How big is your NIL Collective? What NIL deal can I get if I come play for your team?
Gone are the days of recruiting being centered on basketball fit, academic programs, heck, even campus appeal.
Money is a major driver in decisions.
“(Rev share and NIL have) added a very big carrot that isn’t simply based on where I think I can win a national title,” ESPN’s Bill Connelly said, according to CBS Sports. “It’s no longer if Alabama [football] offers me, I’m supposed to go to Alabama. Maybe Tennessee is offering me more money or whatever, so I’ll go there instead. It’s just given recruits another powerful thing to think about.”
The college sports model is turning more and more into the pro sports model.
“If you look at what a lot of these licensing agreements are looking like, they are very similarly mirroring what a collective bargaining agreement looks like at the pro level,” Paia LaPalombara said in an interview with Mid-Major Madness last September. “We’ve seen a recent swing of ADs coming from a pro sports side of things… We’re starting to see more of a professional model coming into the college sports framework, and a big part of the pro sports model is that collective bargaining opportunity for its athletes.”
LaPalombara, an attorney who specializes in college athletics law and who used to work as a compliance officer at Ohio State, envisions a time in the future when college athletes unionize — akin to what the Dartmouth men’s team tried to do.
But why is that necessary?
A couple of different reasons.
One, the athletes are getting paid.
There have always been “deals.” Now, they’re just above board. Some semblance of clarity was provided when the House settlement for revenue-sharing took effect. Athletic departments were initially allowed to pay $20.5 million to their athletes each year. That number increased to $21.3 million a year for the upcoming school/fiscal year. The vast majority (327 of 364) of Division-I schools opted in to participate.
All of the power-conference schools joined, as did each school in the American, Atlantic 10, C-USA, CAA, Horizon, MAC, Missouri Valley, SWAC, Sun Belt, WAC and West Coast. The only conferences with no participants were the Ivy and Patriots leagues.
“The thought is if you opt in, then you’re making yourself competitive with others who are also vying for spots in the NCAA Tournament,” LaPalombara said. “From an institutional side, I think it’s going to be a challenge to maintain. … Ultimately that’s going to put some more pressure on institutions to sort of streamline operations so that they’re able to maintain that competitiveness if they are looking to get close to or meet that sort of maximum amount that is permitted to be offered.”
The House settlement also removed the scholarship limits that had been in place and instead instituted roster limits.
Schools had been capped at the number of scholarships they could offer to each team. While the revenue-generating sports like football and men’s and women’s basketball had the majority of their rosters on scholarship, other sports, such as track and field, rugby, or volleyball, had much fewer total scholarships, which meant the coaching staffs had to be creative in terms of divvying up the scholarship money.
Now, each sport can offer its entire roster a full scholarship. While football and men’s basketball receive roughly 90% of the revenue-sharing payments, an estimated 90% of these scholarship boosts aid all the other sports.
However, all this money being “thrown around” puts even more strain on athletic department budgets.
Schools in the Group of 6 (American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12, and Sun Belt in the football sense) operated at an average loss of nearly $36 million a year. They turned to using school support and student fees to make up the difference.
OK, so great that a shade under 90% of Division-I schools opted into the House settlement, which began at $20.5 million per school per year and has already increased by nearly a full million. The pot is slated to reach about $33 million by 2034-35.
But the House settlement is far from the only piece of legislation Washington has addressed. The Protect College Sports Act is now on the table.
The widespread legislation, co-authored by Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Eric Schmitt and Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, has had bipartisan support and received a major boost last Friday when the SEC and Big Ten backed it.
First off, the bill provides safeguards to protect schools from circumventing the salary system and giving “off-the-books” money to players. See Kawhi Leonard and the Los Angeles Clippers’ year-long controversy in the NBA.
“You wanted to sort of head off ways to circumvent that, this kind of redirection that’s happened where it’s a wink and a nod,” Schmitt told CBS Sports. “Don’t give us the money, give it to players X, Y, and Z, and it never really shows up. That’s how you end up with football rosters that are like double or triple potentially what the number is.”
That provision is important for mid-majors as it keeps somewhat of a level playing field.
“On one side, you have sort of that piece where to maintain competitiveness on the court, there’s going to be some challenges,” LaPalombara said. “However, on the other side, I would also argue that those challenges have always been there. They’ve just been underground before. It used to be the donors, sort of the back-alley money approach for the larger institutions, where smaller institutions do have that same access or resources. But now, it’s out in the front so everyone can kind of see that. So, I think that’s one challenge.”
