Texas spent approximately $23 million assembling its 2026 football roster through NIL and the transfer portal, more than any other College Football Playoff program in the country. There will be press conferences. There will be talk about culture. About commitment. About the little things it takes to build a championship program. Twenty-three million dollars for a program built on “values” is a lot of values.
The $23M figure isn’t actually the interesting part. The interesting part is the shared performance everyone has agreed to maintain — the collective decision, made by universities and coaches and conferences and the NCAA itself, to keep calling this college football rather than what it is, which is a professional sports league with a scholarship attached. College football has been professional sports with academic aesthetics for a generation; the transfer portal just made the transaction visible. Ohio State spent $20 million. Oregon spent $19 million. Texas A&M spent $18.5 million. These are not recruiting budgets. They are payrolls. The fiction everyone agrees to maintain is simply that they are not.
The fiction works because it serves everyone seated at the table. The universities get a product worth billions in media rights. The coaches get contracts that would register as competitive salaries in professional sports. The conferences get the television deals. And the players in the portal, the ones with leverage, are finally getting paid, which is the only part of any of this that is actually new and genuinely good. An average SEC starter commands roughly $600,000 on the open market in 2026; that’s a salary, not a stipend, and it is appropriate. The players always generated the value. They should receive some of it.
The entity most invested in maintaining the fiction is the NCAA, which is a strange position for an organization with no enforcement mechanism left. The NCAA keeps promulgating guidance about NIL and amateurism; the schools keep spending; nothing happens. It’s a bouncer outside a club that closed six months ago, still checking IDs, still wearing the earpiece. The club is gone. The bouncer is very professionally stationed at the door.
LSU is claiming even more — $25 to $30 million for roster construction, a number that drew this response from a Big 12 general manager: “You see LSU say they’ve got 25 mil for NIL, and you see that they’re skirting the rules. We don’t have that kind of money.” This is a remarkable sentence. The Big 12 GM has accepted, without apparent irony, that there are rules being skirted, that his program cannot afford to skirt them as aggressively, and that the primary competitive disadvantage is a budget gap rather than anything resembling an ethical breach. College football governance, ladies and gentlemen.
Texas built what analysts are describing as the most explosive offense in college football around Arch Manning, adding Cam Coleman, a five-star transfer wide receiver who signed one of the most-discussed NIL deals of the offseason, along with running backs Hollywood Smothers and Raleek Brown. This is a bought team in the most literal sense available; it was assembled from other programs’ rosters using money that did not exist as a legal category five years ago. The 2026 transfer portal window ran fifteen days in January. Fifteen days to spend $23 million. Revenue sharing at Power Four programs adds another $20.5 million on top of that; the NIL portal spend is a supplement, not the whole picture.
https://twitter.com/thenilstandard/status/2053598420397432989
None of that is the scandal. The scandal — if you want to call it that, if the word retains any charge, is that everyone involved will spend the next eight months explaining how this is different; how this is about development, about the culture, about the little things it takes to be a championship team. The growing NIL spending gap in college football between programs that can afford this arms race and those that cannot is a genuine problem, the kind that reshapes conferences and consolidates power in ways that won’t be undone. Texas will win some games. The NCAA will issue some guidance. The bouncer will keep checking IDs. Hook ‘em.
