As the first college basketball season under a new era of student-athlete compensation comes to a close, March Madness has been marred by concerns about what player compensation means for competition. And it's nearly impossible to get a clear picture of how much money student-athletes in Texas made over the past year, further muddying the picture.
Starting last July, schools across the country were permitted to pay their athletes a total of $20.5 million per year in revenue sharing as part of a multibillion-dollar settlement reached in lawsuits against the NCAA. Since 2021, student-athletes also have been allowed to secure Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals with private entities.
Houston Public Media submitted a set of public records requests to 11 schools in the state for information about financial compensation of student-athletes. We requested per-player pay on an individual level as well as per-team financials on an aggregate level.
The 11 schools — including competitors in the men's or women's NCAA basketball tournament like the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, the University of Houston (UH), Prairie View A&M University, Stephen F. Austin University and the University of Texas at San Antonio — refused to turn over the information.
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It's an unusual level of secrecy for financial information held by a public institution, and it comes as policymakers and athletic administrators ask existential questions about the changing nature of college sports.
Student-athlete compensation marks a ‘very stupid exception' to public information laws
The Texas Public Information Act provides members of the public — as well as the news media — with broad access to financial records maintained by public institutions, like state schools.
Daniel Libit is an investigative and enterprise reporter for Sportico, a digital news outlet covering sports, and a self-described "evangelist of all things transparency as it relates to college sports."
"Now that college athletes are getting directly compensated, I think they fall into the same category as anybody else that’s benefiting from tax dollars — which is really the whole prerogative and one of the main parts of public records law is to enable the public to follow the money," Libit told Houston Public Media.
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UT-Austin didn't object to handing over records to Houston Public Media showing Steve Sarkisian, head coach of the football team, earned a $4.4 million base annual salary as of March — a slice of his total $10.8 million per-year package. The men and women's basketball coaches, Sean Miller and Vic Schaefer, each made $1.8 million in base pay, while their total compensation stood at $4.8 million and $2.3 million, respectively.
Likewise, Texas Tech turned over records showing football coach Joey McGuire earned $6.5 million in his annual compensation, men's basketball coach Grant McCasland made $5 million, and women's basketball coach Krista Gerlich earned $600,000.
Prairie View A&M — a small, historically Black university near Houston — revealed its football coach, Tremaine Jackson, earned a $290,500 salary, while men's basketball coach Byron Smith made $255,758 and women's basketball coach Tai Dillard earned $166,000.
And the University of Houston disclosed head football coach Willie Fritz made $4.5 million per year, men's basketball coach Kelvin Sampson earned $6 million, and women's basketball coach Matthew Mitchell was paid $600,000.
But when it came to student-athlete compensation on a per-athlete or per-team level, the universities withheld information or asked for a decision from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office, which referees public information disputes. They cited state law making payments for Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) confidential due to legislation sponsored in 2023 by then-state Rep. Brandon Creighton, now chancellor of Texas Tech, who was unavailable for an interview this week. They also pointed to the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which is intended to protect student privacy.
Libit argued the shielding of student-athlete compensation is "a very stupid exception."
"Whether it’s directly paid by the university or it’s fungibly paid by the university," Libit said, "that money includes resources going to college athletes, and I think the public should be as entitled to see what that is and what it’s for and all the details of that as they are to see how college coaches and university presidents and athletic administrators at public universities are compensated."
UT-Austin disclosed that it handed out $13.5 million in revenue-sharing payments to all student-athletes from July 2025 through the end of March 2026, putting it on track to hit about $18 million in revenue-sharing over a one-year span. Under the 2025 settlement, scholarship growth — under a full-ride program for most athletes announced last year — would put it at the $20.5 million cap. It was the only school to provide high-level revenue-sharing information.
"It seems to me that transparency is always the best answer, especially if these are public universities," said state Rep. Carl Tepper of Lubbock, who authored the 2025 state law allowing schools to directly pay players. "It seems to me that disclosure is always a good thing, but you know, if that puts us at a competitive disadvantage with other states, we’d have to look at it."
