Seventy thousand people pack a stadium on a Saturday afternoon. They buy jerseys with a kid's number on the back. The school sells those jerseys. The television network sells commercials around that kid's every move. And for a hundred years, that kid walked back to a dorm room with nothing but a scholarship and a thank-you. That was the original sin of college athletics. It was exploitation dressed up as tradition, and nobody in a position of power wanted to say it out loud.
NIL said it out loud. And for that, NIL deserves credit.
I have watched this game long enough to know the NCAA's amateurism model was a monument to institutional hypocrisy. Now, the total NIL market has exploded from $917 million in 2021 to an expected $1.67 billion in 2024-25, with early projections pointing to the total market exceeding $2.5 billion in the first year of revenue sharing. Schools can now pay athletes directly, up to $20.5 million per program per year under the House v. NCAA settlement. That money is real. That money is justice, or at least a reasonable approximation of it. For women's athletes especially, this matters in ways a column cannot fully capture. Angel Reese's WNBA rookie salary was $73,439. Her NIL earnings dwarfed it. She called the professional paycheck a "bonus." Think about that for a moment. Think about what it means for a young woman to have financial leverage before she ever sets foot in a league that would have underpaid her anyway.
Trust what your eyes tell you about that part of the story. The athletes deserved this.
What the Money Broke on Its Way In
But I have seen this movie before, and I know how it ends when you pour money into a system without building the walls first. The numbers tell you something. Only 1% of athletes earn more than $50,000. A top-25 Division I quarterback can expect over $1.3 million annually. Meanwhile, athletes on the other 16 to 18 sports on most campuses may end up with nothing, or a few hundred dollars. Eighty-five to ninety percent of revenue sharing is predicted to flow to football and men's and women's basketball alone. That is not equity. That is a different kind of exploitation wearing a friendlier face.
The transfer portal has turned team-building into a hostage negotiation. Over 25% of scholarship football players enter the portal annually. Average income after a December transfer window jumped 61.5%, so now every contract dispute ends with a player threatening his feet toward a database. Schools are suing players. Players are countersuing schools. Georgia sued a defensive lineman for leaving. Wisconsin sued Miami over tampering. A Boise State law professor who tracks NCAA litigation said he may need to add an entirely new section just for portal-related lawsuits. The College Sports Commission, the body tasked with bringing order to this, reported only $127 million in cleared deals as of January 2026, against an estimated $500 million NIL market for basketball alone. You can not measure the chaos in that gap, but you can feel it.
What you cannot measure is what this does to a locker room. The locker room is the most important room in sports, and nobody with a spreadsheet has ever been inside one. Chemistry, sacrifice, and the willingness to block for a guy who might be gone in January: those are real competitive advantages. The four-year player who bled for a program, who stayed when things were hard, who became a leader because his teammates watched him choose the team over himself, that player is increasingly a relic. His replacement is a portal product with a contract, a brand, and a bus idling outside if the deal gets better somewhere else.
The Injustice Was Real, But This System Is Not the Answer
Here is where I will part ways with the purists on both sides. The people who say NIL destroyed college sports are wrong. A corrupt system was already doing that. And the people who say NIL saved college sports are also wrong, because you do not save something by replacing one set of problems with a messier, more expensive, more litigious set of problems.
What NIL actually did was correct a moral wrong and create a structural catastrophe simultaneously. That is not a paradox. That is what happens when you fix a hundred years of institutional failure with four years of improvisation. The players who were locked out of the money they generated deserved better. They got something. Whether that something serves the next generation of athletes, the ones whose NIL valuations will be set before they play a college snap, whose commitments will be transactional from day one, whose loyalty will be priced rather than earned, that remains the open wound.
Carnegie Mellon researchers found that NIL has actually spread talent more widely across programs, giving smaller schools a real shot at four and five-star players. I believe that finding. Smaller programs winning recruiting battles they could never have won before, that is something worth protecting. But a top recruit switching his commitment from LSU to Michigan for a reported $10.5 million collective deal, that is a different animal entirely. That is not a kid choosing opportunity. That is a market transaction between adults using a 17-year-old as the asset.
That is what winners do, the old programs figured out first. They bought the new system faster than anyone else. You cannot measure what it costs everyone else to keep up.
NIL gave athletes their names back after a century of theft. That was right. The system that replaced the theft is lawless, unequal, and eating the soul of what made Saturday afternoons matter in the first place. Both of those things are true. Holding both of them at once, without flinching from either, is the only honest way to watch what comes next.
