Texas Longhorns To Spend $40 Million On Name, Image, Likeness? Oregon Ducks’ Budget

In the era of insane NIL spending, the Oregon Ducks must keep up with financially inclined programs like the Texas Longhorns, who are estimated to spend $40 million on their NIL efforts this year according to a new report.

With the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) era of college football ballooning to payouts eclipsing some professional rookie salaries, it’s quite difficult to pinpoint exactly what NIL groups are spending on their players. For the Oregon Ducks, NIL groups like “Division Street” and “Ducks of a Feather” do not release any number figures regarding their revenue and athlete payments.

However, a recent report from the Houston Chronicle’s Kirk Bohls potentially sheds some light on how one of the biggest programs in the nation, the Texas Longhorns, spends their NIL money and how much is going in to athletes’ pockets.

In a recent article, Bohls claims that the Longhorns plan to spend $35 and $40 million on their 2025 football roster. Bohls points back to a CBS Sports article from April 2025 to solidify his claims.

In that article, Indiana coach Curt Cignetti makes some bold claims about big programs’ NIL budgets, which emboldened Bohls to make his assertion on the Longhorns’ spending habits.

“This is an unprecedented couple days, weeks, where everybody’s waiting on this rev share, and the five or six out there that have unlimited NIL resources, it’s kind of scary for everybody else,” Cignetti told CBS Sports regarding NIL spending around the nation. “I think our little pot of gold is pretty nice, but we’re not at $40 million. Or $30 million. Or even $25 million.”

So, does Texas really plan to spend upwards of $40 million on this years’ team? Does Oregon spend a similar amount on their players as well? Which programs is Cignetti referring to?

It is all unclear at this point, and according to an anonymous insider source for the Longhorns’ team, Bohls may have misjudged Texas’ pocket book.

“Whacked,” that source told 247Sports’ Chip Brown when asked about Bohls’ article. “There may be a school or two at that level of spending, but we (Texas) are not the top of the market, I can promise you that.”