Texas isn't the only state where public universities shield this type of information. In Louisiana, three news outlets announced a lawsuit against Louisiana State University last month after the state's flagship university refused to turn over details about how it pays student-athletes.
The College Sports Commission, which was created as part of the settlement and tasked with overseeing student-athlete compensation in 2025, said in a statement that the organization "is not sharing school specific data or student-athlete-specific data at this time."
Where did the cinderellas go?
For most of the NCAA's 60-year history, the organization mandated that student-athletes were unpaid amateurs, eligible only for scholarships.
"I can reflect back as a student-athlete myself where it wasn’t even permissible to give a student-athlete a ride from one end of the campus to the other end of the campus if it was pouring down rain," said Tommy McClelland, vice president and director of athletics at Rice University in Houston. "That was viewed as an impermissible benefit from a staff member. That, obviously, was wrong and not practical."
Still, pundits credit the amateur model with increasing the likelihood for so-called "cinderellas" in the March Madness tournament — underdogs who advanced far beyond expectations.
In 2022, St. Peter's University — a small private school in New Jersey ranked as a No. 15 seed, the second lowest within a region — advanced from the 64-team opening round to the Elite Eight. In 2018, 11th-seeded Loyola University Chicago, a mid-size private school, made the Final Four on a series of last-minute, game-winning shots. In a painful memory for UH fans, No. 6 North Carolina State University made a buzzer-beating basket to win the championship against the top-seeded Cougars in 1983.
Since 2021, college sports have been in a state of metamorphosis. A ruling then by the U.S. Supreme Court allowed NIL compensation for players by third parties. In 2025, the blockbuster settlement between the NCAA and former players allowed direct compensation from universities to athletes.
This year, the Final Four consists of large state schools seeded third or higher in their regions.
"When you’re congregating these dollars into these top programs, you know, it certainly does" make cinderella stories less likely, McClelland said. "We’re still seeing some early-round upsets even this year, but we didn’t have as many people in the Sweet 16 or the Elite Eight, and certainly no one in the Final Four that is a cinderella. ... Let’s not just jump and judge just yet, but I think in basketball it certainly seems to be separating a bit more."
Rice University is private, not subject to public records law. McClelland declined to share how much the school pays its student-athletes.
The arms race around student-athlete compensation came "without guardrails and without structure," McClelland said.
Student-athletes have virtually unlimited transfer opportunities, allowing them to switch schools in pursuit of higher compensation. Agents for athletes aren't required to have credentials. And while the 2025 settlement set an ostensible revenue-sharing cap of $20.5 million, McClelland said, the NCAA lacks "a punitive system when you don’t adhere to that."
Tepper, the Lubbock lawmaker who authored the state's student-athlete compensation law in 2025, said policymakers need to "save college sports."
"I think we’re in danger of losing a lot of Division I schools," Tepper said. "I’m extremely concerned that, you know, Hardin-Simmons University wouldn’t be able to support a team or McMurry University or even Baylor and Southern Methodist University. You know, the private schools — their ability to fund this level of competition is going to be limited."
Tepper pointed to President Donald Trump's "saving college sports" executive order in 2025, when he described "an out-of-control, rudderless system in which competing university donors engage in bidding wars for the best players, who can change teams each season," with states across the country engaged "in a chaotic race to the bottom, sometimes to gain temporary competitive advantages for their major collegiate teams."
In his order, Trump wrote, "opportunities for scholarships and collegiate athletic competition in women's and non-revenue sports must be preserved and, where possible, expanded," and he instructed the Department of Labor to take action to "maximize the educational benefits and opportunities provided by higher education institutions through athletics."
With the financial arrangements set up behind a veil, it's hard to know how the new system works in practice, in Texas and across the country.
"I do think that there can be chaos," McClelland said. "The chaos exists in the unknown."
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