Brian Dutcher and Jerrod Calhoun were busy preparing their basketball teams for Saturday’s first-place Mountain West showdown, scheming how they’d guard ball screens and attack switches.
That was the present. But the future was in the forefront of both head coaches’ minds, so much so that they spoke about it candidly in the days before the game.
And neither painted a particularly bright picture.
Dutcher, the San Diego State coach, received a question on his weekly radio show last Thursday about the state of program’s NIL and revenue-sharing resources for next season.
“To be honest with you, we don’t have enough to compete on a national level,” Dutcher, whose Aztecs host Wyoming on Tuesday night, told Jon Schaeffer on 760 AM. “We need people to step up and feel we’re important to the city of San Diego, important to the university, and support us as best they can. Obviously, we need the university to step up and help with rev share, but I know it’s tough.
“I’ve done the best with what we have, and we have really good kids, we have really good players and we’re playing at a really high level. But from a payroll standpoint, we’re not close to what the high majors are playing with, not even near that level.”
Earlier that day, in a phone interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Calhoun broached the same topic, wondering aloud if Utah State could continue its remarkable basketball success with increasingly inferior financial resources.
“It’s going to be so interesting to see how every athletic director in the country at the Group of Five level approaches this,” Calhoun said of the schools that play Division I football but don’t have access to power conference TV money. “It’s going to be a very interesting three- to five-year study in what can you get out of your investment, because you do have to invest.
“My fear is, how do we keep up in this revenue-sharing space?”
SDSU amassed just under $3 million for men’s basketball for the 2025-26 season, all of it from external fundraising. Calhoun says his program had between $1.5 million and $2 million, also without university support.
How does that compare with power conferences?
One unofficial survey this season found more than 30 programs with at least a $10 million payroll for men’s basketball from outside NIL and direct university revenue-sharing. That’s topped by Kentucky, which is operating with a reported $22 million.
SDSU has transitioned from exclusively using the MESA Foundation, an NIL collective founded in 2021 by boosters Jeff and Wendy Smith, to folding its efforts for men’s basketball into the university’s Student-Athletic Recruitment and Retention Fund.
In October, Chase Fisher, the founder of Blenders Eyewear, pledged $1 million per year for five years toward men’s basketball. The program also receives $1 million per year from the Players Era Festival, the annual nonconference event in Las Vegas over Thanksgiving week.
That’s in addition to close to $2 million MESA raised last year from the general public, although early indications are they’re not on pace to hit that level again.
SDSU’s football team, meanwhile, is expected to have between $5 million and $6 million in revenue sharing for next season. Football fundraising has lagged well behind the powerhouse men’s basketball program, meaning much of that increase presumably will come directly from athletic department coffers despite the most recently available budget documents showing a $29.1 million deficit in 2024.
“I have a beautiful office in our athletic building, but I don’t even think of redoing or getting new furniture or any of that,” Dutcher told 760 AM. “Any money I can raise, I’m trying to put toward NIL, because we’re trying to stay relevant on a national level.
“A lot of the other things that would normally get done have to be put on the back burner, because NIL is the most important thing we have to have in our program right now.”
For the second straight week, Dutcher and his players were not made available to the media before a home game, a departure from past access.
SDSU and Utah State are among the five schools leaving the Mountain West this summer for a relaunched Pac-12, which promises slightly higher TV revenues but at the cost of an $18 million exit fee that’s currently being litigated in the courts.
Utah State has a significantly smaller athletic budget than SDSU, ranking ahead of only San Jose State in the Mountain West at just over $50 million per year. Calhoun donated $150,000 of his own salary to the basketball NIL collective to keep from falling further behind the conference’s top four or five programs.
Competing for conference titles could be even harder in the Pac-12, though. Gonzaga is expected to receive a full revenue share in the new conference despite not having football, allowing it to pour that money into basketball.
“In the new Pac-12, you have some basketball powers, but you also have the one outlier that doesn’t have football in Gonzaga,” Calhoun said. “Most of us are on an equal playing field, but we’re not anymore. The facts are the facts. I think Coach Dutcher will tell you that. They don’t have football. They’re at another level.
“What are we going to do, the Boise States, the Colorado States, the San Diego States? That’s not even in our hands (as coaches). That’s an athletic department decision.”
San Diego State (15-6, 9-2) vs. Wyoming (13-9, 4-7)
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Viejas Arena
TV: CBS Sports Network
Radio: 760 AM