Memphis Is Spending Like a Power 4 Program. It Isn't One.

Memphis athletic director Ed Scott went on 92.9 ESPN on Wednesday and said what G6 athletic directors almost never say out loud, as reported by the Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis will be at full revenue share for the 2026-27 fiscal year. About $21.3 million distributed directly to athletes. Nine million for men’s basketball. Seven million for football, with plans to reach $10 million next season.

That makes Memphis the second Group of 6 program to hit the House v. NCAA settlement cap, after South Florida. In a conference where the American set a $10 million minimum over three years — the first league to set any floor at all — Memphis is spending more per year than most of its conference mates will spend in three.

It sounds aggressive. Then you look at the numbers.

The Gap

The Big Ten distributed more than $76 million per school in fiscal year 2025. The SEC distributed more than $70 million. Those numbers do not include ticket revenue, sponsorships or the tens of millions Power 4 schools spend in NIL deals on top of revenue sharing.

Memphis at full revenue share — $21.3 million — is spending less than a third of what a Big Ten school receives from its conference distribution alone. The entire Memphis athlete revenue budget is a rounding error in Ohio State’s operating expenses.

The American Conference’s average G6 school shares roughly $2.5 million with athletes. Memphis is spending eight times that. And it is still a fraction of what the programs it is trying to join spend before they count their TV money.

The Scoreboard

Memphis was already outspending most of the G6 before this commitment. The results have not matched. The Tigers went 8-5 in football last season, 4-4 in the American Conference, and lost the Gasparilla Bowl 31-7 to NC State. Then head coach Ryan Silverfield left for Arkansas — and 49 players followed him out the door, the most departures of any G6 program in the country.

Basketball was worse. At Memphis, basketball expectations drive the program even if football is the more important sport for conference expansion. Penny Hardaway’s Tigers went 13-19 last season — this at a program that considers itself a basketball blue blood, coached by the most famous player in program history. Hardaway is entering his ninth season with a 168-87 career record, two years left on his contract and no extension talks. Scott retained him in March despite widespread speculation about a change, and is now committing $9 million in revenue share to men’s basketball — the highest in the American Conference. Scott said the coming season will be a “better barometer” of Hardaway as a coach, now that the program has the resources and institutional support it previously lacked.

“I thought, if we put these things around him, we can really assess how good Penny Hardaway is as a coach,” Scott told 92.9 ESPN.

That is the clearest version of the accountability argument. The money is there. The staff has been overhauled. The excuses are gone. Now produce.

“We can’t have seasons like we had last year with football and men’s basketball and think we’re going to be ready for the next round of conference realignment,” Scott said.

He also knows the spending is not sustainable.

“I don’t think we can sustain it more than a few years if we’re not in,” he said.

That is an athletic director telling you his own strategy has an expiration date. Memphis is spending $21.3 million a year on the assumption that a Power 4 invitation arrives before the money runs out.

The Record

Memphis and South Florida are positioning for the next round of conference realignment — assuming another round comes at all. The logic is straightforward: spend at the Power 4 level, win at the Power 4 level, get invited.

Almost no one in the history of college athletics has spent their way to an invitation.

UCF invested millions in facilities and went undefeated. It claimed a national championship. It built a brand. Then the Big 12 invited it. The facilities helped. The spending helped. But without the winning, there is no invite.

Cincinnati dominated the American Conference and was undefeated when the Big 12 invited it in September 2021. It made the College Football Playoff three months later. Utah went undefeated twice and earned BCS bowl victories. Then the Pac-12 invited it. TCU won the Rose Bowl. Then the Big 12 invited it.

The pattern is consistent: winning first, invitation second.

But even winning does not guarantee anything. UCF went undefeated in 2017, beat Auburn in the Peach Bowl and claimed a national championship. Nobody called. The Big 12 did not invite UCF until Oklahoma and Texas announced they were leaving for the SEC in 2021 — creating vacancies the league needed to fill. Cincinnati, Houston and BYU got in the same way. The invitations came because programs left, not because outsiders earned them — a dynamic I explored in “The Door That Only Opens from the Inside.”

SMU is the exception — Dallas market, donor wealth, a university that wrote the check. But SMU had something Memphis does not have: the nation’s fourth-largest metro area and a donor base willing to fund the gap indefinitely.

Rutgers is the other exception. A big state university in the No. 1 television market, it got into the Big Ten on geography and cable subscribers. Could be argued that if it were being done over today, Rutgers does not get in. And the move has been a financial catastrophe. Since joining the Big Ten in 2014, Rutgers athletics has accumulated a $516.9 million cumulative deficit, according to an NJ.com investigation — including a record $78 million single-year shortfall. The department spent roughly $1.35 billion over 11 years, funded by internal university loans and conference advances, while ranking near the bottom of the Big Ten in ticket sales and fundraising. Rutgers got the invitation. It has not been able to afford it.

Then there is Boise State. Two decades of sustained excellence. Fiesta Bowl upsets. A Heisman Trophy runner-up. A College Football Playoff appearance. The strongest brand in G6 football. And Boise State is still G6. It moved to the rebuilt Pac-12, which is not a Power 4 conference. If winning at that level for that long does not earn a Power 4 invitation, spending your way there from a 4-4 conference record will not either.

The Pressure

There is a force that rarely gets discussed: the fans demand it. Memphis fans expect the program to spend at the Power 4 level. They expect the facilities, the coaching hires, the roster investments — even if they are not the ones funding it. That expectation is real and it drives decisions. An athletic director who does not spend risks losing the fan base. An athletic director who does spend risks losing the budget. Scott is navigating both.

Every G6 coach in the country would take that budget. And every G6 coach with that budget would hear the same message: we gave you the resources. Now produce.

The spending removes the alibi. A coach at Memphis can no longer point to the budget and say the program cannot compete. The administration put the money on the table. The expectation is results. If the results do not come — as they did not in 2025 — the conversation changes. It is no longer about whether the school can afford to compete. It is about whether the coach can win when the excuses are gone.

But that pressure may not extend beyond Memphis. The American’s $10 million floor over three years is modest by design — most of the conference cannot afford to match what Memphis is spending. The Sun Belt, the MAC, Conference USA — they are operating in a different financial reality. Memphis reaching full revenue share does not change the math for Louisiana or Northern Illinois. Those programs signed five and 17 transfers respectively this cycle. One FBS player each.

Memphis and USF are operating in a different category than the rest of the G6. Nobody has proven it leads anywhere.

The Question

Scott said the quiet part out loud: Memphis cannot sustain this spending outside a power conference. If the next round of realignment does not include Memphis, the program will have spent tens of millions with no guarantee it changed anything.

And even if Memphis does everything right — wins the conference, fills Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium, keeps its coach, sustains the budget — the invitation may never come. Boise State did all of that for 20 years. It is still waiting.

Ed Scott is spending $21.3 million a year on the belief that doing more with more is the path forward. He may be right. But the results have not followed the investment, the spending is not sustainable by his own admission and the Power 4 has never opened its doors because a G6 school asked politely.

Every other G6 program is watching. Most of them cannot follow. And the ones that can are left with the question Scott already answered for himself: What happens when the money runs out?