The College Football NIL Market Doubled In 2 Years. How Did We Get Here?

Ryan Day didn’t intend to be prophetic. While this gathering of boosters inside the Covelli Center in the heart of Ohio State’s athletics campus four years ago was about pushing business opportunities for athletes in the midst of a new world order in college sports, it offered insight into the changing ecosystem. The Buckeyes’ head coach provided the roughly 100 local stakeholders with an incisive figure: $13 million. That’s how much name, image and likeness (NIL) money the Buckeyes needed to retain the bulk of its roster in 2022. “If the speed limit’s 45 miles per hour, and you drive 45 miles per hour, a lot of people are going to pass you by,” Day said at the time. “If you go too fast, you’re going to get pulled over.” Ohio State won the national championship two years later; its ballyhooed $20 million roster was the talk of college football and representative of the increasing commercialization of the enterprise. But with the 2026 campaign kicking off this weekend, that old figure might presently make the Buckeyes competitive at the high end of the Group of Six, let alone within the Power Four. NIL data provider Opendorse released its annual NIL market report in June, estimating Big Ten schools will spend an average of $48.2 million annually across all sports this year. The SEC followed closely behind at $44.5 million, while the ACC and Big 12 were expected to spend around half those figures at $29.4 million and $24.3 million, respectively. “The same thing that drove coaches’ salaries to the moon and buyouts to the moon are driving players’ salaries to the moon,” Opendorse co-founder and president Blake Lawrence told me. “The difference between the two is [that] there is a more direct tie between athlete compensation and championship caliber outcomes — or at least it is easier to sell donors on that potential. “That’s where the story is going to go. It’s going to keep driving up these numbers forever.” The financial requirements to compete in high-major college football have seemingly doubled almost every offseason for the last five years. Coaches and administrators are decrying the rising costs but continue to spend hand over fist to fund football rosters. Congress is involved. Threats of a breakaway from the NCAA and conference-level governance in the SEC and Big Ten have been discussed. And the college football season starts at week’s end. How did we get here? That part is relatively simple: A win-at-all-costs mentality. It’s finding a fix that’s more complex. “At some point, the system’s going to potentially break,” Kansas State athletics director Gene Taylor told me. “Players are going to get paid. Schools are going to over-promise — which I think many of them have already over-promised and are writing checks they can’t cash — and it’s going to break because donors will get tired of it.” ‘Controlled Chaos Mixed With Genuine Excitement’ Times Square isn’t exactly the place for subtlety. No, this part of Manhattan is the amalgamation of a hellish tourist trap crossed with greater commercialism that brings millions to the city weekly, all in search of the perfect Instagram caption or a $4,000 Gucci bag. What better place than this to launch the flashy new world of college athletics? “July 1, 2021, felt like controlled chaos mixed with genuine excitement,” said attorney Darren Heitner, who helped land basketball players Haley and Hanna Cavinder a spot on a Boost Mobile billboard in Times Square to open the new-look college sports ecosystem. Back home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Heitner danced between phone calls throughout the day as interest for the Cavinders as spokespeople rolled in. Three deals in 24 hours felt like too much for proper diligence. Even still, the calls were proof of concept. Brands wanted in — and the money would follow. “Athletes finally had rights they should have had all along,” Heitner told me. “And the volume of activity confirmed how ready the market was.” The NCAA, for its part, has long been opposed to change. But as the pressure from the legal system mounted, college sports’ governing body reworked its rules in 2021 to allow athletes to benefit from NIL. The idea, in theory, was marketing deals with local mom-and-pop car dealerships, sports camps, and efforts of that ilk. The Gatorade and Pepsi campaigns would be the exception rather than the rule. That couldn’t be further from how the world has evolved. The College Sports Commission, which has been charged with regulating NIL dealmaking, released data in July that showed more than 34,000 deals worth $355.24 million (roughly $10,450 per deal) had passed through its NIL Go clearinghouse. Another 1,800 deals representing around $90 million had been rejected. Opendorse’s annual report, meanwhile, suggested Power Four quarterbacks being paid $1.5 million annually are in the 90th percentile of earners, while it estimates this year more than $725 million will enter the NIL ecosystem through “above the cap” deals — agreements through third-party providers that don’t count toward the revenue-sharing cap placed on universities by The House vs. NCAA settlement. “It’s just been very difficult to be able to understand where all those dollars are coming from,” said former Miami athletics director Dan Radakovich, now the executive director of the FBS Athletics Director Association. “You want to be able to say, ‘OK, if a school decides that they want to invest in these programs, they should have the ability to invest in the programs; just as they’ve always had the ability to invest in facilities or stadiums or coaches and staffs.’ But the rules didn’t read that way.” The House settlement — a combination of the House, Hubbard and Carter antitrust cases involving lost NIL opportunities for past college athletes — was supposed to provide impediments to the rampant spending that has pushed across the ecosystem. The proceedings that were finalized last summer laid out a $20.5 million cap, among other measures, that would enable schools to pay athletes directly through varying revenue streams that had previously lined athletics departments’ coffers. The cap, however, has been anything but. Schools are regularly blowing past the number through third-party endorsement deals — which are not subject to the cap — and other measures of creative accounting. “I think 99% of these schools would tell you they can’t keep up with it,” said Altius Sports Partners president Andrew Donovan, whose company consults on revenue-generating projects for a number of Power Four schools. “Now, they probably would’ve told you that same thing if we had the same conversation every year for the past three to four years — and somehow they found a way. “That goes back to the competitive element, but, at the end of the day, what they’re doing is looking at other ways to subsidize the departmental revenue in the name of finding ways to get third-party NIL payments to athletes to satisfy obligations that have been made directly and indirectly through the recruiting process.” ‘We Need National Standards’ The broader issue with the rising market is sustainability. Schools are over-leveraged across the board. Middle-of-the-pack SEC schools are spending $15 million or more annually on their men’s basketball rosters. Big Ten football programs are doubling or tripling that figure. The perpetual refrain in college sports has been that there is always money to be had. Shake the couch cushions hard enough, and the bills will flow. That approach hasn’t necessarily changed. “We need national standards; we need national rules; we need national enforcement,” Texas Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt, whose school has been as representative of the new-look powers of the NIL era as any, told me. “We’ve taken the mindset that this is not a time to manage our way through. Of course, we are trying to manage costs wherever we can, but managing costs in football and basketball right now is not the strategy that we’ve taken nor will we take as long as we continue to navigate through this type of landscape.” Yet athletics departments nationwide are getting tapped out, and schools are increasingly turning toward the university side for help. A U.S. Government and Accountability Office report issued in July found Power Four “college contributions” (institutional support and student fees combined) had nearly tripled from $445 million to $1.2 billion between 2014–15 and 2023–24, while 71% of those schools spent more than they generated in 2023–24 (up from 65% a decade earlier). Cal Chancellor Rich Lyons said last year the university would match booster donations of up to $6 million in football and $1.5 million for men’s basketball. Florida State recently took advantage of a new authorization from the state that allows up to $22.5 million to be transferred to athletics. Even Nevada reported that more than half of its nearly $58 million budget for the 2024 fiscal year came directly from public funds. “That’s the underreported question,” said Nebraska athletics director Troy Dannen, who told me the school’s investment in NIL has skyrocketed 400% in two-and-a-half years. “Because, for the most part, this is happening with state and public dollars and student fees, and not truly happening at the desires and behest of corporate sponsors. … Higher-education spending is already challenged. At some point in time, is that prioritization going to change on campuses?” The most pertinent hope for curbing overspending resides on Capitol Hill. The Protect College Sports Act — a bipartisan effort from authors Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) remains in flux on Capitol Hill, where college sports leaders have spent tens of millions of dollars and almost a decade lobbying for congressional action to help provide stability. The bill touches on myriad current issues plaguing college sports, including: That the bill might even come to a vote — or receive enough support in the Senate — is an open question. The Senate already blew past its Aug. 7 recess deadline, which many on Capitol Hill had hoped would serve as a line in the sand to introduce a vote on the PCSA. The Senate returns to session on Sept. 14, but, like anything, time kills deals. “I want to see college sports preserved for future generations to enjoy,” PCSA co-sponsor Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said in a statement earlier this month. “If Congress doesn’t step in to restore order to an increasingly chaotic system, programs across the country could be forced to shutter.” So what is Plan B? That’s less clear. Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti and his SEC counterpart Greg Sankey have hand-waved at the idea of self-governance; that the conference offices might take on a more direct role in enforcing rules and regulations related to their members, albeit that has its own antitrust challenges. Both leagues could also take up portions of the PCSA and look to introduce their own versions of a retention cap — effectively a bonus pool of money designed to let schools spend above the House settlement cap to keep their own players (The Big Ten has already explored such a change as far back as March). “We have to clarify what the caps are,” Ohio State athletics director Ross Bjork told me. “Retention, we all agree with that concept — a retention cap and the original House cap. But if we don’t close all the loopholes, then we’ve done nothing. “If there’s gray areas, what’s the old phrase? ‘If you’re explaining, you’re losing.’ If we have to explain, ‘Well, if you do it this way, then maybe it’s permissible, but if you do it this way, it’s not.’ If we have to explain some matrix, then we’ve lost because somebody’s going to find a loophole.” Attending a wedding in recent weeks, Taylor ran into a former Kansas State football player whose time with the Wildcats coincided with the early days of the NIL era — and an annual compensation package of around $150,000. “How much more,” they asked, “would I make now?” Quipped Taylor: “A hell of a lot more than you made.”