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.
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.
“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 we’ve had. So it’s not necessarily always about who spends the most money.
“We’re in a position where you’ve got to continue to be creative with how you’re structuring contracts. There is a moneyball approach to a degree. So there’s a lot of moving parts that go into it and you’re constantly evolving and shifting because you got two different sources. You have revenue share, and then you have NIL. So you have to balance the two and, like I said, kind of put the puzzle together in different ways.”
With NIL only rising across the nation, it’s important for teams to continue to grow their resources to accomodate. But the Badgers likely won’t be in the top half of spending again in 2026, according to Gard.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Gard said. “Yeah, maybe if we can grow it a little bit more. Like I said, that’s a constant challenge. We’ve had extremely generous individuals step forward and help us over the course of the whole time since NIL was created. But like I said, it’s an extremely, extremely competitive landscape in terms of where not only the other 17 schools in our league are going and where they’ve been, but also you look at geographically who we have to compete with.
“We’re surrounded by Big East schools. They don’t have to subsidize football. So that allows them to put more money into basketball. Other leagues, we got a pretty good idea of what, you know, the SEC, the ACC, Big 12, what they’re doing, and then how it stacks up with the teams in our league.”
Gard and his staff continue to impress by increasing the team’s resources outside of revenue share and the school’s budget for the basketball team, but it seems like they’ll be in a tough position again to find the best fits for the team, requiring that moneyball approach.
That sums up why we’ve seen certain moves this offseason, notably John Blackwell and Aleksas Bieliauskas’s transfer. But this staff has found a way to make portal magic happen in the past with AJ Storr, John Tonje, and Nick Boyd. Let’s see what they can do this offseason.
