Seven Million Dollars? Have We Completely Lost Our Minds?

Milan Momcilovic/ photo courtesy Jacob Rice/ Iowa State Daily

I have a confession to make. When I first heard the reported figure Kentucky allegedly paid Milan Momcilovic to come to Lexington, I assumed somebody had misplaced a decimal point.

Seven million dollars? Are you kidding me?

I immediately began searching for clarification. Surely they meant seven hundred thousand. Maybe 1.7 million. Perhaps even 2.7 million. After all, NIL has changed everything. But seven million dollars for one college basketball player? That number sounds less like a recruiting budget and more like something you would pay to acquire a small Caribbean island.

Before anyone accuses me of criticizing Momcilovic, let me make something perfectly clear. This isn’t about him.

I wanted more than anything for Kentucky to land him.

I think he’s exactly the kind of player Mark Pope needed. Kentucky lacked consistent perimeter shooting last season. Momcilovic is one of the best shooters in college basketball and immediately makes the Wildcats better in so many different ways. Not only will he score, but he’ll automatically spread the floor, allow his teammates to create, and open up the lanes for a bunch of easy baskets. If Coach Mark Pope wanted him, I wanted him. That’s not the issue.

The issue is the number.

Maybe I’m showing my age, but I grew up in an era when Kentucky fans debated whether a coach was worth a million-dollar contract. I can still remember when coaching salaries themselves seemed outrageous. Today, we’re discussing the possibility of paying a college basketball player seven times that amount.

Think about the names that have passed through Lexington.

Dan Issel.

Jack Givens.

Kyle Macy.

Jamal Mashburn.

Anthony Davis.

John Wall.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

None of them made anything remotely approaching seven million dollars while wearing Kentucky blue. Heck, Coach Adolph Rupp most likely didn’t make seven million dollars in his entire forty-year career.

Yet here we are.

What fascinates me isn’t necessarily the amount itself. What fascinates me is how quickly we’ve become numb to numbers that would have seemed absurd only a few years ago. If somebody had predicted ten years ago that Kentucky fans would be casually discussing whether a player was worth seven million dollars, we would have laughed them out of the room. That’s a lot of twenty-dollar handshakes.

Today the reaction is often, “Well, that’s just what it costs.”

Maybe that’s true.

In fact, that’s the uncomfortable part of this conversation. If Kentucky wants to compete for championships, perhaps this really is what it costs. Perhaps the market has spoken. Perhaps this is simply the new reality of major college athletics.

If that’s the case, then we should at least be honest about what we’ve become.

For years the argument was that players deserved compensation. I didn’t always agree. I felt the free tuition and associated amenities were more than a fair tradeoff.

But I’ve since relented a bit. Universities, television networks, apparel companies, and coaches were making fortunes while the players generated much of the product. I’ll admit the old system wasn’t fair.

But somewhere along the way, college athletics stopped evolving and started mutating.

Today we have free agency, bidding wars, contract negotiations, agents, revenue sharing, NIL collectives, and transfer portals. The jerseys still say Kentucky across the front, but increasingly the sport resembles professional basketball with pep bands and mascots.

I don’t blame the players.

In fact, if someone offered me seven million dollars when I was nineteen years old, I would have sprinted toward the nearest signature line before they could change their minds.

The players didn’t create this marketplace. The adults did. The schools did. The boosters did. The television networks did. And yes, the fans did.

For years, fans demanded that their schools spare no expense. We demanded elite recruits. We demanded Final Fours. We demanded championships. We demanded that our programs do whatever it took to stay ahead of the competition.

Well, apparently somebody listened.

Now we’re seeing what “whatever it takes” actually looks like.

Of course, all of this leads to the obvious question.

Is any college basketball player worth seven million dollars?

My answer is simple.

No.

Nobody is worth seven million dollars. Not John Wall. Not Anthony Davis. Not Cooper Flagg. Not anybody.

Unless…they win Number Nine.

That’s the standard at Kentucky.

At seven million dollars, we’re no longer talking about potential. We’re no longer discussing upside, projections, or recruiting rankings. We’re discussing results only. We’re discussing banners. We’re discussing championships.

Fair or unfair, a number that large creates expectations that are equally large.

If Kentucky wins a national championship, nobody will care what Momcilovic cost. Fans will call it a bargain. They’ll call it money well spent. They’ll celebrate the investment the same way businesses celebrate a successful acquisition.

But if Kentucky falls short, that number won’t disappear. It will hover over every loss, every missed shot, every disappointing March exit. That’s simply the reality of attaching professional-level money to college-level expectations.

Perhaps that’s what bothers me most.

The old connection between fans and players was built largely around shared identity. Players came to Kentucky because they wanted to be Wildcats. Fans embraced them because they represented Kentucky. Today, many players come because Kentucky assembled the most competitive financial package.

Again, I don’t blame them. Most of us would do exactly the same thing. But let’s not pretend the relationship hasn’t changed.

Maybe that’s progress. Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe it’s even fair. I honestly don’t know.

But every once in a while, I hear a number like seven million dollars and find myself wondering whether we’ve mistaken evolution for absurdity.

And then I remind myself of one final truth.

If Banner Number Nine is hanging in Rupp Arena next April, nobody will remember the price.

Until then, however, I reserve the right to stare at that reported number and wonder whether college basketball has finally lost its mind.

Dr. John Huang is a retired orthodontist, military veteran, and award-winning author. He currently serves as a columnist for Nolan Group Media and invites readers to follow him on social media @KYHuangs. His latest book is Whining for Posterity, available on Amazon.