Name, image and likeness has completely transformed collegiate sports—especially football and basketball—into a bonafide professional model in just under four short years. Athletes who once lived on scholarships and under-the-table “gifts” are now raking in millions of dollars from agents, boosters, brand sponsors and many others who deem their services worth paying for.
The industry has grown exponentially since debuting on July 1, 2021. Some 300,000 athletes combined to make an estimated $917 million in the first year of NIL, and more than 350,000 athletes grossed just over $1 billion the next year. The third and most recent fiscal year saw another slight increase in total NIL from July 2023 through June 2024, and numbers since then suggest this year will see over 375,000 athletes combining to earn more than $1.6 billion.
Of course, more politicians have their eyes on the exploding NIL industry as universities and regulators alike scramble to put guardrails on what’s become the Wild West of bidding for athletes. And with a new U.S. President in the White House for the first time since NIL launched, interviewed scholars and industry experts are buckling their seat belts for 2025.
“We’ll be entering a whole new world,” said Mit Winter, a college sports attorney for Kansas City-based Kennyhertz Perry whose list of clients includes the NCAA, the Big 12 Conference and several Division I universities. “There will be some entirely new issues, for sure.”
Schools paying athletes directly and a curb on boosters
Blake Lawrence, 35, lived through the pre-NIL days when college athletes earned only scholarships in exchange for their time and performance. A nationally recruited high-school football player in the late 2000s, Lawrence played linebacker for three years at the University of Nebraska before launching Opendorse—an online matchmaking site for athletes and brands—in 2012.
NCAA rules banned student-athletes from sponsorship deals at the time, so Lawrence catered Opendorse to the pros. Anyone involved in professional football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer and even Olympic sports like gymnastics, figure skating, wrestling and countless others could use the platform to set their prices for sponsorship deals. In July 2021, though, Lawrence’s business multiplied “100-fold” when NIL unlocked the floodgates for over 500,000 college athletes to also earn money.
“NIL isn’t new to sports, it’s new to college,” he said. “But it’s created a giant mess that’s a ways away from being solved.”
Lawrence says 2025 could reset the market yet again.
A federal judge in California will rule on April 7 whether to require universities to share revenues of up to $20.5 million with their student-athletes, which means schools could be forced for the first time in the history of college sports to directly pay players. The caveat? The deal would end the practice of boosters cutting proverbial blank checks to athletes.
April’s proposed settlement calls for a third-party, accounting firm Deloitte, to help control the money that booster “collectives” can pay athletes by determining “fair market value” for each deal. So while athletes will earn money directly from their schools, in the case of high-profile athletes in major football and basketball programs, they’ll earn much less money than they’d otherwise get directly from donors.
“The only limits will be on how much schools and NIL collectives can pay players,” explained Winter, the college sports attorney. “There won’t be a cap on third-party NIL compensation with businesses and brands. It’s not going to stop any of the side deals for sponsorship from happening, so for example New Balance can still pay (Duke basketball player) Cooper Flagg as much as it wants.”
Then, there’s the all-important Title IX piece, which could turn the entire NIL model on its head.
A boon to women’s sports and the end of college football?
Just five days before leaving the White House last month, departing President Joe Biden and his Department of Education released an opinion that NIL money for athletes should be evenly distributed between men’s sports and women’s sports. It’s not law, but if President Donald Trump’s administration follows the guidance from Biden’s DOE, it will result in the “greatest-ever wealth creation” for women’s sports, said Lawrence.
The revenue-sharing model in April’s settlement is set to designate 75 percent of funds for athletes in football, 15 percent for men’s basketball, 5 percent for women’s basketball and 5 percent spread out across every other sport. Though Trump adopting Biden’s Title IX plan for revenue-sharing is unlikely—given his criticism of the Biden administration and his plan to shut down the DOE entirely—doing so would have a seismic ripple effect. In a Title IX world, Lawrence speculates the massively profitable college football industry would separate from higher education.
“Fielding a competitive roster in today’s landscape, you need at least $10 million for college football, $5 million for basketball and $1 million for women’s basketball,” he explained. “A Title IX ruling would put college football right back to operating under an umbrella that’s restricted and doesn’t make sense, almost similar to the pre-NIL days.
“We might as well take football and form a college-level professional sport that the higher-ed institutions license their naming and stadiums to these teams, so it would look and feel the same but higher-education would not be involved in any administration of the actual sport. That way, there’s no Title IX subjectivity to a football team that’s called the Texas Longhorns or Nebraska Cornhuskers.”
States could have the upper hand
Perhaps lost in the shift between U.S. presidents and ongoing federal court cases is the power of individual states to set NIL policy. Thilo Kunkel, an 11-year professor of sports management at Temple University, believes legislatures will ultimately do more in the short term to influence college sports than Congress or any federal agencies.
Kunkel—who also works in Temple’s renowned Sports Industry Research Center with clients including the NCAA, pro basketball’s Indiana Pacers and tennis’ Rod Laver Cup—doubts that April’s federal ruling will set a precedent for NIL’s future. He argues that forcing universities to share revenue with “employee” athletes would lead to schools doing away with sports that aren’t financially profitable.
“It’d phase out the non-revenue generating sports,” he said. “Especially at Division II and Division III schools, they probably wouldn’t be able to afford their employees and many of the programs would need to shut down.”
The German-born, Australian-raised-and-educated Temple professor believes NIL is “not a top priority” for Trump’s administration and that meaningful progress is still years away.
Winter agrees. The attorney predicted that single-party control of all three federal branches of government still won’t result in the NCAA getting its years-long wish of a law to protect it from antitrust suits, contending it’s still “too big of an ask” from college sports’ main organizing body. And without player unions like those in professional U.S. sports, the relationship between college athletes, their schools, the NCAA and boosters will continue to be unique—and often chaotic.
“Some people are hoping and thinking the settlement, if approved, will bring this 10-year period of stability, but I don’t think that’s the case,” he said. “We’ll still have lots of litigation and change and things in flux until there’s a model where the athletes can be involved in negotiating and agreeing to the rules.”
