Like That Catch? Click Here and Pay Me!
Note: This post was originally published prior to Oklahoma State’s season-opening game August 31, 2024. Following the game, the NCAA banned the use of QR codes on helmets, claiming they are unpermitted “advertising or commercial marks.” The school is still permitted to use the QR codes on the side of players’ bags, in signs around the stadium and on coasters in luxury suites.
Today marks the kickoff of the season for most US college football teams. But that’s almost a relief for coaches, who’ve had one of their busiest, most stressful offseasons ever.
If you don’t look too carefully, this may seem like just another year of blocking and tackling, acrobatic catches and bitter rivalries. But there’s been a revolution in the game since 2021, the year players were first allowed to profit from use of the name, image and likeness (NIL) and the pace of that change has accelerated since last year. Behind the scenes, almost everything is different.
Here are five things you need to know about your favorite college football team:
1. You won’t recognize the players. For the past couple of years, players have been granted essentially unlimited free agency – at the end of every season they can – and do – transfer to other schools, to get more playing time and more money. This can be discombobulating for fans. Last year at the University of Colorado, incoming coach Deion Sanders brought in 51 new players; 56 old players transferred out. Out of 22 Washington Huskies starters last year, 20 are gone this year.
"Coach Prime" has brought new excitement to Colorado football... and unprecedented turnover.
2. There’s a new MVP on your team. Over the past couple of years, college athletic booster clubs have gone on steroids, forming organizations called “collectives” that are pumping millions of new dollars into athletics programs. Coaches are then able to draw on that money to offer players money in return for unspecified use of the players’ NIL. Because contracts with players are private, this has created a silent auction bidding war for players – only about 30% of the deals players are getting have become public. That creates chaos for teams trying to do the signing — what some coaches call “the wild wild West.” But a lot of the men funding these collectives have been delighted to gunsling, raising money and paying players:
· The University of Utah’s collective is buying all 85 scholarship football players new Dodge Ram trucks (and paying the insurance).
· The University of Tennessee’s Spyre Collective felt so strongly about a high school quarterback that they are paying him $8 million to spend his college career there.
· The Grove Collective at the University of Mississippi was relatively late to the NIL game, but has quickly raised more than $10 million and is sponsoring more than 165 different athletes across a wide range of sports.
Add it up and the current estimate is that “collectives” are funding 80% of the $1.7 billion NIL market. Ingram Smith, the founder of Florida State’s collective, “The Battle’s End,” told On3:
“I’m not going to tell you… I have unlimited money, but I will tell you we are going to be as competitive as we want to be in this space.”
The power of a strong collective is you can pay athletes more money – if you want a “5-star” (top recruit) tight end, you may end up paying $100,000 or more per year; for $5,000, all you can get is a “1-star” tight end. Basketball coaches at top schools should expect to have $5 million in payroll to pay for their 13 scholarship players. More money in collectives = better players = more wins. That changes the calculus of the game. “I don’t worry about how good the coach is,” one coach told The Athletic about his competitors. “I worry about how big their NIL budget is.”
The figures are only estimates, but here's a shopping guide for football recruits at every level. (chart from a survey by 247 Sports)
3. You don’t need to go to the game to show your support – CLICK HERE! This afternoon, if you tune in to the Oklahoma State Cowboys game against the South Dakota State Jackrabbits this afternoon, and get excited about a particular Cowboys’ play, you can amble over to the TV and scan the QR code on the back of a player’s helmet, enter your credit card info, and pay into the players’ NIL fund to show your appreciation. (You may remember this concept from The Hunger Games movies. After a particularly clever escape from death or an impressive murder of another participant, tributes would watch as sponsor gifts flew down magically from above.)
OSU coach Mike Gundy is actually psyched about this innovation. “This is a revolutionary step forward to help keep Oklahoma State football ahead of the game,” he said in a release. “It gives a chance for everyday fans across the world to have a real impact when it comes to supporting the NIL efforts for Cowboy football.” But it also gives the coach a chance to concentrate on football:
“We have to have those conversations with [the players],” Gundy says: ‘Tell your agent to quit calling us and asking for more money.’”
Instead YOU, the fan, (if you are a true fan), can pay your favorite players more money.
What would you pay for a good play? Click there.
4. There’ll be a lot less money available for non-football or non-basketball needs your college may have. Best estimates are that two-thirds of all NIL money is going to men’s football and basketball; another 15.7% to women’s basketball. That leaves about 18% to support the varsity athletes in remaining 15-18 sports big universities typically offer. And the new demands on alumni donors to support sports leaves them with less money to contribute to other important needs universities might have – scholarships for low-income students, new residence halls, new biology labs, etc. You could argue that sports donors are only going to give money to sports, and that good sports teams increase general enthusiasm of alums for their schools, but I can’t believe that the increased monetary demands of athletics won’t cannibalize some of the general giving.
5. Chances are you’ll be fine with all this. The most comprehensive survey so far finds that fans are twice as likely to support college athletes benefiting from their name image as they are to oppose it. 75% of fans are either supportive or neutral on the subject. Some 58% of fans – and 75% of “avid fans” -- say they are more likely to think favorably about the people and companies that sponsor athletes. Younger fans, on average are more supportive than older fans, but it is overwhelmingly older fans who are funding the collectives.
And even if all this gives me whiplash, count me among those strangely OK with all this.
You can argue that the American obsession with college sports is absurd, or that they distract from the core mission of universities, but that’s not the world we live in. But in this world, for far too long, athletes have been underpaid for the full-time jobs they take on as varsity athletes – the university athletic program makes far more off them – at least the football and basketball players -- than the value of the scholarships they get. So let’s pay them market value for the jobs they do. But this is all happening pretty fast: it’s going to be a minute before I run to my screen to scan a QR code.
-Leslie
Update: There’s a great summary of the evolving pay rates of college athletes in a new article from the New York Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/31/business/nil-money-ncaa.html
Notes:
Utah football team gets Ford trucks: https://www.si.com/college/utah/football/utah-football-nil-deal-gives-every-scholarship-play-a-car
Estimate of cost per football player: https://www.si.com/fannation/name-image-likeness/football/the-college-football-nil-pay-gap-is-real-noah9
On3 story on biggest collectives: https://www.on3.com/nil/news/on3-top-20-most-ambitious-nil-collectives-year-2-tennessee-texas-am-oregon/
Tennessee quarterback’s $8 million deal: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/3605831/2022/09/19/t-a-cunningham-eligibility-recruiting-nil/
Correlation of athletic success with other donations to universities: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/03/report-finds-alumni-giving-among-other-areas-correlated-football-success