The milestone went almost unnoticed on Wednesday, surprisingly so, given the massive ramifications of this historic event. July 1, 2026, marked the five-year anniversary of NIL in college sports.
Oh, how quaint July 1, 2021, seems now.
At the stroke of midnight, college athletes could, for the first time in history, accept paid endorsement deals. TikTok stars Hanna and Haley Cavinder — twin sisters on Fresno State’s basketball team — made the first big splash with a Times Square digital billboard ad for Boost Mobile.
Meanwhile, a Sports Illustrated headline declared that Miami quarterback D’Eriq King was “kick(ing) off NIL Era with a big payday,” from deals with several local companies that, the story revealed, “should net him more than $20,000.”
Five years later, there are college quarterbacks making more than $5 million.
Love it or hate it, NIL became something entirely different than what anyone in college sports envisioned five years ago, back when NCAA members begrudgingly bowed to years-long pressure from antitrust lawsuits, state legislatures and congressmen.
In its annual report last month, NIL firm Opendorse projected that total spending across the industry will reach $4.5 billion this year when counting schools’ direct payments to athletes (which began last year), athletes’ own brand deals and paid social media posts, and sales of consumer products that license those athletes’ rights (jerseys, trading cards, EA Sports video games, etc.).
The average Power 4 school’s athletes are making a combined $34.8 million.
Hard to believe it was once headline news that Texas’s offensive linemen were getting paid $50,000 to do charity appearances.
With a dozen-plus states’ NIL bills set to take effect on July 1, 2021, the NCAA officially lifted its longstanding ban on athletes monetizing their NIL rights. The primary beneficiaries figured to be social media-savvy athletes like then-LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne, whom brands would pay to advertise products to their many followers. And that absolutely happened.
But leaders failed to account for a fundamental component of big-time college athletics: the desperation to win championships. It only took a couple of months for boosters at early adopters like Texas A&M and Tennessee to figure out they could pay recruits to come play for their schools by pooling their money, cleverly wording their “NIL” contracts to stay 10 steps ahead of NCAA investigators.
It’s been off to the races ever since.
“We’ve seen 4.5X growth in five years — and it’s accelerating, not slowing,” Opendorse founder Blake Lawrence told The Athletic. “We knew athletes were going to get paid; we just didn’t know who was going to pay them. And the answer turned out to be everyone — brands, donors, and now the schools themselves.”
It’s no secret that the NCAA, under former president Mark Emmert, basically wrote its own obituary by spending years fecklessly fighting the inevitable. Former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon, upset at seeing his likeness used in the old EA Sports basketball game without any compensation, first filed his landmark antitrust suit in 2009. Emmert and the membership spent a dozen years mounting its 1950s-era defense of amateurism, all the while watching their TV deals soar by billions and their own salaries soar by millions.
Even at the very end, when Emmert himself had already raised the white flag and urged his members to modernize, the thousands of schools he served could not reach consensus on any sort of comprehensive NIL regulations. The only two things they agreed on are that the deals can’t be pay-for-play and the schools themselves can’t be involved.
But of course, NIL became a free-for-all specifically because the schools couldn’t be involved.
Looking back, the turning point came in March 2022, when The Athletic reported that then-high school junior Nico Iamaleava, a five-star quarterback from California, had signed a four-year, $8 million contract with Spyre Sports, the nascent collective/marketing agency promoting Tennessee athletics. No one had heard of such a thing. And to be fair, Iamaleava’s $2 million annual figure remained a unicorn for at least a couple of years. (Today, at least a half-dozen QBs make nearly three times that.)
Not only did NCAA enforcement fail to stamp out Tennessee’s brazen pay-for-play deal, but that state’s attorney general later won an injunction that neutered the NCAA’s ability to crack down on booster deals entirely. But even if that had never happened, chances are, nothing would have changed.
Boosters have been trying to buy championships for their schools since practically the dawn of football. NIL just made it easier for them to have cover. Nico’s deal, and all the others that came after it, are essentially the same thing that got SMU the “Death Penalty” 40 years ago, only with much larger numbers and legally binding contracts.
How was anyone ever going to corral a bunch of fierce competitors who stage an endless duel to out-recruit each other for talent?
Last year’s House settlement, which finally allowed schools to pay their athletes directly, was billed as a mechanism to rein in the chaos. Schools would need to stay within a cap, and athletes would need to get their third-party deals approved by a clearinghouse.
We also just hit the first anniversary of the College Sports Commission, which the conferences created to enforce the settlement. But July 1, 2025 turned out to be July 1, 2021 all over again, with schools immediately devising workarounds to spend whatever they want.
And so, on this fifth anniversary, we find ourselves asking: What will NIL look like in another five years? Come July 1, 2031, will the industry have finally stabilized? Will the rate of inflation for roster dollars have slowed? Will the athletes be employees by then? Will there be collective bargaining?
Your guess is as good as mine. The only safe bet? As long as schools are still competing with each other for talent and their fans remain as victory-mad as ever, the money will always find its way to the athletes. Because no cost is too much when it comes to beating your rival.
