The NBA star returns to Fort Worth as Chief Basketball Officer, advocating for structured spending limits to stabilize the collegiate landscape while ensuring athletes secure their fair share.
Desmond Bane believes college basketball players deserve to get paid.
He also believes there should be a limit to how much programs can spend.
Those two positions aren't mutually exclusive to the former TCU star, who returned to Fort Worth this summer as the Horned Frogs' first Chief Basketball Officer while continuing his NBA career with the Orlando Magic.
And Bane already has an idea for how college basketball's increasingly complicated financial system could become a little easier to navigate.
"I think NIL's a great thing," Bane told Front Office Sports. "I think players deserve to get paid. All the work they're putting in, all the money that they're bringing into the school, I think they definitely deserve a slice of the pie."
But ...
"I think there needs to be some sort of cap," Bane continued.
He didn't advocate for one specific spending limit, instead throwing out $10 million or $20 million as examples before adding, "whatever the number is."
There's an important distinction to make here.
College athletics already operates under an annual revenue-sharing cap established following the House settlement. But third-party NIL compensation can extend beyond that figure, meaning the overall financial picture surrounding roster construction isn't confined to one universal spending limit.
Bane didn't specify exactly how the cap he described would interact with that existing system.
His broader reasoning was pretty straightforward.
Establishing a more clearly defined spending limit, Bane argued, would give donors a better understanding of how much money needs to be raised and coaches a clear idea of how much they have available to spend. He also believes it could create "somewhat of a level playing field" between programs.
That's particularly interesting coming from Bane now.
When he played at TCU from 2016-20, college athletes couldn't profit from their name, image and likeness under the system that exists today. Bane is now returning to a program operating in a considerably different environment.
And his new role gives him a closer look at it.
TCU hired Bane as a volunteer special adviser to Jamie Dixon, with responsibilities including player mentorship, career-management guidance and providing insight into player development and evolving NBA trends.
Bane told Front Office Sports that money management will also be one area where he can serve as a resource for current Horned Frogs.
That gives him an interesting perspective on the broader compensation debate.
Bane isn't arguing that the sport should return to an era when players couldn't financially benefit from their value. Quite the opposite.
His concern is structure.
Whether college basketball ever adopts the type of additional spending restriction Bane described is a much larger question, particularly within a compensation system that has already undergone substantial legal and structural change.
But his position isn't difficult to understand.
Pay the players.
Just give everyone a better idea of how much there is to spend.
