The UTEP men’s basketball team conformed to the most conventional of wisdoms in its 11-20 season.
You get what you pay for.
That proved true for what fans in the Don Haskins Center saw after they bought a $9.15 ticket, it proved true for what UTEP put on the court with one of the lowest player payrolls in Conference USA.
Is there hope going forward for UTEP men’s basketball?
The latter is harder to quantify than the former as booster donations that fuel the NIL revenue-sharing collective (the fund that pays players) aren’t public record, but UTEP wasn’t paying much more than half a million in “salaries” for its 14-player roster in 2025-26 in league where the median was reportedly around $1 million.
The team that paid 11th or so finished 11th — a miserable record that didn’t even qualify UTEP to play in the conference tournament. This marked their fourth losing season of the millennium and the worst record since going 8-21 in 2018-19, the first year under Rodney Terry.
That would seem to be a big problem heading forward as UTEP moves into a nicer neighborhood with a higher cost of living (the Mountain West Conference), but the financial situation is changing moving ahead.
UTEP coach Joe Golding doesn’t want exact numbers out there (no one’s are, though national champion Michigan reportedly had an $11 million payroll for a team entirely made up of transfers), but brighter times could be coming if indeed you get what you pay for.
With revenue now coming in for parking at Haskins Center and Sun Bowl concert events going directly to the NIL (that’s new), with UTEP finally for the first time kicking in its own money toward NIL (not a huge amount but enough to show boosters it too has skin in the game), with boosters warming to the challenge of a bigger league and UTEP putting a press on them, the Miners should almost triple what they’re paying players next year.
They also are in line for conference revenue sharing, which UTEP forfeited after becoming a lame duck in CUSA. That will be another $5 million at least in the athletic coffers, up from $0 this past year. That doesn’t directly go in players’ pockets but puts the athletic department on better ground.
“We finally have hope around here for the first time since the portal opened,” Golding said. “We’re not going to have (as much money as the very top teams in the MWC), but we have enough to put together a competitive roster. There’s hope.”
University president Heather Wilson put it this way: “We don’t have a coaching problem, we don’t have a leadership problem, we have a resource problem.”
That’s changing.
2025-26 Miners basketball: UTEP had a team on cheap; it didn’t work
UTEP talked about hope coming into last season, that’s the way of sports everywhere in the world, and in retrospect it wasn’t much justified. The Mines were usually the smaller team on the court, and while they tried to use quickness to harry opponents, they didn’t have anyone to backstop at the rim when the pressure was broken.
On offense, they just didn’t have enough guns. All of this was exacerbated when forwards David Tubek and especially Tyreese Watson went down early in the year, never to return (and then hit the portal), and while most teams have to deal with injuries, the reality is that they are harder to overcome for the lower payroll teams.
“We obviously didn’t have the talent level on the floor for Conference USA and I didn’t do a good enough job coaching them,” Golding said.
“We just never could quite figure it out on either side of the ball. It was one of those years where you have a play sheet of 10 plays for the first game, then you end up with 92 for the last game because you’re just searching for any way to score.”
Did Golding see this coming in October?
“The competitor in you thinks you can compete,” he said. “We’ve done more with less the last two or three years. We played in the (CUSA) championship game (in the 2023-24 season) with less money than we had this year.
“But the game has changed, each year the money gets higher and higher and higher in the NIL packages.
“Where it hit me was when Tyreese and DT went down with injuries, we had figured Tyreese being a big piece of that puzzle. When you don’t have the resources you can’t afford to miss on guys or have guys have injuries. It puts you further and further behind. You don’t have the depth.”
What’s next for UTEP?
The important question at this point is how UTEP turns this around and goes forward. That won’t come from building off of this year, as that page has been turned. Two of the 14 players on the roster are out of eligibility, the other 12 are in the transfer portal.
“If there ever was a time for a blank slate it’s right now,” Golding said. “We need new energy, we need new voices, we have to get better in all facets. It seems overwhelming but it’s really not. It’s a new game.”
While UTEP will be competitive in terms of player salaries with the middle of their new league (UNLV, New Mexico and the private church school Grand Canyon are at the top end), the Miners can’t spend other people into the ground so there is a specific strategy on how to allocate their resources.
The basic plan is to spend about 60% of their payroll on three players they hope can be all-conference caliber, build a team of seven more around them and fill the rest of the roster with project players who may not come to UTEP on anything more than a scholarship or less.
