For most of the twentieth century, the National Collegiate Athletic Association operated on a simple, if convenient, fiction: that college athletes were amateurs. that there was a clear distinction between professional work and playing football in front of 80,000 spectators on a Saturday afternoon. That a scholarship — room, board, tuition — was fair compensation for generating hundreds of millions in television revenue. The majority of people agreed to that arrangement. For the most part, the athletes had no real option.
Even though the pressure had been building for decades, the unraveling happened quickly. By 2022, Division I athletics generated nearly $17.5 billion in revenue. In retrospect, that figure alone makes the outdated amateur argument seem almost embarrassing. Major basketball and football coaches routinely made more money than university presidents, governors, and nearly everyone else employed by the state. In the meantime, it was legally forbidden for the players making that money to earn a single dollar under their own names.
When the Supreme Court declared in NCAA v. Alston in 2021 that some NCAA limitations on athlete benefits were illegal under antitrust law, it was the first significant crack. The NCAA allowed athletes to make money off of their name, image, and likeness—what the industry now refers to as NIL—in response to years of growing public skepticism and growing legal exposure. Carefully crafted to maintain the amateur label, it was a major concession. It is possible to sponsor athletes. Their schools were simply unable to pay them.
Almost immediately, NIL collectives emerged. These third-party organizations started giving athletes money, ostensibly for promotional work but actually for playing, thanks to donations, local companies, and boosters. Few people were willing to genuinely pretend otherwise because it was an obvious workaround. There’s a certain irony in watching a billion-dollar industry construct elaborate legal scaffolding to avoid simply paying its workers, only to watch that scaffolding collapse within a few years anyway.
Last year, the House v. NCAA antitrust settlement pushed things further than most observers expected. Athletes may now be paid directly by schools up to 22% of athletic revenue, or about $20.5 million per school in the 2025–2026 school year. That’s not a loophole. That’s a paycheck. The amateur model, which the NCAA defended for over a century, didn’t bend. It broke.
The inequality the money is exposing is what truly complicates this situation, not the money itself. Not all schools make a lot of money from athletics. Direct athlete compensation creates a new structural divide between a mid-major conference school and a program like Alabama or Ohio State. It will be difficult for schools to recruit athletes if they cannot afford to pay them competitively. Conference alignments and the college sports ecosystem as a whole are already changing as a result of this pressure.
How this is resolved is still unknown. NIL collectives might continue to play a part, perhaps developing into something more akin to athlete development organizations or marketing firms rather than merely serving as booster money conduits. The legal framework surrounding the classification of athletes—are they employees, students, or something else?—remains unresolved, which will probably lead to additional litigation. It appears certain that the athletes who made massive sums of money for organizations over the course of decades while receiving carefully controlled benefits are no longer prepared to quietly accept that arrangement. And increasingly, courts, lawmakers, and the public aren’t asking them to.
There’s something worth sitting with in all of this. Even in basketball and football, the majority of collegiate athletes will not pursue professional careers. The window is not very long. For a student who earns an additional $10,000 or $15,000 through NIL work, that money is significant in concrete ways. Rent is covered by it. It pays for auto repairs. It’s the type of financial buffer that modifies what a person can afford to do once the sport is over. For a very long time, the previous system ignored that fact.
The economics of college athletics have changed. The harder question is whether the institutions surrounding them will change fast enough to keep up.
