The Collision: Advocates – myself included – fought for college athletes to get paid. We were right to. And what we built is a mess. Now what?
Advocates fought for college athletes to get paid — and we were right to. But what we built is a market without a market structure, and the reckoning is closer than most people think.
Since 2021, NIL has created a real market for college athletes but almost no infrastructure around it.
No federal framework, conflicting state laws, little meaningful oversight of agents or the deal brokers moving the money. There is no consensus on how revenue-generating vs non-revenue-generating athletes should be treated. There is no collective voice for the athletes themselves.
We built a market without a market structure.
Another, typically overlooked part of this story is what it teaches athletes. A 17-year-old signing a $4 million NIL deal before his first college game is learning something about value, leverage, negotiation, and expectation – in an environment with few rules and no fiduciary standard governing many of the people around him.
That matters to him now but in five to ten years, it will matter to all of us since many of those well-paid teens will vote on collective bargaining agreements in professional sports. They will arrive as the veterans of the game, conditioned to operate in an open, chaotic market since high school.
Across the table will be ownership groups increasingly shaped by private equity logic: cost control, labor compliance, scalability, and investment horizons.
That collision is coming.
The good news is that this moment is still early enough to shape. The current disorder does not have to become permanent dysfunction. But it will require leadership willing to build durable structures instead of waiting for the next crisis to force them. The solution lies in building a new framework that fuses collective bargaining principles with federal policy.