Blatantly fake news about college sports spreads like wildfire in the absence of player payday details

About an hour after the men’s college basketball season ended in Indianapolis with a Michigan Wolverines’ championship on April 6, the team’s coaching staff was already working hard at trying to win the next one.

The transfer portal—a digital compliance tool and database to systematically manage the transfer process for student-athletes—opened for Division I men’s basketball players on midnight after the title game, and it set off a firestorm of entries with players seeking massive paydays.

However, the public doesn’t actually know for certain who is getting how much money. And in today’s disinformation economy, it’s become a haven for fake news to take the mantle.

Consider University of Connecticut freshman Braylon Mullins, who became a household name when he made the greatest shot in the last decade of college basketball to knock off Duke in the East Regional Final. He hasn’t announced whether he will enter the NBA Draft, return to the UConn Huskies for a second season, or make the unlikely decision to leave the Huskies for the transfer portal.

And one X account saw an opportunity to capitalize on Mullins’s name.

On April 12, @ShaneTuttleNCAA, a satire account with a disposition that could come across as looking like a journalist at first glance, tweeted that “UConn G Braylon Mullins will hold the first ever ‘NIL Auction’ to determine what his next team will be with the minimum bid starting at $6M.”

To most people who follow college sports closely, this is obviously fake. It’s a bridge too far. But one of the most prominent voices in college basketball was fooled.

Dick Vitale, the legendary ESPN color commentator, famous for his enthusiasm for the sport and iconic catchphrases, chimed in in the replies.

“This is college – sickening @NCAA must do something about the CHAOS GOING ON – how in the world can they write all about student – athletes in their NCAA manual – that is JOKE – put some rules together to end this wild Wild West,” he wrote.

Many people were quick to point out that the X account that posted the tweet includes “Everything I do is satire” as part of its bio.

Others, however, believed the bait. It has nearly two million views on X. I’ve been sent that post, and many others, many times throughout the offseason, and have had to tell people that it’s fake.

Ecosystem of falsehoods

On X, verified accounts posting under names such as Simon Charles, Rob Reinhart, Scott Hughes, and more have gained followings for posting fake news. Hughes even briefly had a Kalshi badge on his account back in December.

There’s a whole ecosystem of fake reporters on sports Twitter, but specifically within college sports, established, mainstream reporters aren’t reporting concretely the exact dollar values of players and team budgets. It’s all about who can pretend to know the most information.

And thanks to X’s Creator Revenue Sharing program, there’s a monetary incentive to being the loudest voice in the room. Presenting fake—or in some instances, straight-up satirical—information is one way to do that. 

Reached for comment, an X spokesperson referred Fast Company to the site’s rules and policies, but did not specify whether these accounts ran afoul of them.

A post with 2.3 million views from March 31 by @FastbreakHoops5 on X featured a graphic claiming to display the 10 highest-paid NCAA men’s basketball players in 2025-26.

Scroll through the comments and you’ll find plenty of people taking the bait, hook, line, and sinker. The list displays Jayden Quaintance as an Arizona State player (he played for Kentucky this year) and PJ Haggerty as a Memphis player (he played for Kansas State this year).

The list also misrepresents every figure. It’s all just a guess. It doesn’t provide a source. These posts never do. But people saw it and passed it along as if it were accurate, perhaps because nobody had been telling them the actual numbers. 

Jeff Goodman, perhaps the most connected insider in college basketball, quote-tweeted the post with “This ain’t even close to accurate,” but didn’t go any further with correcting it.

Before the NCAA Tournament, @ConnerHaleSprts sent off a series of tweets, confidently listing roster budgets for each team in the NCAA Tournament. These tweets, from an account that has posted less than 300 times and has fewer than 600 followers, got millions of views, and many people in the quotes and comments were taking the numbers at face value.

Once again, the numbers were absolutely fake.

There are a few things that we know are true. College sports teams are spending a ridiculous amount of money on their rosters. Some rumors have truth to them, but much of what you see on social media is a lie. When insiders do share some level of information on how much a team is spending, it’s typically vague and guarded behind a paywall of some sorts, whether a message board, Discord server, or in an article.

In an article for The Athletic on Wednesday morning, award-winning college basketball reporter C.J. Moore reported that the average roster at the high-major (Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12, Big Ten, Big East, Southeastern Conference) level is between $10 to $12 million.

Evan Miyakawa, who runs analytics site EvanMiya.com and sells an analytics/NIL (name, image and likeness) tool to coaching staffs, wrote on Tuesday that the NIL market for Division I players is “up about 65% from last year.”

But what we don’t know, and won’t know, is how much each player is making. There’s no database, and there won’t be one under this current structure.

One thing, however, is clear. The information ecosystem around the transfer portal and college basketball roster spending is a train wreck.