South Carolina MBB overhauls its roster again. Will the results be any different?
South Carolina had no choice but to start from scratch ... again.
Such is life in the transfer-portal era of college basketball. Have a good season and you try like heck to retain every player you can, then head into the offseason talking about continuity and experience. Have a miserable season and you go out and overhaul your entire roster and begin talking about how different everything feels.
For the second-straight year, the Gamecocks did the latter. Two years ago, South Carolina went 12-20 and responded by bringing in 11 new players. A complete revamp — that didn’t work.
Though USC won 13 games last year, the team was arguably worse. The Gamecocks couldn’t shoot, couldn’t rebound and withered against anyone over 6-foot-10.
So, naturally, they took a sledgehammer to the house they just built and began anew — this time, with 12 new players.
The obvious question: Why is this reconstruction going to be any different?
“I do think, as a unit, that we needed to be more talented,” Gamecocks head coach Lamont Paris said. “And so that was one thing we wanted to address: size, overall size, depth of size, physicality, rebounding.”
In other words: South Carolina needed better players — and they needed more cash to acquire better players.
South Carolina’s NIL budget, team sources told The State, was under $2 million for the 2024-25 season, the lowest in the SEC, and increased to just over $6 million for last season with the addition of revenue-sharing money.
It’s not clear exactly how much USC is spending on its current roster but, with the help of Athletic Director Jeremiah Donati, Paris’ budget skyrocketed. It wouldn’t be surprising if Carolina spends twice what it did last year on the roster.
“It’s a significant, significant improvement in terms of where we were,” Paris told The State in May about USC’s spending budget.
“We not only made up the ground that we needed to in terms of what the raw number was,” he added. “But then from a percentage base relative to our competitors, too, we were able to catch up in a lot of those areas.”
Last offseason, Paris said, conversations with transfer-portal prospects were short. He’d be on the phone with a kid — and, likely, their agent — throw out an NIL offer, give his quick recruiting pitch and never be considered because the cash wasn’t there.
This time, conversations were longer. South Carolina started beating out big-time schools for elite prospects. It landed Texas sharpshooter Cam Heide and Wisconsin big man Aleksas Aieliauskas. It snagged Alabama’s Davion Hannah and lured a trio of international pros to Columbia.
Life is better when you go into an auction and never put your paddle down.
“I will say,” Paris noted, “I don’t know that there was one new player that we got to come here that we ended up the second-highest payer. I don’t think that ever happened.
“We were always the highest payer,” he added. “That’s where we are. That’s what it is.”
Paris did not mean for that quote to draw negative feedback on social media. It did anyway.
But a few things to note. Paris did not claim that South Carolina is leading the country in NIL spending — the Gamecocks aren’t pulling a Kentucky and touting a $22 million roster. Heck, it’s not clear that USC is even in the top half of spenders in the SEC.
He merely said that for the guys that South Carolina landed, it spent the most. That’s likely more common than any fan wants to believe.
And what was the alternative? The Gamecocks constructed a cheap (relatively-speaking) roster last year and finished second-to-last in the SEC. There’s no reason to think another beans-and-rice lineup would’ve produced better results.
Now, did South Carolina have to pay a “tax” for its struggles the past two seasons? Perhaps, though Paris says negotiations are only different for a select few uber-successful squads.
“I think there probably are some programs that would get a perceived discount,” Paris said.
South Carolina isn’t one of those, and that’s fine. So long as USC wins.
Trophies aren’t handed out to the most-resourceful coaches. There is no national title awarded to the program who got the most bang for their buck. This isn’t the value Olympics.
It’s about winning basketball games. That requires talent, and acquiring talent nowadays takes money. South Carolina men’s basketball, it seems, finally has that. It’s time to see if the results match the investment.
This story was originally published June 25, 2026 at 8:06 AM.
