What are your thoughts on “NIL”? Do you think the decision to let college athletes earn compensation has been a good thing or bad thing for college sports?

34 comments

  1. >Do you think the decision to let college athletes earn compensation has been a good thing or bad thing for college sports?

    A good thing, no contest. No company should ever be able to use a person’s name, image or likeness without compensating them. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a greedy corporate cunt.

  2. When unis are making seven figures while they make nothing it’s a good thing for college sports. Especially since a vast majority of them don’t make it pro.

  4. I think the question is less what’s good for college sports. I don’t really care about that beyond how it affects students. What I really care about is whether it’s a good thing for college athletes who are pro in everything but name and have been before this too. They performed at that level, this was always a feeder series for the major leagues, and it generates many billions of dollars and is aired to millions on live tv. The students create a large part of that appeal and they deserve real compensation based on the value they add. Scholarships are essentially free on the level schools provide them to athletes and the athletic duties take away from the quality of their education.

    It’s also revealed there may be additional funding/interest in women’s and smaller sports. The best thing for those sports would be for additional funding to come and make them more viable.

    Im sure there will be some rough points and edge cases we need to deal with, but overall I believe it’s a positive for athletes.

  5. I’m not sure it’s necessarily good for the sport, but it’s only fair to treat the players like professional athletes since we’ve been acting like they are for a very long time now.

    Ultimately it’s good for the players, good for some schools, and very bad for some other schools. I’m more or less fine with that bargain.

  6. NIL is merely a small sign of the things to come.

    I’m convinced the SEC and the Big Ten will start paying/compensating their players based on a % of the media revenue and that’s when the flood gates will open and we will see the end of collegiate athletics as we know it.

  7. Universities, who never saw a dollar they didn’t like, are allowed to charge market rate for tv rights.

    Coaches, who have a unique skill set and pricing power, charge what the market will bear for salaries.

    But somehow university athletes are supposed to be happy with a tuition waiver and maybe some token on-campus job?

    When colleges negotiate tv deals that maximize free fan access and viewership and coaches take a median professor salary, I’ll believe there is genuine concern for the integrity of amateur athletics. Until then its a labor dispute and universities need to pay up.

  8. I don’t know if it ultimately will be a good thing or a bad thing, but I do think college athletes were taken advantage of for a long time. They were the talent that generated billions of revenue for an entire industry and weren’t allowed a piece, or even to accept meals and tattoos. That was grossly unfair. Ultimately maybe the issue is that this kind of money shouldn’t be involved in college athletics. Maybe there should be a farm system. But that also would introduce its own set of problems. Idk. At this point I don’t think there are any great, obvious answers.

  9. Bear with me: College sports fund college sports and the empire they created.

    The multimillion dollar contracts that used to benefit the average student are press-piece feed these organizations have created to generate wealth.

    I worked at the Michigan training table back in the day (I say this because I love the Michigan Wolverines and if you look into my history you’d see bias so I’m being upfront and honest) and took the job specifically because I could get something on my plate once a week when otherwise I went without food – I was homeless for a time because the rest was going to tuition, books, and a ton of random stuff a professor would ask us to buy but only use once.

    Athletes had free tuition, books, food, housing, medical, tutors, gifts from boosters…

    Most students were paying for one scoop of an item on Thanksgiving (meal staff was not culpable. They do a TON but with constricted resources.) while SA’s were getting full spreads. And it was once every other week with steak or lobster.

    I think the entire system no longer benefits the average student – because athletes are not treated like normal students. Tuition rises, book fees rise (many professors wrote their own textbooks so they are directly responsible), on base housing prices rise; and all I see are coaches salaries rise and talks of NIL – which is honestly just an extension of that – without help to the student body.

    Those millions of dollars are spent updating facilities every few years to attract recruits to “benefit the school” but it doesn’t. It benefits them. It just goes on to feed the cycle of “our team was underperforming (aka “we sucked [mismanagement which includes bad appropriation of funds, bad coaching…], please cover our losses”) and more money is always their answer. NIL will just be another recruiting tool that will exemplify and exploit this, much to the detriment of an already “extremely helped” athlete.

    —–

    Why do the Service Academies suck at CFB? Level playing field. Hat do you think NIL’s will do?

  10. I don’t care if it’s good or bad for college sports. It’s good for the players, which is all that matters.

  11. It’s indentured servitude to not pay them, because the money is there. It’s not like the universities do sports programs out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it to make money. Without the players there is no money. Give them money.

  13. There’s an interesting parallel between students controlling their likenesses and the strike in Hollywood regarding AI and the likenesses of actors, IMO.

  14. If a college athlete wants to market themselves and make money, they should be able to. A vast majority of athletes never make it to the pros, so being able to make a bit of money while playing sports in college isn’t the worst thing and could help set the athlete up for success in life if they’re smart with the money they do make.

    I also like NIL because it means we’re eventually going to get a new NCAA football game.

  15. People who don’t follow college sports don’t realize that schools/programs aren’t paying athletes with this. They aren’t “professional” in the sport. What NIL does allow is for them to have sponsors. Sponsors can pay them/cover their bills, etc, etc, and in return, the athlete or their name/likeness will be used in some kind of marketing or ad campaign.

