The consensus around college basketball's exploding market is that you need $10 million to be an NCAA Tournament team, $15 million to compete for a conference title and north of $20 million to scale the mountain and win the National Championship. Which puts North Carolina in a slight predicament. Michael Malone's first Tar Heels roster checks in at $20 million, per a report from Inside Carolina, but this team does not enter 2026-27 as a Tier 1 National Championship contender.
CBS Sports' Gary Parrish ranks UNC 26th in the Top 25 And 1. That's a far rosier outlook compared to respected models like Evan Miya, which rates UNC's roster in the 34-42 range nationally. Bart Torvik's early 2026-27 projections tab UNC as the 44th-best roster in the country.
In the ACC, Carolina will have the third-highest-paid roster in the league behind Louisville and Duke, but it should rank no higher than fifth in the preseason ACC poll behind teams like Duke, Louisville, Virginia and Miami. It reiterates the fact that there are no discounts to be found in the transfer portal or the international market, which were the two primary avenues that Malone had to use to build this roster. UNC was forced to pay top of the market to build its backcourt with Utah transfer Terrence Brown, NC State transfer Matt Able and Virginia Tech transfer Neo Avdalas.
While individual contracts are not public information, it's safe to assume that UNC forked over nearly $10 million combined for those three guards alone. A starting high-major guard had a $3 million market last spring, multiple high-major general managers confirmed to CBS Sports. For a while, the smart teams were using international recruiting to find an edge.
Anyone and everyone is scouring the globe for the next international products to charter to college basketball. Today, the bargains are usually found in retention, high school recruiting or deep in the portal. It's also hard to find diamonds in the rough when you don't know who the players are.
"The biggest challenge was, being in the NBA, you had heard about this transfer portal, but now being thrust into it — the greatest challenge was I didn't know the players," Malone admitted to reporters in Thursday's press conference in Chapel Hill. "So someone would mention 'Terrence Brown.' I looked at his stats, but I didn't know who he was. Getting a feel for who Matt Able is.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