Golding several times cited the book Moneyball, where author Michael Lewis explained how two decades ago the Oakland A’s put together a team with a low payroll by exploiting market inefficiencies (avoid what’s being overpaid for and go get what can be obtained for less).
How UTEP will build a team financially
“The first thing you look for is a 5 (a center), that’s why (UTEP’s tallest starter, 6-foot-8) Elijah Jones is in the transfer portal,” Golding said. “There are not a lot of 5s and the market is way, way up there.
“I don’t know if we have the money to go with a 5. We could Moneyball the 5 position and go get us a point guard, a scorer and a wing. Or a point guard, a scorer and a 4 (power forward). Those are the conversations we’re having with agents and with players.”
When Golding talks about moneyballing the center spot, one of four players on the roster at the moment is 7-0 junior college center signee Alexandre K’Medehouto from South Plains College, who averaged 3.8 points, 4.3 rebounds and 16.3 minutes per game last season.
Going back to economics, Golding put out some numbers.
“If this guy costs us $500(,000) and this guy costs $300 and this guy $200, that’s $1 million we have invested in those three,” Golding said. “Then we have the rest of the money we’re building on the side.
“If a 5 is going to cost us $750,000, it limits your resources. It’s who can we get, what’s the price point and how can we build this team? We don’t have the money to say we’re going to recruit eight guys for $500,000 or more. That’s easy to do, but we don’t have that kind of money.”
Then he added: “We have to evaluate, find out who we can get, what’s the price point and how do we build around them at that price point. What we can’t do with those three or four guys is run out of money. You still have to have a team. Our vision is 10 players where we can spread the money a little more.”
Once that team is assembled, Golding said he then has to reevaluate some of his long-held core beliefs, which may not apply in a new era for college basketball.
Golding has always believed in a high-pressure defense with a team that will out-hustle people, but that went belly up this year when UTEP had less talent than its opponents. That was most of the time.
“We’re looking at everything on coaching,” Golding said. “Can we continue to guard the way we’ve already guarded? Because that’s hard to do when you’re recruiting new teams every year. We’re looking at, do we play a different way defensively?
“I want to be aggressive. I hate sitting back, but if we don’t have a $1,000,000 rim protector, it probably doesn’t make sense being so aggressive in the front court when you have no protection on the on the back end. That’s where coaching comes into play.
“It’s like, how do you build a team? How do we build a team with the resources we have so we can coach that team, get the best product on the floor and win games.”
UTEP looking for right mix
Sports can be copy-cat, but given the payroll discrepancies, there is only so much UTEP can learn from Michigan. But like UTEP is going to try to do, Michigan won with a team built around transfers, just not ones who were mercenaries looking for a stepping stone to their next payday.
That’s one thing Golding took away from Michigan’s title.
“The most important thing we can do in recruiting, we’ve got to recruit talent, but we’ve got to recruit guys who aren’t looking for the next move already, who are looking to win games here at UTEP,” Golding said. “I think that’s very important and it’s hard to do.”
He also acknowledged the obvious. Successful underclassmen in the Mountain West will probably jump to a power conference as soon as the portal opens the day after the national title game, and that’s true all across the league.
UTEP men’s basketball moves forward
As April nears its midpoint, UTEP has four players on its roster, including four-star signee Donovan Criss from San Antonio Brennan High (and two of his high school teammates Delano Tarpley and Isaiah Ward) and Golding expects that number to jump in the coming week, followed by a lull, followed by another jump some time in May.
“Our plan is, we start school June 4 for summer school, to have our team in place then,” Golding said. “We’ve got two months to get a team in place.”
Golding said the team will include a mix of a few freshmen (the three signed right now could be it) and junior college players to go with the transfer portal players, who will make up much, but not all, of the team.
Then UTEP can see what more money bought.
Where UTEP will rank in the Mountain West in payroll, “I don’t know exactly, but they are putting us in a place where we can be competitive,” Golding said. “I don’t know where that exactly looks like, but we’re going to be way more competitive in NIL rev share in the Mountain West than we were in Conference USA.”
The hope is that will show up in the won-loss record.
Bret Bloomquist can be reached at bbloomquist@elpasotimes.com; @Bretbloomquist on X.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: UTEP men’s basketball hoping more money changes fortunes on the court
Reporting by Bret Bloomquist, El Paso Times / El Paso Times
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
