Hello and thanks for opening up the NILnomics newsletter. With a new college basketball season starting, this issue looks at how men’s basketball spending relates to the way rosters are built. I started with men’s basketball spending data from the public MFRS database I have developed (using the latest FY2025 data). Then I worked with Basketball Quant (basketballquant.com), a college basketball analytics platform. Their data covers every D-I men’s team and player with its own team and player ratings, preseason projections, and transfer portal and roster tracking. The roster data in this piece come from their 2026-27 roster database, built from every team’s official roster page.
What did I find?
Across Division I, the money a program spends on men’s basketball is only loosely related to how many returning players it carries and closely related to where its new players come from.
The transfer portal has made every Division I men’s basketball roster a constant rebuild. This issue asks how spending relates to that rebuild and addresses three questions.
Do the programs that spend the most build with high-major transfers or with returning players?
Do programs with fewer resources rely more on returners and on new players?
And how do those patterns differ by conference level, by football subdivision, and by conference?
The answer is that a basketball budget is tied far more closely to a program’s position in the transfer market than to its continuity. Spending relates to the level of the transfers a program brings in and is only loosely associated with how many returners it carries. The least-resourced programs do not carry more returners. They carry slightly fewer, and their rosters lean more on freshmen, on transfers from low-major programs, and on transfers whose prior school the data cannot identify.
The roster data classify each of the 5,577 players on 2026-27 Division I rosters as a returner, a transfer from a high-major, mid-major or low-major program, a transfer whose prior school is not identified, or a freshman, international or other newcomer. Returners hold 32.8% of roster spots, which leaves 67.2% to players who are new to their programs. Transfers hold 38.6% of spots and freshmen and other newcomers 28.6%. The average roster carries 15.3 players, of whom five returned from the prior season.
The number of returners barely changes across the three conference levels. High-major and mid-major rosters each average 5.1 returners and low-major rosters 4.8, even though the median public high-major program spends $14.06M on men’s basketball, 7.8 times the $1.8M median at the low-major level. What changes is the origin of the transfers. High-major rosters average 2.6 transfers from other high-major programs, mid-major rosters 1 and low-major rosters 0.4. Transfers from low-major programs run the other way, from 0.5 per roster at the high-major level to 0.9 at mid-majors and 1.3 at low majors, as do transfers whose prior school is not identified, at 0.2, 1.3 and 1.7. Freshmen and other newcomers are spread fairly evenly, at 4.1, 4.5 and 4.4 per roster.