Just a couple of observations as we are a week into the portal with just short of a week to go:
1. The amount of high major to high major shuffling is a lot more accelerated this year than we've seen (North Carolina to Michigan) and it is pushing mid-major talent feeding frenzy down the pecking order. After what Michigan did (full roster turnover) you are seeing a lot of Power 4 conference teams completely restructure their teams (Kentucky for one). Teams are not wedded to their prior seasons million dollar NIL deals and those kids are being told to find a new home, which is why I think we are seeing a lot of power 4 conference players hit the portal this week.
2. My hunch is the median D1 roster is going to cost a school 25K per player. If that seems insane, it has more to do with how top heavy some of the NIL pay outs are. Myles Bird (SDSU and MWC) player is thought to have collected a million from Providence. Kentucky paid out in excess of 1 mil last year, and if you want a sense as to why many low D1 schools spend so much time recruiting at the DII level is those prices and the market for those players seems to be considerably less and you can get bigger bang for your buck. Montana isn't going to have 300K+ to spend on 15 roster positions. Montana wasn't going to ever be able to rationalize spending 200K plus on one player through NIL/revenue shares, and it’s likely that Money is going to fetch 500K or more from a high major program. The point, is this market is set up for schools that can a) keep their own players b) out spend their comparatives on one or two players and c) know how to find economic value in areas that are under-recruited. Most low to mid-major programs are going to have to wait the cycle out a bit if they want existing D1 players to come to them. Montana might have a larger share of money other than maybe Weber (who i think was given a cash infusion by Lillard) in the BSC.