Keeping the money even is important. Even if the total is still astronomical for a school without football. The new legislation estimates we could see total spending close to $50 million per school.
Didn’t we say the House settlement gives schools somewhere in the low $20 million range to pay its athletes? How are we close to $50 million?
Well, the Protect College Sports Act allows schools an additional $22.5 million retention fund. Isn’t one of the points of paying the athletes directly to entice them to stay? Meaning retention? Now, we’ve basically doubled the salary cap. Add on the additional $5 million if a school spends that same amount on NIL deals for women’s sports. So, like a barter system? That won’t be “fudged” at all will it?
The Protect College Sports Act is also geared toward eliminating tampering. Good luck with that. Tampering is always going to exist. It’s just more out in the open now than it used to be. Which is in line with the provision in the act that provides more flexibility, which could be good or bad and probably both.
Where again is all this money coming from?
It’s no secret that media rights deals are huge for sports, pro and college. There’s a proposal in the bill that splits the shared media rights pool. However, this is optional. So, conferences with the biggest media rights deals – looking at you, SEC and Big Ten – don’t have to join and can keep their full media rights deals. Why do you think Notre Dame football has never joined a conference? It would have to share that massive NBC deal with others or lose it entirely if the conference has a deal in place elsewhere.
“It is possible the Big Ten and SEC are making compromises in good faith, agreeing to crack down on the chaos of recruiting and NIL tampering in exchange for ensuring they can keep their huge sums of money,” Mountain West Connection’s Mike Wittmann wrote. “But it isn’t likely. Instead, it reads like the P2 is willing to agree on the things that will be challenging to enforce in exchange for not participating in the most tangible part of this.”
If one of the biggest streams of money for college athletics is not being shared concurrently to everyone, how can we see equal representation and compliance?
“The other challenge, too, is just sort of the representation through the governance process and sort of the supports and voice that non-Power-4 conferences are going to have at the table when it comes to some pretty significant changes that are going to happen ultimately to the NCAA structure or this new College Sports Commission structure as things start to unfold over the next five to 10 years,” LaPalombara said. “Those are sort of the two primary buckets where I see there’s going to be some challenges and some separation between those Power-4 institutions and the non-Power-4 institutions.”
There it is. The haves and the have-nots. The majority of mid-major conferences already backed the Protect College Sports Act along with the ACC and Big 12. However, the legislation seemed to stall. Now, with the two most powerful conferences providing their support, the bill has new life.
The Protect College Sports Act also seeks to tackle conference realignment because it seems like every five minutes teams, especially at the P4 level, are looking to jump ship. Gone are several traditional rivalries, and instead multiple big conferences have expanded to span from coast to coast. Think of the massive reworking (more like death and rebirth) of the Pac 12.
The bill preserves traditional rivalries. Great!
It also curbs realignment by freezing membership of the P4 conferences. That sounds positive, but is it?
Under this provision we won’t see a conference go the way of the Pac 12, i.e. the ACC if Clemson, FSU, Miami and North Carolina make a jump. But it also limits teams from the Group of 6 from moving: the way TCU, BYU, UCF and others have done.
“They’ve locked us in,” one G6 conference athletic director said, according to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger.
So, first the squashes any upward movement. Second, while it appears to establish some stability, it might just cause more chaos in the short term.
Schools and conferences will look to act and to move before it could get passed. If power-conference schools change conferences after the bill is passed, they will have a five-year probationary period.
“It has put a shot clock on it,” one power league athletic director said, according to Dellenger.
HOWEVER, an amendment to the bill allows the moving schools t0 avoid the penalty if the change happens in the first 180 days after the bill is enacted.
It all stems back to those conferences seeking more power than they already have.
The NCAA Board of Directors approved changes last August to the power structure that provided the Power-4 conferences 65% of the voting power in the majority of NCAA major oversight and governance committees.
“My only concern that I really have is the devil’s in the details as far as the use of 65% voting power that they will have and how that can affect the future of Division I,” Big Sky Commissioner Tom Wistrcill told Sports Business Journal last year.
Back to the Protect College Sports Act. It entails more than just team salaries. It includes protections for women’s and Olympic sports because so much of the discussion focuses on the big headliners: football first and foremost, men’s basketball second, and then women’s basketball, followed by all other sports.
The proposed bill ensures women’s and Olympic sports and athletes are protected and will not be cut solely as a way to streamline more money for other, more prominent sports.
The bill states that schools will have to maintain at least as many opportunities and total roster spots for these sports as it did during the 2024-25 school year. It has a provision where schools can change which of these sports they sponsors but that the total rosters still have to add up.
