The market just keeps quietly resetting upward.
Who is to say that, in 2030, we won’t look back on where we are now and say we were foolish for thinking we were at the peak of spending?
There is real evidence to back up that notion, too.
In 2025-26, the first year of its new media deal, the NBA is generating roughly $6.9 billion a year from its television and streaming partners. College basketball’s most valuable asset, the NCAA Tournament, currently brings in a little more than $1 billion annually through its deal. The rest of the NCAA’s championship inventory, the women’s tournament included, sits in a separate ESPN agreement worth around $115 million a year. Add it all together and the comparison is not particularly close. The NBA is pulling in something like six times what college basketball’s signature event generates.
That kind of gap would make sense if the audiences were just as lopsided. They are not.
The NBA averaged about 1.78 million viewers a game this season, its best mark in seven years, and there is no reason to undersell that. But college basketball’s best inventory does not trail those numbers — it beats them.
Duke’s win over Arkansas on Thanksgiving drew 6.8 million viewers, and Michigan State and North Carolina pulled 6.5 million on the same afternoon. The NBA had strong regular-season windows of its own, but its high-end nights generally topped out closer to three million. And then there is March, where the comparison stops being a comparison at all. The 2026 NCAA Tournament averaged 10.9 million viewers across three weeks, and the Michigan-UConn title game reached 18.3 million. The NBA’s regular season simply does not have anything that climbs that high, and the postseason fails to match up, either. Game 1 between the Thunder and Spurs was the most-watched Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals ever, and it brought in 9.2 million viewers.
College basketball is in a genuinely unusual spot because of this. It is a sport whose best games match or beat the NBA’s best games, and whose postseason operates on an entirely different tier, yet its national television revenue still comes in at a fraction of what the NBA commands.
That is not the profile of a sport that has run out of financial room, but rather the profile of a sport that has been underpaid relative to what it actually draws.