    It’s a far better solution than colleges using athletes to draw in millions of dollars, then not giving those athletes a dime while also telling them they can’t be paid or have a sponsor…what was before NIL was criminal IMO. Yea yea, you get an education and free tuition and stuff like that…I’ve worked in housing with NCAA football programs…those athletes were often miserable. They often couldn’t afford food outside of dining hours…and during dining hours they’re usually in practice or meetings (or class to work around their sport). I’d be in gas stations late at night, and I’d see groups of 8-10 football players in line purchasing bags of chips and donuts for their dinners because they couldn’t afford the gas or delivery fees for pizza, or food-share purchases.

  16. The whole college sports system is rotten and bad, but at least NIL allows athletes to take back some of their agency…

  17. If the schools are allowed to make money off the athletes, the athletes should be allowed to earn some.

  18. NIL is about equity.

    The NCAA, Athletic Conferences, and Universities all told are making billions of dollars. Black male athletes make up 60.5% of male athletes. While all black people combined make up 13% to 14% of the entire US population. There was definitely a problem there. Massive profits made on the backs of unpaid black labor. Sounds like something that was supposed to be abolished a while ago?

    The problem is/was publicly funded universities running for profit sports programs and not paying their players.

  19. Good for the players, bad for fans.

    So many comments here about how these programs make billions of dollars and such, and that’s not even remotely true (source below). People also forget that football (at least at most schools) subsidizes the other sports; athletic programs as a whole are mostly profitable, with the top schools profiting eight figures a year, but many break even.

    [Source](https://thesportsdaily.com/news/college-sports-finances-top-10-most-profitable-ncaa-d1-athletic-departments-in-public-schools-in-2022/)

  20. I’m fine with it. I think I saw recently though that some player made like $1 million from an NIL deal but part of that deal was that he has to pay NIL some percentage of his NFL wages for the first few years. Resulting in the player receiving much much less money overall than he would have if he didn’t sign the NIL deal. Maybe someone else can provide more clarity

  21. I’m fine with NIL but they really need to make tiers or a cap on scholarship vs partial vs non scholarship students, and the level of competition. And they need to get rid of the transfer portal, or at least not make it so OP.

  22. It’s a good thing. Being a D1 athlete is more work than most full time jobs on top of being a full time student

  23. Unlike most on this thread, I care about whether it’s good for college sports more than if it’s good for the present athletes themselves. I’m not necessarily against athletes being paid, but I’m against the free for all. The NIL system is way different than professional sports. In professional sports a billionaire can’t pay an athlete to sign an initial contract with his team. There’s a draft. And there are salary rules to prevent certain teams from hogging every good player because they have more money.

    I’d prefer the universities pay the players, but that there was a salary cap and a limit to the number of players that any one university could pay. This would probably save the universities money in the long run, as right now they are competing for athletes based off buidling luxary accomodations and facilities.

    As far as NIL, which are endorsements, I’d prefer that athletes not be eligible for any NIL deals in their first year with a school. This will prevent what we have recently seen where some schools are essentially “buying” kids from other schools or purchasing commitments from high school kids.

    Also, the previous transfer rules need to be brought back. You should be able to freely transfer up or down divisions, if you ended up at the wrong level of competition. Within division you should have to sit out a year, or only be able to freely transfer if you have completed your degree. I think that’s a fair system that balances the interests of the athletes, teams, and fans.

  24. Yes. When college athletics began, they were competing in gymnasiums and playing an extra curricular activity. These are now billion dollar industries that want to rely on free labor while the coaching staffs have dozens of people, the athletic departments are in a facilities arms race, and everyone but the athletes were getting rich. It’s still not “fair” as some schools have players with huge NIL deals and other players getting basically nothing, but at least they’re able to.

    Yes, it’s a good thing. But it’s also temporary and the situation will evolve over the next 10-20 years and we’ll end up somewhere totally unrecognizable.

  25. I don’t think it’s necessary. The players have always “gotten paid” for playing in that they get a free college education despite many of them being academically unfit for it.

    That said, since in my view they’ve always been paid anyway, I don’t really care if they get actual money from boosters. It’s also good for the guys who are decent at the NCAA level but will never make the NFL.

  26. The players ought to be paid as if they are professionals. NIL is one part of that, employer-employee contracts are another. I think it’s gotten to the point where the large revenue generating sports teams need to be split off from the schools. They don’t share a mission.

  27. I’m for the NIL and I believe the good far outweighs the bad, since people have been profiting off students for far to long for the amount of work they do.

    My worry – as a fan of college sports – is that it might reduce parity across college sports. Will small name schools still be able to attract recruits? Will big schools be able to “buy” the best high school players in the county?

    Obviously the big schools all ready did all sorts of tricks to get you to commit – I went through it myself – but they weren’t explicitly telling me how much money I’d make as a freshman.

  28. I don’t believe any work should be unpaid. To suggest otherwise is just pernicious weasel words from a businessman who’s trying to score some free labor.

  29. I have to say I’m not really a fan of rich alumni getting together to basically sign kids to a contract to play for their school.

    I don’t have a problem with the idea that if a business wants to sign a player to an endorsement deal they should be able to make that money, but that’s not what’s happening in reality.

  31. It is a good thing. It is a multi-billion dollar industry that was not giving a dime to the folks actually putting their bodies on the line. I know all the horseshit they tried to spout to justify it but I am not buying it.

    College Ball is big business and the players should be taking a health bite of it.

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