporting breaks the numbers into seven tiers, from Tier 1 at $20 million plus all the way down to Tier 7 at $5 million to $7 million.
And buried in that financial map is a list of coaches who are squeezing every last bit of value out of limited resources.
Matt Painter sits at the top of that group. Purdue landed in Tier 6, in the $7.1 million to $9.9 million range, alongside programs such as Utah, Northwestern, DePaul and Penn State.
That makes the Boilermakers’ level of success look even more striking. Painter has built a program where continuity matters, retention is a strength, and Purdue keeps producing like a much richer operation.
Among the teams in Tier 6, nobody else is close to Purdue’s overall standard, and the only school in Tier 5 that can really match it is Iowa State.
Nate Oats comes next, and Alabama’s placement tells its own story. The Crimson Tide are in Tier 4, even though 13 of the SEC’s 16 schools are spending at least one tier above them.
Still, Oats has Alabama playing like a heavyweight. He led the program to its first Final Four in 2024, has taken the Tide past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament in each of the past four seasons, and has won double league titles in 2021 and 2023.
Alabama has also never been worse than a No. 6 seed under Oats, and with five first-round picks on his resume, his player development track record is part of the case.
TJ Otzelberger has done something similar at Iowa State, only with a different kind of turnaround. He enters Year 6 having gone 5 for 5 in NCAA Tournament trips, with three Sweet 16s and three straight seasons as a No. 3 seed or better.
That’s a remarkable run on its own, but it looks even better when you remember what he inherited: a program that went 2-22 the season before he arrived from South Dakota State. He quickly built an elite defense with a roster that ranked No. 340 in KenPom’s minutes continuity metric, and his 2026-27 team sits No. 12 in Gary Parrish’s Top 25 And 1.
Fred Hoiberg is another coach making a strong case in the middle of the spending tiers. Nebraska’s Tier 5 placement fits a football-first school that had never won an NCAA Tournament game before this past season. But Hoiberg has pushed the Cornhuskers into territory the program hadn’t seen before: three straight 20-win seasons for the first time ever, and at least two NCAA Tournament appearances in a three-year span for the first time since the early 1990s.
Ben McCollum’s first season at Iowa was enough to get him on this list, even if it’s just a one-year sample. He guided the Hawkeyes to a stunning Elite Eight run and has them trending in the right direction.
The challenge in 2026-27 is replacing Bennett Stirtz, who is now with the Oklahoma City Thunder after playing for McCollum at three different schools. Iowa didn’t make much noise in the offseason market, but that’s part of the assignment in this range: find a way to win without flashy spending.
Kyle Smith has done that at Stanford, too. The Cardinal are 41-27, including 20-18 in ACC play, through two seasons while working with one of the lowest budgets among high-major programs.
Stanford barely missed the 2026 NCAA Tournament, but Smith has still overachieved by a wide margin. The 2025 team finished 18 spots better at KenPom than its preseason projection, and the previous season finished 27 spots higher than expected.
Jamie Dixon keeps doing the same kind of work at TCU. He has taken the Horned Frogs to four of the past five NCAA Tournaments after the program had reached just one in the previous 30 years before his arrival. TCU still hasn’t broken through past the first weekend, but Dixon has consistently fielded teams that are tough, competitive and built on modest resources.
Ryan Odom is already making noise at Virginia, where he won 30 games in his first season. The Cavaliers earned a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament and finished No. 17 in KenPom after starting the year at No.
- That kind of jump is exactly why he belongs in this conversation.
Georgia’s Mike White rounds out the list after helping the Bulldogs make consecutive NCAA Tournaments for the first time since the early 2000s. Georgia ranks last in SEC spending, according to the investigation, but 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 after another strong run at Wisconsin. The Badgers are 73-35 overall and 38-22 in Big Ten play over the past three seasons, despite spending outside the top half of the league. Wisconsin also significantly outperformed preseason expectations in 2025 and has been a No. 5 seed or better in each of the past three NCAA Tournaments.
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