There’s two different points at play in your post so I will try to address them both.
Point One: Competitiveness
I would be curious to hear how you think college football is “non-competitive”. Most all of the games and programs are actually very competitive as teams 15-90 are largely interchangeable in any given year.
I would venture to say that tends to be true in any sport or industry in life: there are your JP Morgans, Goldman Sachs, etc of the world and there are also your First Citizen’s and Comerica’s. Same goes in college sports: in football there is Alabama, Georgia, etc and there’s also Minnesota and Texas Tech, while in hoops there is UConn, Carolina, Kentucky, etc and there’s also VCU and Providence.
If the difference to you in “competitiveness” is the number of teams that have a realistic chance to win the national championship in a given year, that’s a separate discussion. The bar to field a national title caliber team (at least for now) is much lower in basketball than it is in football. This is inherently true due to the nature of the two sports- a few of which are summarized below:
- Limited Roster Sizes: 85 scholarships in football v 13 in basketball, the impact of one “elite” player on your hoops roster is much felt much greater than in football in terms of overall wins/losses.
- Larger Player Pool: Basketball is a global game. There are hundreds of players available that can play key roles (varying of course) on championship teams and rosters. Football predominantly recruits from 5-6 US States consisting of TX, GA, FL, CA, etc. This also makes geography largely irrelevant in the discussion, as teams from states like Kansas, Washington, Connecticut, etc have been able to historically field great teams on a recurring basis
- Lower Overall Program Startup, Maintenance Cost Requirements: The amount of money it requires to field a NCAA Tournament level team in basketball isn’t even remotely close to the amount of money it requires to field a CFP caliber team (speaking in general terms). Go look at the operating budgets for the CFP participants since the first rendition in 2014 and compare them to the basketball operating budgets for anyone in Division 1- it’s not even in the same stratosphere
Point Two: NIL Impact
NIL is going to largely be situationally driven, regardless of sport. The good news is women’s sports have actually also seen large amounts of success in obtaining and creating NIL opportunities. There was a really good writeup in the AP regarding data from OpenDorse on the first year of NIL operations from last July, linking
here and quoting a passage below for reference:
As of June 20, men’s sports received 62.7% of total compensation in the NCAA and NAIA combined, compared with 37.3% for women’s sports, Opendorse said. Remove football and women flip it to 52.8% vs. 11.2% for men. The difference in Division III was stark through May 31: 82.9% men vs. 17.1% women.
Football (49.9%) and men’s basketball (17%) dominated total NIL compensation by sport in Opendorse’s platform through June 20, with women’s basketball (15.7%), women’s volleyball (2.3%) and softball (2.1%) rounding out the top five. Football also took the top spot in INFLCR’s number of NIL transactions through May 31 with 23.7%, followed by men’s basketball (22.3%), softball (8.2%), baseball (6%) and women’s basketball (4.7%).
When it comes to total NIL activities, Opendorse says football (29.3%) is the leader, then baseball (8%), men’s basketball (7.6%), women’s track and field (5.6%) and women’s volleyball (5.5%).
Overall, I would expect (and continue to expect) that football would dominate the overall dollar value in the NIL world. It’s the most popular sport in the US for a reason and the costs associated with those deals far outpace any other sport in the collegiate hemisphere. But that doesn’t mean that NIL can’t have a great impact on college basketball and team’s can’t use that to their advantage to populate their rosters with talented individuals. Again, smaller roster sizes, larger player pools, and lower costs to entry mean it should be easier for a team like UConn to remain at the top of the rung in hoops than in football, where it is really really difficult (if not downright impossible) to enter the club (similar to La Liga or other European soccer leagues).
