College sports has undergone a seismic upheaval. Since 2021, a Supreme Court decision has allowed college athletes to get paid by private companies. Before that, college athletes were highly restricted in what they were allowed to do for work. This always struck me as insane. College athletes are supposed to be amateurs, meaning that are not compensated for the teams they play for. Colleges were not allowed to pay their players, only offer free tuition. Perversely, the NCAA also banned players from receiving money from other entities as well. So if a local auto dealership wanted to pay a college baseball player to be in a commercial, they weren’t allowed to do so. That seems to me much more in line with being a professional athlete than an amateur one. If a professional league, say the MLB, wants to put in their contract that baseball players aren’t allowed to seek other paid work, that seems reasonable. As an employer, they can limit their employees outside work. An amateur sports group, like the NCAA, shouldn’t be able to do that. Amateur athletes shouldn’t have any additional restrictions placed on them - after all, they are amateurs.
We wound up in a world where professional athletes have few restrictions but amateur athletes weren’t allowed to work. As I wrote several years ago for the Las Vegas Sun, no other student organization puts that restriction on their members. Players in a university marching band can absolutely find work as musicians and still play in the band. Actors in a school play can find paid acting work while maintaining student status. Not only is that type of behavior allowed, it is encouraged. For everything except sports. Strange.
Thankfully, however, that is no longer the case. Colleges are still not allowed to pay their players directly, although that is likely to change, but players are allowed to be paid by other entities. This is referred to as name, image, and likeness (NIL). Local boosters can give college athletes thousands of dollars to make a public appearance, appear in a commercial, or do nothing at all. The result has been a massive transfer of wealth. Millions and millions of dollars are moving to athletes who, by and large, do not have high incomes.
How this will affect college sports, especially football and men’s basketball, is yet to be seen. Some universities, such as Ohio State and Alabama, have many alumni who have wealth in the hundreds of millions, if not higher. Will those individuals be able to “buy” a national championship? Will schools like my beloved Illinois, which weren’t very good at sports before players could be paid, be forever relegated to the cellar? So far, the results are mixed. After NIL money was legalized, a group of Texas A&M banded together to raise millions to pay the best high school football players to become Aggies. Supposedly they raised over $100 million for high school players. This is an insane amount of money. Low-income 18-year-olds from across the country were suddenly deluged by an onslaught of cash. The results were underwhelming. Despite having a coach who won a national championship at Florida State and several good seasons in recent years, Texas A&M has struggled. They are just .500 over the last two seasons. After last year the Aggies fired their head coach, paying a ludicrous buyout of $77 million to have a coach not be on their sidelines.
So it remains to be seen how NIL will affect college sports. It’s early days yet, but so far it seems that there will not be a small cadre of elite schools that beat up on everyone else. At least, not in a notably different way than already existed. It’s not like anyone was betting on Indiana to take down Michigan over the last 100 years. It will be interesting to see how that changes as booster groups get more organized and NIL becomes entrenched. What norms will develop?
My favorite story so far is that of Kadyn Proctor. Proctor was a standout high school athlete. In his senior year, he was ranked as the best offensive tackle and was viewed as a top-ten player. He was wooed but a lot of the traditional football powerhouses, but since he was also from Des Moines, the University of Iowa was in the mix. He ultimately chose to attend the University of Alabama, the bluest of the blue bloods, and had a decent freshman year. NIL deals generally aren’t made public, but he was certainly offered beaucoup bucks. Then, after Nick Saban, the head coach of Alabama, announced his retirement, Proctor announced he was transferring home to Iowa. The NIL money now came from Iowa City. Within a day, Hawkeye fans donated over $100,000 to the Iowa NIL collective. At least one business paid Proctor before even stepped foot on the field for Iowa.
He never will. After a whopping two months at the University of Iowa, Proctor announced he was returning to Alabama. Oops. The Iowa NIL group has stayed professional and tight-lipped about the whole ordeal, but people have to be furious. How much was Proctor paid to play for Iowa, only for him to take zero snaps as an Iowa football player? This is a wild west market.
Over time, these types of controversies will largely disappear. Boosters and businesses will figure out that maybe paying a teenager six figures without any strings attached is a bad idea. Contracts will become standardized. The one thing I’d like to see is a change in how transferring works. Before Covid, college athletes were allowed to transfer once during their scholastic careers, and if they transferred they usually had to sit out a year. Now they can transfer many times, in football’s case, more than once in the same calendar year. This is not good for players, colleges, or the sport. Going back to a system that limits transfers would be a worthwhile change. Forcing players to spend at least two years at their initial school, and then allowing only one transfer, is one possible solution.
Money has always been a big part of college sports. Boosters used to donate millions so that athletic departments could woo recruits with state-of-the-art facilities. Players used to be paid under the table. Now, the money is going directly to the players. I see that as an improvement. There are still some wrinkles that need ironed out, but I look forward to seeing how college sports evolves over the next decade.