By Carron J. Phillips
It wouldn’t be surprising to read about a university “robbing Peter to pay Paul” in 2026, but what the men’s basketball program at Mississippi Valley State University (MVSU) is doing goes beyond mere financial juggling. The Delta Devils aren’t just moving money around to survive; they’re sacrificing their desire to win just to endure.
When MVSU released its schedule last month, the internet was quick to point out how head-scratching the calendar looked. Out of the 32 regular-season games the team will play this season, only nine are on home court. The Delta Devils’ first 16 games are all on the road; the first home game is January 9.
Of those first 16 games, 14 are referred to as “buy games” — non-conference contests in which larger schools/programs with big budgets pay smaller schools to come get blown out in an unfair matchup for a set price. It’s a payday for David and a guaranteed win for Goliath. This model explains why the reigning national champion Indiana Hoosiers hosted Howard in football this season, or why Southern Illinois University Edwardsville will travel to Durham to face Duke next month.
“I don’t love the model and at the same time understand the things that we have to do financially to run this athletic department, because we do have a great opportunity to impact the lives of young people. And we can only do that if we are meeting our budgetary demands and needs,” Kent State Athletic Director Randale Richmond explained in a 2024 AP article about the science of the system. It’s believed that a school like Ohio State paid around $1.5 million to programs like Akron, Western Michigan, and Marshall that were on their schedule that season. Kent State was winless in 2024, and its schedule included games against Tennessee and Penn State. According to the report, Ohio State pulled in $127 million in revenue from football alone in 2023, compared with Kent State’s entire football budget of less than $10 million. By comparison, MVSU spends less than $3,000 per year on its recruiting budget for its entire athletic department out of a little over $4.1 million in expenses on sports and making under $4.5 million in revenue, according to the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis from the U.S. Department of Education.
“It makes it very difficult to gain momentum when you have three guarantee games. I can’t answer whether it’s fair or not. I can answer that it does make it difficult,” Richmond admitted.
Facing power conference opponents like Oklahoma, Oregon, Arkansas, UConn, Texas Tech, Baylor, and defending national champions Michigan, MVSU is likely to begin the season 0-14 before entering conference play in the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) against rivals Alabama State and Alabama A&M.
“Here’s the part that’s everybody’s missing. In those 14 games, we will play games on ESPN, FOX, FOX Sports, USA Network, and the SEC (Network),” MVSU Men’s Basketball General Manager Cyril White said in a response video pushing back on the viral criticism of the program. “In those 14 games, we will have a chance to play in front of an estimated viewing audience of six million people. (That’s) six million eyeballs on our first-class athletes. Also, six million eyeballs on our jersey patch partners.”
However, not all exposure is good exposure. Though MVSU’s administration has been compelled to make tough choices, its basketball program faces serious challenges. Recently, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained a team member over an allegedly expired visa. Qingfang Pang, who transferred to MVSU from a junior college in New York, is being held at the Richwood Correctional Center in Lousiana.
“He’s tired of being detained,” said Pang’s lawyer, Marcus Session. “He’s tired, you know, of feeling that he’s a criminal. … He wants to resume going to school. He wants to play college basketball. He wants to be a 21-year-old kid who’s just trying to make a life for himself.”
Pang joins fellow HBCU athlete Amina Seck (Kentucky State) and Deng Deng (Southern Connecticut State) as college basketball players recently detained by ICE.
Last month, it was estimated that Howard made approximately $475,000 in one afternoon by traveling to New Jersey to lose to Rutgers by 51 points on the football field. The controversial “Protect College Sports Act” is supposedly creating a grant program of $180 million to support improvements in HBCU athletics, but nothing has been appropriated, authorized, or guaranteed. HBCUs exemplify the imbalances the bill is allegedly going to fix. However, given that HBCUs have been underfunded to the tune of over $13 billion across three decades, compared with how smaller athletic programs at lower-tier conferences compete in the business of sports, one thing is undeniably clear:
The game has always been rigged.
Carron J. Phillips is an award-winning journalist who writes on race, culture, social issues, politics, and sports. He hails from Saginaw, Michigan, and is a graduate of Morehouse College and Syracuse University. Follow his personal Substack to keep up with more of his work.