For years, the case for paying college athletes was airtight. The NCAA generated billions while the people producing the entertainment ate cafeteria food and signed away their likenesses. When Name, Image, and Likeness rules finally arrived in 2021, the fix sounded simple: let athletes earn from endorsements like everyone else. The reality has been messier than reformers admitted, and three years in, the product on the field has paid the price. Saying so out loud isn’t reactionary; it’s accurate.
The transfer portal turned rosters into rentals
Combine NIL with the one-time transfer rule, then with the unlimited transfer rule, and you get a labor market without contracts. Players can change schools every year, and collectives can outbid each other for proven starters mid-career. Coaches now spend more time recruiting their own roster than recruiting high schoolers. Continuity—the thing that built rivalries, traditions, and watchable team chemistry—has collapsed in many programs. Smaller schools that develop a great player for two years lose them to a Power Five collective the moment they have a breakout season. This isn’t free agency; it’s annual auction. The defenders argue it’s just market efficiency. Markets are efficient. They’re also indifferent to the things that made college sports culturally distinct from pro sports.
Collectives are pay-for-play with a fig leaf
The legal fiction is that NIL deals reward marketing value, not athletic performance. Anyone who’s spent five minutes near a top-25 program knows the reality: collectives—booster pools dressed up as marketing entities—write checks based on roster needs. A five-star quarterback gets seven figures whether or not he’s ever appeared in a commercial. The IRS and FTC have started circling, and several state attorneys general are looking at whether collective payments meet the definition of legitimate compensation. The NCAA, having spent decades fighting any payment to athletes, now lacks the credibility or legal authority to regulate the system that replaced it. Congress keeps holding hearings and passing nothing. Coaches openly say they don’t know who’s on their team in February.
The viewing experience has degraded
College football and basketball were never supposed to be lower-tier pro leagues. The appeal was campus tradition, four-year arcs, and the slightly ragged charm of teams figuring it out together. The current product is closer to minor league sports with worse uniforms. Conference realignment, driven by the same money pressure NIL accelerated, broke geographic rivalries that took a century to build. UCLA plays at Rutgers on a Tuesday. Texas plays in the SEC. Ratings are still strong because nostalgia carries weight, but viewership trends among younger fans suggest the brand equity is thinner than the TV deals assume.
The takeaway
Athletes deserved compensation. That was always true. But the implementation skipped every guardrail other professional leagues spent decades building—salary caps, contracts, collective bargaining, revenue sharing structures. The result is a system that pays players more than ever while making the games less compelling. Reform is possible: collective bargaining, athlete employee status, and standardized contracts would all help. None of it requires pretending the current state of affairs is working.
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