The College Sports Money Explosion — and Who Isn't Getting Any

Darius Holloway is twenty years old, a quarterback at a university whose football programme has been nationally ranked for most of the past decade, and the beneficiary of a name, image, and likeness portfolio worth, by his agent's estimate, $4.3 million. He has endorsement deals with an athletic-wear company, an energy drink, a regional car dealership chain, and a mobile-gaming studio. He has a financial adviser, a content manager, and a publicist. He has not yet played a snap in the National Football League. By any historical standard, he is an anomaly. By the standards of the current college-sports economy, he is merely the most visible example of a transformation that has reshaped the business of amateur athletics in ways that almost no one predicted and that very few people can agree are fair.

The median NIL deal for a college athlete in the United States is $1,200. Not $1,200 a month. Not $1,200 a week. $1,200 total, according to a comprehensive survey by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics released this spring. For the overwhelming majority of the roughly 520,000 NCAA athletes across all divisions and all sports, name, image, and likeness revenue is not a living. It is a coupon.

The gap between Holloway and the median athlete is not a flaw in the NIL system. It is the NIL system. The rules, introduced in 2021, permit college athletes to profit from their fame — but fame, in college sports, is distributed with the same brutal inequality as in any entertainment industry. Football quarterbacks and men's basketball stars generate enormous audiences, and advertisers pay accordingly. Swimmers, field-hockey players, and second-string offensive linemen generate almost none, and the market pays accordingly. The result is a compensation structure that mirrors the winner-take-all economics of professional sports but operates without the salary floors, revenue-sharing mechanisms, or collective-bargaining protections that professional leagues provide.

"We created a free market and then acted surprised when it behaved like a free market," said Dr. Angela Torres, a sports-economics professor at the University of Michigan who has studied NIL compensation patterns. "The money goes where the eyeballs go. The eyeballs go to football and men's basketball. Everyone else is a bystander."

The House v. NCAA settlement, reached last year, has pushed the economics further in the same direction. Under the agreement, universities will begin sharing revenue directly with athletes — a landmark shift that acknowledges, for the first time, that college sports is a commercial enterprise and that the athletes who generate the revenue deserve a share. But the revenue-sharing model, as currently structured, allocates funds based on the revenue each sport generates, which means football and men's basketball players will receive the lion's share, while athletes in non-revenue sports — the vast majority — will see little or nothing.

The governance challenges are immense. The NCAA, which for decades enforced a system of amateurism that courts and public opinion have now decisively rejected, is struggling to build a new regulatory framework on the ruins of the old one. Conference commissioners, university presidents, and athletic directors are making decisions with billions of dollars at stake and almost no consensus on the basic principles that should govern the enterprise. "We are writing the rules of a new industry while the industry is already running at full speed," said one Power Four conference commissioner. "It is creative lawlessness, and everyone knows it."

The athletes at the bottom of the compensation ladder are acutely aware of their position. Emily Wexler, a junior on her university's rowing team, spends thirty hours a week training and competing, maintains a 3.7 grade-point average, and has received exactly one NIL offer: $200 to post an Instagram story for a local smoothie shop. "I am not jealous of the football guys," she said. "They earn what the market gives them. But let's not pretend this system was designed for me. It was designed for them, and I am still here because I love rowing, not because anyone is paying me to do it."

The deeper question — one that the NIL revolution has made impossible to avoid — is what college sports is for. If it is a commercial entertainment business, then the current trajectory makes economic sense: pay the stars what they are worth, let market forces allocate resources, and stop pretending that a football programme generating $150 million in annual revenue has anything in common with a fencing team. If it is an educational endeavour, then the concentration of money in a handful of sports, the arms race in coaching salaries and facilities, and the transformation of student-athletes into professional-grade content creators suggests that something has gone badly wrong.

"The honest answer is that it is both, and we have never been willing to say so," Torres said. "College sports is a multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry bolted onto an educational institution, and the bolts are coming loose. The NIL rules did not create the contradiction. They just made it impossible to ignore."