I just read about a University of Florida linebacker who issued some demands regarding his NIL payment from the school. Among them, he wanted $45,000 a month. That’s a monthly “stipend” for an outside linebacker who, I suspect, nobody outside the state of Florida or various recruiting services has ever heard about.
Florida said “no” and showed him the way to the Transfer Portal.
Meanwhile, Marshall University was forced to opt out of its bowl game this year because 30-some players entered the portal when their coach took another job. They didn’t have enough returning players with game experience to play a bowl game.
And West Virginia’s best defensive player hit the portal, too, which is bad because the defense wasn’t very good to begin with. (He did say he might change his mind and return.)
So NIL and the Transfer Portal are now the way of the world in college athletics. I, for one, am not amused.
First, I want to talk about the Transfer Portal. In the past, college coaches were allowed to switch jobs at will with no penalty attached, while players who transferred schools had to sit out one year. The portal allows players to transfer to a new school every year and to play immediately thereafter. That seems only fair, except for two things: (1) the portal is already open for this year before teams have played in their bowls, and players are already leaving, and (2) players are allowed to transfer more than once. Some players find themselves on four different rosters during a four-year college career. Coaches don’t know from year-to-year which players they will have in the future.
On the NIL front, big money schools have big money budgets that smaller schools simply cannot match. Ohio State and the University of Oregon, for example, have NIL budgets in the $20 million ballpark, according to Nebraska Athletic Director Troy Dannen. Nebraska’s budget of less than $10 million places the Big 10 school at a competitive disadvantage, he believes.
Here are a few other facts:
* In 2023, the University of Texas's nonprofit NIL collective, Texas One Fund, raised nearly $10.5 million and spent more than $13.3 million. The collective distributed about $11.7 million to UT athletes.
* The average Power Five school spent an estimated $9,815,217
on NIL in 2023-24, about 66% of which went to football players. Another 24% was
allocated to men's basketball.
* In 2023, the Walk of Champions' budget for NIL payments to student athletes at Alabama was $5,700,000. The estimated revenue sharing cap for Alabama in 2025 is $20,500,000.
* Getting back to Florida, the school DOES lead the nation in the number of NIL deals brokered with 498 deals since March 2021. Texas was the next closest school with 367 deals. Florida plans to spend more than $13 million this year to improve their roster and make them competitive again in the Southeastern Conference.
* The $45,000 demanded by the Florida linebacker would have paid him $540,000 over 12 months or $225,000 during the five-month football season from August through December.
So what’s wrong with this picture?
NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) came about because the NCAA and colleges were profiting by marketing their best players for awards, endorsements and such, without any compensation paid to the players themselves. It’s understandable that the players would be upset by being denied a slice of the pie.
But the pie has become bigger than most of us could imagine, and now millions of dollars are being paid to the top athletes in the country, according to ESPN and other internet sources. Colorado QB Shedeur Sanders, son of his coach Deion Sanders, reportedly benefits to the tune of $4.7 million, and all of the top 20 recipients are receiving at least $1 million in NIL funds.
That makes it difficult for schools like WVU and Marshall to compete. In the Big 12 Conference, for example, West Virginia ($5.5 million) ranks eighth out of 16 teams in NIL money, good for only 44th best in the country. That means that 43 other schools have more NIL money to buy the best players. In my book, that’s a competitive disadvantage.
Not much is reported about Marshall’s NIL budget, which falls around the middle of the Sun Belt schools, but in 2023, the football coach offered Ohio State’s $20 million players “all-you-can-eat” at Tudor’s Biscuit World to transfer. The offer made the news, but didn’t net a lot of players.
So the Transfer Portal and NIL are problems which are damaging college football, in my opinion. But take heart, sports fans I think I have found solutions to both problems.
First, assuming the NCAA won’t do away with the Transfer Portal on my say-so alone, at least they could keep it closed until after the football bowl games and before spring practice begins. That way, teams could compete in bowls with a full or nearly-full complement of players, and coaches could start spring practice knowing which players they still have.
And second, put a cap on NIL spending so the big schools and the ones funded by Nike or oil money or some other billionaires can’t buy all of the best players. I don’t know what a reasonable cap would be, but someone smarter than I am should be able to figure that out.
These days, watching live streams of sporting events, I see a lot of TV commercials in which former WVU center Zach Frazier and Marshall basketball player Meredith Maier promote a regional convenience store. It’s okay with me if they are getting paid for their appearances (I assume they are), and I wouldn’t even mind if they got free slushies and a candy bar or two. But that’s far removed from the millions being doled out nationwide.
Several years ago, before NIL, someone proposed making payments to college student-athletes, many of whom came from disadvantaged backgrounds and needed a little financial help beyond their scholarship awards. At the time, that meant stipends of a few bucks so they could buy a cheeseburger or go to the movies or take a date to dinner. Clearly, that’s not what NIL has become. Now, a top college football player makes enough in NIL money to buy his own hamburger franchise, star in a Hollywood movie and drive his date to dinner in a Lamborghini.
But have you noticed the price of eggs?
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