We have now been around to see college athletes being paid “legally” due to the NIL (Name Image Likeness) policy being approved on July 1st 2021. This made it legal for college athletes to essentially be paid for the sport they play while they attend college. 

Rewind the clock before NIL was not an approved policy for college athletes. I would believe a lot of programs have been doing this just under the table. We all know the main sports starts who got “caught” such as Reggie Bush at USC, Johnny Manziel at Texas A&M, and Cam Newton at Auburn. Those three players are just a few of all the athletes that were getting/trying to get paid back in the day. However, is the blame all on these college athletes or does the system have to take some of the blame? I fully believe most college programs were doing this but some were just better at hiding it than others. We will never really know all the payments that were handed out over the years but we can assume it was happening quite often. 

Welcome back to the present day of NIL and players now getting paid millions (that’s right you read that correctly) of dollars to play college sports. Some recent examples of the NIL deals are as followed: 

• AJ Dybantsa  at $7 Million
• Shadeur Sanders at $6.2 Million
• Travis Hunter at $5.4 Million
• Arch Manning at $5 Million
• Livvy Dunn at $4.2 Million
• Cooper Flagg at $2.6 Million

The values you see beside these players names are the “valuation” of their NIL deals so the amounts could not only be less but could be much more depending on their play, social medias, and other contracts. Looking at not only these players but NIL deals across college sports we see most of them belonging to college football players (which is expected), following them we see an uptick in college basketball players especially with the highest “valuation” yet at $7 million!? 

In ending, this is purely my opinion on the whole NIL and the college sports landscape. First I look at it through the player side of things, you would not tell your son or daughter to not take multi million dollar offers to go play college sports. I love this from the players side, how could you not? Let’s get paid to go to college and play a game for however many years and become a millionaire before even trying to play professionally. As the player where do I need to sign. Secondly I have to look at it from the coaching side, what an absolute nightmare to have to deal with am I right? Now these coaches have to deal with these athletes being possibly (probably) being paid more than they are at 18 years old. Grant it when the athletes because professionals a lot get paid more than coaches I get that, but that’s why a lot of college coaches stay college coaches to not deal with those issues. Coaching is already hard enough, now we add how to balance a million dollar kid when other teammates are paying for school!? No thank you. Lastly I am looking at this NIL as a fan of college sports, truthfully I think it has ruined the feel/look of “college sports”. College athletes getting paid pretty much makes it the pro system the only thing keeping college sports different is the fan base and atmosphere at games. Hear me out, think of the best atmosphere in the NFL and put that up against some of the top atmospheres in college football. It’s not even close the college atmosphere is so much more electric and fun! However you keep paying these college athletes millions of dollars I do believe the fans will start seeing it as the pros and be less and less electric as time goes forward. I also think what NIL does in college sports is that it gets rid of loyalty to a program. For example, why would a kid go play football in their home state let’s say Wisconsin when USC from California offers them more money? This is a very slippery slope college athletics are on you have kids making millions of dollars, no loyalty to the program they are at with money being involved, and the ability to jump from school to school depending on who is going to pay them more money. 

I know this article sounds like I am hating on the NIL (Name Image Likeness), to some extent I am as a college sports fan. However, for the players and a father of a daughter that hopefully wants to play sports I could not be any happier go get your millions kid there is no time like the present! As a fan of college sports I really hope they get a control on this because if they do not you are going to see the college sports landscape change drastically.