That safeguard is of major concern for Dawn Staley.
“[In] some of the top programs in the country, you get some help,” Staley said in an Oct. 2025 interview with The Cavalier Daily. “You don’t get the five percent help that was projected prior to the House settlement. And then you get no help from other programs who need to compete in the space. If you don’t have [revenue] share dollars, [it] is really hard for you to have a top-notch program, so it hurts women’s athletes and women’s sports.”
A school could receive a waiver to not fund one (or more) of these non-revenue generating sports if it shows that the school’s revenue decreased by at least 15% on average over the previous three years and that at least 45% of the athletic department’s expenses came from grant-in-aid.
The school would first have to cut the compensation of its revenue-generating sports’ coaching staffs in the amount it said it would save by cutting the other sport.
Furthermore, the Protect College Sports Act seeks to tackle the fluid nature of transfers. It proposes to allow athletes one transfer without losing eligibility with exceptions for additional moves.
The transfer component mirrors the executive order President Donald Trump signed in April that limits athletes to a five-year window to complete their college careers and one transfer without having to sit out.
The NCAA adopted its eligibility rules for Division I to comply in June. Under the “5 for 5” model, athletes have five years to complete five years of competition. The clock starts at whichever comes first between an athlete enrolling in college and his/her 19th birthday. So, gone are the days of redshirts and waivers.
All these pieces seem like some semblance of stability in the nomadic way of life in college sports has become.
However, several big questions remain.
How is all this going to be enforced?
While much of this verbiage seems to be more in line with what’s needed to improve college athletics, who will make sure everyone plays by the same new rules? And how so?
“This could very well be an uneducated interpretation of a summary of a long bill that will crack down on things,” Wittmann wrote. “Or, the Protect College Sports Act could end up making tons of sense on paper, but struggle to lead to practical changes due too many teams and not enough people ensuring the rules are being followed.”
Let’s start off with the “5 for 5” model, which Division II adopted this week.
Players who thought they exhausted their eligibility last season are filing suits to fall under this five years of eligibility rule.
These lawsuits are really just for the initial year or two of this new rule, but the change has already caused a fair amount of question into the implementation of a change.
Back to the NIL portion. How will it be guaranteed that the reported money being paid to the athletes is all there is? Remember the FBI probe into college basketball about a decade ago? FBI wiretaps found that then-Arizona head coach Sean Miller discussed paying then-recruit Deandre Ayton $100,000 to ensure he would be a Wildcat. The investigation happened in 2017. Reports of Miller’s connection came out in 2018. He wasn’t fired until 2021, and the school had been considering giving him a contract extension.
All this transpired when teams couldn’t “pay” players. Miller found his way back into coaching just a year after being fired for his role in an FBI investigation. He is once again at the high-major level as he is at Texas, a school that prints money. One has to question what punishments (or lack there of) we might see now that the Protect College Sports Act is going to allow more flexibility. Could the Wild West get wilder?
Staying on the subject of coaches, specifically those who were fired.
One of the major reasons why schools are so strapped for money is coaches buyouts. Scott Schneider, founder of Schneider Education & Employment Law, tweeted schools owed fired coaches $228 million in 2025, which was nearly $100 million more than the previous high.
If athletes are going to be capped by how much they make, why are coaches not also limited? Especially, fired coaches.
Schneider proposed putting a cap on how much coaches can make based on the athletic revenue of a school. He also wrote coaches can only be contacted for other jobs within a certain period of time, otherwise it is tampering.
“If the problem is unsustainable cost, reform should start with the largest cost [paying former coaches],” Schneider wrote. “And if the answer is that Congress has no business setting private employment terms — that’s a fair answer. It’s also an argument against the rest of the bill.”
But the question remains: how to make sure everyone plays by the same rules? Or when everything will get cleared up?
Though the Protect College Sports Act received a major boost from the SEC and Big Ten last Friday, who knows how soon it might be enacted. Consider that a vote on the SCORE Act in the House of Representatives has twice been delayed.
“Let’s hope for change, and let’s hope for practical ways to enforce those changes,” Wittmann wrote.
Others are not so optimistic the current proposals, or maybe even future ones could provide relief or solutions.
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” 247Sports’ Kyle Tucker tweeted. “Washington isn’t going to save college sports, guys.”
The desire for action is there. Dare I say even swift action. We have college football games this month. We’ll have our first college basketball contests in less than three months.
“I just think culturally, this is such an everyday thing people care about,” Schmitt said. “A lot of things we do up there, people don’t give a shit. But they care about their teams, and they care about college football. I just felt like this was important.”
