Pay for Talent—or Develop It?

For years, college coaches competed to recruit student-athletes to their sports programs. Today, bizarrely, the real challenge for many coaches is retention. More precisely, “employee retention,” and yes, the “employees” in question are the alleged student athletes.

It seems like ancient history—but it was just 2018—when two “student-athletes” affiliated with the University of Kansas basketball program, Billy Preston and Silvio De Sousa, got KU in hot water for receiving what the media called “big money.” For De Sousa, that big money, filtered through an adidas exec, was $20,000. For Preston, $90,000.

In 2018, coaches would have lured prized recruits to campus with promises of a full scholarship, quality training, high-level coaching, and a tradition of winning. Oh, yeah, and maybe—shhh!—some “big money” under-the-table.

By 2025-26, even the illusion of education was gone. It is as if KU had changed the school fight song from “I’m a Jayhawks” to Jerry Maguire’s “Show me the money.” The exact figures are not known, but five-star freshman Darryn Peterson was making about $90,000 a game. By some estimates, he was raking in as much as $3.8 million for the season.

But let’s not single out KU here. The rule that changed everything in college sports goes by the acronym NIL, shorthand for “name, image, and likeness.” Battered by legal challenges to its rules on amateurism, the NCAA officially ushered the NIL era into college sports in July 2021.

As conceived, advertisers and other sponsors could pay athletes for using a player’s name, image, or likeness to sell a product. This golden age of equity didn’t last a Philadelphia minute. Schools were buying players outright before sports fans figured out what “NIL” even stood for. 

Compounding the madness, again under legal duress, the NCAA abandoned all restrictions on student transfers. Starting in 2021, athletes no longer had to sit out a year if after transferring to a new university. In 2024, the Department of Justice pressured the NCAA into lifting all restrictions on an athlete’s ability to transfer.

Kansas State caught on quickly. Competing with the basketball juggernaut at KU, K-State’s now-former head coach, Jerome Tang, knew that if he were to field a competitive team, he would have to poach his players from other schools. For the 2023-2024 season, he did just that.

The bios on K-State’s basketball roster have a category labeled “previous school.” Other than a few freshmen, just about every player on the 2023-2024 roster checked that box. The abandoned colleges included Florida, Samford, Virginia Tech, North Texas, Mississippi State, Manhattan, LSU, and Creighton. Tang’s team of mercenaries rewarded fans by making it to the Elite Eight in that year’s NCAA tournament.

As Coach Tang learned, it is easier to recruit mercenaries than retain them. Of the 12 players on that Elite Eight team, only three returned to K-State for the following season. The 2024-2025 team of newbies lost more games than they won and failed to make the NCAA tournament. The following season, the Wildcats went 3-15 in Big 12 play costing Coach Tang his job. 

The NIL era treated KU no kinder than it did K-State. Despite the program’s historic quality, KU needed Peterson more than Peterson needed KU, and he played like it. Loyalty was for suckers. No fewer than five basketball players transferred out of KU in the last two seasons. Four others have entered the transfer portal. Peterson will not be back next season, as the NBA draft beckons.

The storied KU program has not made it as far as the Sweet 16 since that championship season of 2022. If fans are upset, wait until they find out that, as KCUR reported, “KU Athletics finances are so bad that the new student-athlete payroll is coming out of the university general fund, made up of tuition money and state tax dollars.” 

Is it possible for a university to run a traditional program in the show-me-the-money era? Indulge my bias as a Purdue alum, and I’ll say yes. 

In this craven new world, Purdue has made the news by recruiting and retaining actual student athletes. Without a single blue-chipper on the roster, the Boilermakers have won 117 games over the past four seasons.

At the start of the 2024-2025 season, Purdue, fresh off a second straight Big 10 Championship and a trip to the Final Four, did something so perfectly retrograde that it left pundits in shock.

Coach Matt Painter dared to field a team without a single transfer student anywhere on the roster. Incredibly, all of his players began at Purdue as freshmen. But unlike KU or K-State, the Boilers did make it to the Sweet 16 before losing at the buzzer to the University of Houston, another school strong on retention.

Like KU and K-State, Purdue is a state university. The difference is that Purdue’s roster reflects that fact. Four of the starting five in the 2024-2025 season graduated from Indiana high schools, and seven additional Hoosiers made the team. Two of the players from out of state had Purdue grads as parents. “You empower people who stay in the program and grow,” said Painter.

Purdue further shocked the sports world by returning its three-star players for the 2025-2026 season, one of them a philosophy major, another a first-team All-American. Now seniors, all three started at Purdue as freshmen and were among only 10 power conference seniors nationwide who could make that claim. 

With just one transfer in their nine-player rotation in 2025-26, Purdue ranked No. 6 at season’s end and made it to the Tournament’s Elite Eight. Said Painter, “We’re at an advantage. We have corporate DNA. We have guys who can coach our team.”

“What makes Purdue a March Madness outlier?” asked The New York Times. “Retention in a world of movement.” Said Painter, “Man, you can’t grow them if you can’t keep them.”

True, virtue may be its own reward, but this season the University of Michigan started five transfer “students”—its star player on his fourth college—and won it all. So it goes.

PUBLISHED MAY 2026