NIL Explained: How College Athletes Are Finally Getting Paid and Why College Sports Still Need to be Saved

If you’ve followed college sports over the past few years, you’ve heard the three letters, “NIL,” thrown around everywhere you look. You know they have something to do with players making money in some way, shape, or form, but what do they really mean? And why do many people believe they’re hurting college sports?

NIL stands for name, image, and likeness. In July 2021, the NCAA finally allowed college athletes to make money from their fame by giving them the rights to their own name, image, and likeness, something that was banned for decades. Before NIL, if a star player appeared in a local car commercial, they’d risk losing their eligibility. But now, athletes can, in addition to appearing in local ads, sign endorsement deals, get paid for autograph signings and meet-and-greets (a practice that nearly landed Johnny Manziel in a heap of trouble just over a decade ago), monetize their social media accounts, sell their own official merchandise, start their own businesses, and as of this year, earn money through the revenue generated by their schools’ TV deals, ticket sales, sponsorships, and more. But how exactly does the NIL system work?

Athletes aren’t paid directly by their schools for playing. Instead, they earn money from two main avenues; outside companies or groups of boosters, known as collectives, who want to work with them and pool together large sums of money to do so through both donations and the members’ fortunes, and the revenue that their schools generate through TV deals and sponsorships, which vary greatly from school to school.

While NIL is a step in the right direction, many fans, including us here at Crowdnoise, argue it’s not a true solution but simply a temporary fix. Here are some of the most popular reasons why:

1. Transfer portal madness: Before the implementation of NIL, the role of the transfer portal in college sports was minimal, mainly because a player was required to sit out for a year if he decided to transfer, a decision he would make for no purpose other than more playing time. But now that that rule is gone and money is now a legal incentive for players to transfer, we’ve seen the portal expand to a once-unimaginable scale.

2. Unequal playing field: Star players get paid, role players don’t. A starting QB at Alabama will make millions of dollars each season, while a backup offensive lineman or a star in a more obscure, low viewership sport, such as field hockey, gets next to nothing.

3. The role of NIL in recruitment: Many schools use NIL as a primary recruiting tool, offering huge deals to lure players, creating an unbalanced system that screws over the little schools that simply will never have the donor base or the TV deal to match.

4. The NCAA still controls the system: The NCAA can still punish players for certain NIL deals, but the rules keep changing. Athletes can’t be expected to know every single change that is made to the ever-evolving system when they already have academic and athletic careers taking up the vast majority of their time

NIL was a necessary change, but it isn’t the finish line. Until athletes have real power, the system will remain flawed. We here at Crowdnoise are dedicated to giving players the power they deserve through the strength of you, the fan.