NIL’s next test: Too many cooks, no shared recipe |
Five years into the NIL era, the question is no longer whether college athletes should be paid for the industry they have built. It is whether this diverse mix of commissioners, presidents, lawmakers, regulators, athletic departments, collectives, GMs and agencies will ever work from the same plan, rather than tossing conflicting ingredients into the same pot.
To outsiders, NIL still looks simple: An athlete signs a contract, works with a brand on marketing deliverables, and they get paid. Or an athlete receives a portion of the revenue share directly from the school. On the ground, it is anything but simple. One missed detail can void an agreement, hold up payment for months, threaten eligibility or blow up a roster plan.
The stakes have escalated because NIL now affects everything that matters in college sports: multimedia and apparel rights, recruiting, retention, the transfer portal and revenue-sharing mechanisms that tie payments directly to institutional budgets. “When a coach says, ‘We need to be competitive in NIL,’ they really mean, ‘We need a compliant, scalable financial and legal infrastructure that did not exist on this campus three years ago’ — and they are saying it in a room where everyone thinks they own the menu.”
Those of us who have worked in this space from the beginning do not see NIL as a talking point. We see that athletes are begging us for clarity and ease of use. From that perspective, the gap between rhetoric and reality is evident in every recruiting........