NIL And Conference Realignment Has Changed College Basketball Too
The impact of the wave of conference realignment and start of NIL money has mostly been considered for its influence on college football. And as the 2024 season in college football showed, there's been plenty of influence.
There were upsets throughout; Alabama losing to Vanderbilt, Michigan beating Ohio State, Ole Miss over Georgia, Ole Miss losing to Kentucky. Just to name a few. The gap between the elite teams and mediocre teams seemed to be as small as it's ever been. If not more so.
College basketball in 2024-2025 is much the same.
Upsets are everywhere; outside of one or two teams, there's been little consistency at the top of the rankings. Some teams seemed to surge for a few weeks, only to go on a losing streak soon afterward. And we have a likely explanation as to why.
COLUMBIA, S.C. - Auburn Tigers guard Denver Jones (2) and guard Miles Kelly (13) celebrate a three point basket by Kelly against the South Carolina Gamecocks in the second half at Colonial Life Arena on Jan. 11, 2025. Photo: Jeff Blake-Imagn Images
Realignment, NIL, Changing Landscape Of College Basketball Competition
There are a few different ways to illustrate how the game has changed even from just a few years ago. In the Associated Press poll at this same point in the 2019-2020 season, the top 10 teams had combined to lose 24 games between them.
In this week's poll, the top 10 had combined to lose 34 games. That's a massive difference in outcomes from the same subset of rankings. And that was before No. 8 Iowa State lost to Kansas on Monday and No. 9 Michigan State lost to UCLA on Tuesday.
Heck, seven-loss Illinois is ranked this week. There were no seven-loss teams ranked at this time in the season in 2019-2020.
The unpredictability of the 2024-2025 schedule is also apparent in the difference in rankings from the preseason to early February. Here was the top 10 in the first edition of the AP rankings:
- Kansas
- Alabama
- UConn
- Houston
- Iowa State
- Gonzaga
- Duke
- Baylor
- North Carolina
- Arizona
Here's this week's rankings:
- Auburn
- Duke
- Alabama
- Tennessee
- Houston
- Florida
- Purdue
- Iowa State
- Michigan State
- Texas A&M
Six of the 10 teams in the most recent poll were not in the top 10 of the preseason poll. Kansas has dropped into the mid-teens after being preseason number one.
Unpredictability in college basketball is nothing new, but what is new is the difficulties of cross-country travel within conferences. UCLA head coach Mick Cronin, for example, has complained about how west-to-east travel has hurt the Bruins this season, their first in the Big Ten.
Of the 18 teams in the Big Ten this year, just seven are .500 or better in conference play. Eight of the 14 teams in 2023-2024 version of the Big Ten finished .500 or better in conference play. Traveling to new venues across the country is tough. Take Michigan State, a top 10 team that entered last week at 18-2 on its way to Los Angeles. Then they lost to USC and UCLA.
Then USC had to travel to Chicago, losing 77-75 to Northwestern. Welcome to realignment.
We can also see what's changed with advanced analytics. The Ken Pomeroy computer rankings works by creating an adjusted efficiency margin; effectively how much better is the best team in the sport, and so on, relative to an average college basketball team.
This year's Auburn has a net rating of 37.09, and 40 teams are above 17. In 2017, there were just 30 teams with a rating above 17, and No. 1 Gonzaga had a 32.05 rating.
That's the impact of NIL: top teams are pulling talent from mid-level schools with higher NIL offers, leading to increased competitive balance. It's not just college football; upsets are going to become more common, and have already become more common, because of increased travel due to realignment. Because of NIL bridging the gap between programs. And because the transfer portal allows players to jump between schools when they feel like it.
It's a whole new world in college athletics, and it's playing out in basketball too.