Greg Gard reveals where the Badgers will be in NIL among the Big Ten in 2026

The Wisconsin Badgers are active in the transfer portal, as they’re looking to fill their six open roster spots and round out their team for the 2026-27 season.

Of course, negotiations are ongoing for player retention, but the Badgers are trending to keep their remaining core pieces, notably Nolan Winter and Austin Rapp, while looking to fill in the gaps in the transfer portal.

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With how much college basketball is evolving, NIL has been more prevalent than ever, with the transfer portal essentially looking like free agency. Agents of players are looking for the top offers across the nation, with teams fighting to retain their players, while also looking to add players from other teams.

For the Badgers, Greg Gard and his staff have done some significant work to raise funding for the program over the last few seasons, as the team continues to raise its NIL budget, but the head coach acknowledged that Wisconsin is still far behind in the Big Ten leaderboard.

Gard revealed that the Badgers weren’t even in the top half of Big Ten spending last year, noting that’s prompted the team to take more of a moneyball approach with their recruiting.

“[We were] not neither one,” Gard said on The Mike Heller Show when asked if the Badgers were in the top third or top half of NIL spending in the Big Ten. “Part of that’s just been the explosion again of the market and where it’s gone and how everyone has continued to raise the bar, so to speak, because they’ve had to. And some of it’s due to just how the market has demanded it.

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“They’ve had a lot of teams in our league that haven’t had the success, so they’re just pouring resources into it to try to catch up to the rest of us from a success standpoint. And it doesn’t mean that the teams that— because the teams that spent the most money in our league this year, 2 of the 4 didn’t make the NCAA tournament, right. And there was quite a few that spent a lot that didn’t have the success that…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/greg-gard-reveals-where-badgers-162200435.html

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Publish date : 2026-04-10 16:22:00

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