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Message: [QUOTE="champs99and04, post: 5351847, member: 488"] You can't really compare it to pro sports because pro sports have a draft, arbitration, etc. Most of the biggest baseball stars are under control of the team that drafted them until they're close to 30, so I think the payroll gap in MLB can be a little misleading. Paul Skenes, for instance, made $740K last season and probably something similar this year. Tarik Skubal made $2.5 million last year and $10 million this year despite being worth probably 5x that much on the open market. A lot of times, the small market teams end up getting a player's best years while the big markets pay a premium for declining, broken down stars. Point is, there are built-in advantages for the have-nots in professional sports that do not exist in college. What concerns me moving forward isn't whether we can get the players, but whether we can keep them. Guys like Calhoun made a career out of nabbing underrated recruits because he essentially had them locked up for 3-4 years once they got to campus. I think UConn men's basketball will always have enough booster support to bring in good players, but to build a champion you're going to need the money to keep them. We seem to be on the right side of that ledger...for now. But schools like FAU and Iona that built championship quality rosters only to be raided by the P2 provide a cautionary tale of what can happen if the gap ever grows too wide. [/QUOTE]