Argue about football vs. basketball all you want but it is a fact that Big East schools have a competitive advantage in hoops because their NIL cannons are all pointing in the same direction. The relative decrease (if any) in contributions that they suffer by not having a football team is much less than the amount they save by spending $0.00 on football NIL.
Sometimes I wonder if schools like ISU are crabs in a pot trying to compete over football recruits, while the B1G and SEC can easily blow them away there, instead of focusing their money collectively on hoops where they actually could compete for national title-level talent.