Recent player movement in the Big 5 and beyond shows the gulf-sized gap between the haves and have-nots

Robert Wright, the Philadelphia native who just finished his freshman basketball season at Baylor University, reportedly had reached a deal with Baylor that would pay him more than $1 million for the 2025-26 season.

But then BYU showed up with a theoretical Brink’s truck, overflowing with cash from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Wright’s services, once valued at more than $1 million, were now worth more than $3 million, according to multiple reports. So into the transfer portal Wright went and to Provo, Utah, he will go.

JT Toppin is staying at Texas Tech, where he’ll reportedly make more than $3 million — the salary slot amount of the 22nd pick in the NBA draft.

College and professional basketball are indistinguishable, but the onetime amateur game — at the time of this writing — has no salary cap or enforceable contracts, and the rules are held together the way a 1-inch guardrail would protect a car from a cliff.

» READ MORE: Transfer portal: Big week ahead for Villanova; big money flying around; and more Big 5 moves

College sports have devolved into a hierarchy. There are those with a lot of money, those with some money, those with coupon booklets, and then the poor.

Locally, recent movement in the transfer portal has made that pecking order even more apparent.

Earlier this week, Temple’s Zion Stanford, a West Catholic grad, decided to take his two years of eligibility and move about 16 miles to Villanova. It is easy to see why Villanova would covet Stanford, a local talent who is still improving and has multiple seasons of eligibility remaining. It is easy to see why Stanford would covet Villanova, a Big East program close to home that offers him a chance to play on a bit of a bigger stage.

Missing from that, though, is the heart of the matter. Cue the Jerry Maguire clip.

The transfer portal underworld is where the transactional nature of modern college sports displays at its peak. And while it’s nice to think about Stanford as a local player moving on to the Big 5’s most prestigious basketball program, at least in the last quarter-century, money has to be the main takeaway here.

There may be no better sign of the times, no clearer portrait of the gulf between the haves and have-nots in college basketball, than Stanford’s move from Temple to Villanova. Stanford could make at Villanova around half the amount of money Temple plans to spend on its entire basketball roster in 2025-26. And he may not even be a guaranteed starter.

Temple athletic director Arthur Johnson reiterated on a webinar last week that the university will be like the rest of its peers in the American Athletic Conference — assuming the House vs. NCAA settlement is approved — committed to spending $10 million (or $3.3 million per year) in revenue sharing across its athletic department over the next three seasons. But with a football program to feed, Temple’s budget for men’s basketball likely will be in the neighborhood of $1 million, or slightly more, unless there’s a serious influx of new funds from donors.

Villanova, meanwhile, likely will spend five or six times that. There has long been a gap between the two programs in the sport, but now the price tags are showing.

» READ MORE: Why Kris Jenkins filed a lawsuit that could ‘blow up the House settlement’ if successful

In that sense, how was Temple, which has six players in the portal, ever going to keep Stanford, who would have been at or near the top of the list of best players on Adam Fisher’s team next season? If Villanova didn’t pay him, another program — maybe Seton Hall, where he could rejoin West Catholic teammate Budd Clark — would have made it so Temple wouldn’t be able to match the offer without compromising its ability to fill out its roster.

This is the new world, and while Johnson said that Temple’s main competition is its peers in the AAC, it’s impossible to ignore teams like Villanova if they’re going to raid your roster every offseason.

Likewise, St. Joseph’s isn’t just competing against its Atlantic 10 opponents.

On the same day Stanford committed to Villanova, St. Joe’s point guard Xzayvier Brown, who starred at Roman Catholic before two standout seasons with the Hawks, entered the portal with a “do not contact” tag attached to his entry.

Brown, it appears, was lured away by a better offer before he submitted his portal paperwork. It’s a package deal: Brown and stepfather Justin Scott, who was Billy Lange’s associate head coach with the Hawks, are off to Oklahoma, where Brown can be a lead guard in the SEC, which sent 14 teams to the NCAA Tournament, and Scott can move up the coaching ranks. Real estate in Norman, Okla., is cheap. Win-win for all, except for maybe the Hawks, who are trying to build a roster for next season without the three best players from the previous two seasons.

This, for a team in the A-10 that fits into the “some money” category in the hierarchy. St. Joe’s is pretty well-resourced, compared to many of its conference counterparts, and the Hawks will participate next season in the Players Era tournament with several blue bloods that will bulk up the amount of money they can spend on their roster. But even that footing didn’t make St. Joe’s immune from the powers that be.

So back to the drawing board Lange goes, and the Hawks seemingly are in the mix with enough high-caliber players who will make it more than possible to field a competitive A-10 team next season. Lange’s teams over the last few years have dealt with minimal roster turnover, compared to most, and St. Joe’s likely will have some amount of continuity next season, which not everyone can say.

» READ MORE: Rebuilding Villanova into a perennial winner again is the primary focus of Kevin Willard’s ‘last job’

How much different will Villanova’s starting five look next season? Entirely. Kevin Willard’s group might have just two returning players in the rotation. Because Willard is a first-year coach, that roster makeover may prove to be an outlier at Villanova, but it isn’t elsewhere.

Just ask Fisher at Temple what it’s like to deal with all the comings and goings. La Salle, too, has a new coach, but Fran Dunphy had to remake his roster last offseason. Drexel’s Zach Spiker, meanwhile, now shops for replacement players in the junior college ranks, his way of adapting to the new normal with a coupon book in his hand.

It’s a daunting task, rebuilding a roster every offseason, but it’s made much easier when your program has money. Here, in a city with so much college basketball tradition, few of them are, and none of them have money like the Mormons.