NIL Has Made College Athletes Rich. It's Also Made College Sports Unwatchable.
Let's be clear upfront: college athletes deserve to be compensated. The old system — in which the NCAA made billions while athletes got "exposure" and a scholarship that didn't cover rent — was exploitation dressed up as amateurism. NIL was overdue.
But overdue and well-executed are two different things. And three years in, it's worth being honest about what NIL has done to the product on the field.
The Transfer Portal Is Eating College Sports
The transfer portal — which existed before NIL but has accelerated massively alongside it — has turned college rosters into year-round free agency markets. In the 2022–23 academic year, over 2,600 Division I football players entered the transfer portal. In basketball, the number was over 1,700.
What this means in practice: the team you watched in November is not the team you'll watch next October. Coaching staffs spend enormous resources recruiting high schoolers and then immediately spend the offseason trying to hold their roster together as better NIL offers come in from competing programs.
Team chemistry, developed over multiple years of playing together, is increasingly rare at the top levels. Programs build squads that look more like NBA rosters — assembled from mercenary talent rather than cultivated from within.
Conference Realignment Made It Worse
Simultaneous to NIL, the major conferences blew themselves up. USC and UCLA joined the Big Ten. Texas and Oklahoma fled to the SEC. The Pac-12 essentially ceased to exist as a meaningful entity. Programs that had been geographic and cultural rivals for a century suddenly play each other once every four years — if at all.
The combination of NIL, the transfer portal, and conference realignment has stripped away the things that made college sports emotionally resonant: loyalty, geography, tradition, the sense that you were watching something that meant something to people beyond the paycheck.
The Defense of NIL
Here's what NIL defenders get right: the old system was not "pure." It was corrupt in a different direction — toward the institutions and the NCAA rather than the athletes. Players were absolutely being exploited, particularly in football and basketball, where they generated enormous revenue and received minimal compensation while coaches earned eight-figure salaries.
NIL also democratized opportunity. A swimmer or a volleyball player can now monetize their following in ways that were previously impossible. The college sports economy is more equitable across athletes than it was three years ago.
The Honest Assessment
NIL needed to happen. The execution needed guardrails that nobody put in place.
A system without roster limits on transfers, without a salary cap structure, without any meaningful framework for how boosters can operate through collectives, was always going to produce what we're seeing: a wild west where the richest programs win, athletes chase money rather than fit or development, and the romance of college sports gets priced out of existence.
The athletes got their piece. The fans are still waiting for theirs.
