NIL Has Gone Too Far - and the NCAA Created the Chaos
Written by Owen Fischler
Throughout the history of college athletics, it was always widely known that it was illegal to pay student athletes any sort of compensation for their participation in sports. They were limited to just receiving full or partial athletic scholarships, keeping them on the same pedestal as regular students and keeping power in the hands of both the NCAA and universities. This all changed in 2021 in NCAA v. Alston, where its ruling completely shut down the NCAA’s stance that student athletes were amateurs and opened the door for NIL compensation, changing the landscape of college athletics forever. Name, Image, and Likeness started as a way for college athletes to receive compensation for their contributions to their universities, but has turned into a situation where student athletes have now marketed themselves as professionals, completely shifting the power balance from what it once was. While NIL started as a revolutionary program that allowed students to earn compensation for their participation in college athletics, it has turned into an out-of-control professional business where players have lost school pride and instead gained pride for a larger paycheck, ultimately widening the gap between powerful programs and smaller schools. College sports are in need of a major reform where regulations are imposed on NIL, the transfer portal is limited, and some power is taken away from the players.
When NIL began, its original intent was for players to be able to receive earnings so that they could profit off of their fame and receive a share of the billions of dollars of revenue they generate for their schools. Originally, NIL was framed as an opportunity for athletes to profit off endorsements, social media presence, merchandise, or autographs. However, this was nowhere near to what NIL turned to.
Instead of small endorsement deals, NIL has instead transformed the college athletics landscape into professional sports, as it evolved into collectives funded by boosters, offering six or even seven figure “deals” to potential recruits and athletes as a way of luring them to their school. Rather than traditionally pitching a respective team’s school, coaching, location, or potential to go pro to recruits, the main marketing strategy has now shifted completely into the money they will earn, ultimately destroying the art of recruiting. This will negatively impact the future landscape of college sports because recruiting will no longer come down to who is actually able to sell their school better, but who has more money to pay the recruit, ultimately getting rid of any fair competition that used to exist. Now, these large schools engage in bidding wars, and NIL has turned into a recruiting weapon rather than an additional benefit athletes receive once committed. When NIL was introduced, the NCAA's immediate failure to establish regulations and limitations on how far this can go was a clear signal that this transformation surrounded by greed was going to happen overnight. At the same time, a series of court decisions also weakened the NCAA’s power to regulate the amount of money athletes were earning and how they were receiving it, which quickly removed the power it once had to regulate college sports.
The transfer portal has only made the chaos that erupted from NIL worse, as athletes are bouncing around from school to school every year like it’s free agency. The idea that college athletes were students first has completely vanished, as their academic standing or prioritization of their education has turned into an afterthought. College athletes are quick to jump into the transfer portal if it means they will receive more money from another school, even if they were a productive starter at a school that offers them a good path to the draft. Before NIL, transfer portal entries were in the low thousands across most sports, but by 2025 in the NIL era, several thousand athletes enter in a single sport, with over 4,500 football players. It has even become common practice for players to enter the transfer portal as a way of leveraging a new NIL deal from their schools. Furthermore, the concept of a player waiting their turn seems to no longer exist. Players come into programs expecting to play as freshman or sophomores and end up transferring if they don’t do so. The concept of a player learning behind fellow teammates for a few years before becoming productive team leaders has nearly disappeared, leading programs to now spend as much time re-recruiting their own roster as they do recruiting high school athletes. Team continuity has suffered, and long-term player development has taken a back seat. While some programs, such as Indiana, have found success with older rosters built through transfers, these cases are more the exception than the norm.
One of the most concerning consequences of NIL is the widening gap between larger, wealthy schools and smaller schools. Smaller schools’ ability to develop a roster for multiple years and then potentially have an incredible season no longer exists, as all of their talented players now enter the transfer portal once they realize they can make more money elsewhere.
Reform is necessary if college sports ever wants to return to a place of fairness, as the gap will only continue to widen and players will gain more power if this continues. NIL groups should have to clearly report where their money comes from and follow rules that stop them from using deals to recruit players, and NIL contracts should last multiple years and require athletes to stay enrolled at their school, which would reduce transfers driven only by bigger offers. The transfer portal should also have tighter rules, limiting how often and when players can transfer to help keep team rosters more stable. We should not be reading in an article that a school’s star quarterback “signed a new deal” to stay the next year, as that sort of sentence should only exist in professional sports. By resisting change for too long, the NCAA allowed the pendulum to swing too far in the opposite direction. Now, college athletics operate in a poorly unregulated market. Without meaningful change, the very foundation that made college athletics unique may disappear. If the NCAA does not act soon, the chaos it created may permanently define college sports, and not for the better.
