"The increased spending is now drawing a second line, and that line runs straight through the middle of the power-conference tier itself. Duke and Boston College share a conference, yet they do not share anything close to the same financial reality.
That gap between the handful of genuine national brands and the broad middle class of power-conference basketball may end up being one of the defining stories of the next decade. It will not be simply because some schools care more than others, though that matters, or because a few of them were clever enough to figure out NIL before everyone else. It will be because the biggest brands are sitting on advantages that have very little to do with how generous their collective happens to be.
They have bigger audiences, deeper donor pools, and stronger alumni networks. More importantly, they carry more national visibility and more media value, which simply gives them more ways to turn attention into money. They have also started behaving like organizations that no longer treat any of this as a temporary spike. "