Has NIL Gotten Out of Control in College Sports?

College athletes are getting paid to play, but where will this road lead?

I was scrolling through LinkedIn the other night when I came across the above post from Out2Win Sports talking about this years top rated high school QB prospect, Bryce Underwood. For the time being, Underwood is committed to play football at LSU next season, but what would get in the way of that? The answer is simple-NIL

Now I’ll start by saying this, I have always thought college athletes should get paid in some way. The people who use the weak argument that these athletes are “getting a free education” never played a sport in college. When you’re playing a sport in college at the Division 1 level, that sport is your job. Why? Because you’re there on a scholarship for your athletic abilities. These guys don’t have time to go get a job to make some extra money on the side while they go to school. Their job is training for their sport, practicing, traveling and playing games.

They also bring in revenue through things like tickets and jersey sales, so yeah they should get paid some amount of money. In my head I always thought they’d go the route of some type of universal stipend that would help college athletes have some money in their pockets. What I didn’t expect was what is going on with NIL right now.

In the above post you can see that Michigan is trying to flip this kid from his LSU Commitment with a $10M NIL offer. Yes, this kid is the number one QB recruit in the country and has every school coming after him to play QB for them. But a $10M NIL offer is absolutely insane. He hasn’t played a snap of football at the D1 level and he will walk onto campus with $10M in the bank. That’s the equivalent of a second round draft pick in the NFL.

In my opinion this is where NIL is getting out of control. Especially with the QB position where we’re seeing less guys go into the NFL ready to play. They make millions in college, don’t really develop and then can’t play in the NFL and everyone wonders what happened. And with the transfer portal where guys are being offered a few million to go play for another school, it’s even making coaching harder. You can’t really build a team when guys are looking to leave to go get their payday at the end of every season.

And no, I’m not pretending to know what the fix is here. A couple of suggestions I have are that if you’re getting paid to come play at a school then you can’t be on a scholarship. Another suggestion I have is that the schools shouldn’t be allowed to pay the players BUT the players are allowed to get paid for brand deals and make money that way. Lastly, if the school does pay you and you jump in the transfer portal you have to pay back that money.

Would any of this work? Probably not. But with social media there are more ways than ever before for these athletes to make money. Paying them $10M to come play QB shouldn’t be one of them.