NIL Deals are now a billion-dollar business – but where does it go from here?

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Name, image and likeness deals, commonly known as NIL, are seemingly approaching a crossroads.

In 2021, the NCAA adopted a policy allowing all athletes to earn money through their personal brand by signing endorsement deals, including being featured in advertisements and social media, selling personal merchandise, and more. The aftershocks have reshaped the landscape of high school and college athletics, as less than one year later, individual states began to establish NIL laws granting high school athletes the right to monetize their name, image, and likeness. As of today, over 40 of the country’s 50 states permit high school athletes to benefit from NIL.

Additionally, in the $2.8 billion House v. NCAAantitrust settlement, U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Ann Wilken approved a broad deal in June 2025 that enables all NCAA schools to share revenue with athletes. As of last July, direct payments can be made to them for an amount up to 22% of an athletic department’s revenue. For most schools, much of it would be notably generated from media rights deals. The cap for this academic year is $20.5 million per institution. The settlement, coupled with NIL changes, has led those who study the market to project that collective compensation to college and high school athletes could exceed $6 billion by 2030.

Getting political

The reverberations were felt at the White House last Friday when President Donald Trump hosted a group of nearly 50 highly influential figures, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Mike Johnson, media executives, professional sports executives, college commissioners, and coaches, to “fix” issues, notably NIL, that he contended are negatively impacting college sports. At the Saving College Sports Roundtable – at which no student-athletes were present – Trump asserted that college sports are a “mess” and declared, “I will have an executive order within one week. … The amount of money being spent and lost by otherwise very successful schools is astounding just in a short period of time,” said Trump. “It’s only going to get worse. We have to save college sports, and I believe colleges. If Congress doesn’t take action fast, it could destroy college sports.”    

His vow could be more bluster and pandering than prescriptive. But Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said he would push Congress to pass the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act, which would place NIL laws under singular federal legislation and end state-by-state regulations. But that has come under criticism by many student-athlete advocates for its lack of Title IX protections.

NIL becoming more complex

Meanwhile, with the NCAA tournament getting underway on March 17, college sports fans and pundits are wondering where this is all going. Discussions about NIL pop up everywhere as people examine it. In February, Vanderbilt University hosted its third annual Sports and Activism Symposium. Among the panel discussions was “Race, Gender and the Economics of College Athletics.”

“My focus was on what my research has been, which is the valuation of student-athletes, especially Black female athletes…if we’re relying on NIL and the market to determine what their value is,” says Ajah Hawley-Alexander, one of the panelists. “When we align that with social media, which is where a bulk of NIL deals come from, then we are further entrenching those inequities.” When looking at student-athletes as influencers, Black creators are paid less, noted Hawley-Alexander. “If we are not necessarily putting in the guardrails…within collegiate athletics as we look at Black student-athletes specifically and throw money in the mix and NIL and heightened attention and those types of things, we’re going to continue to see those inequities persist,” she said.

Hawley-Alexander, a Clinical Lecturer in the Media & Strategic Communication Department at Iona University, explained that if the earnings of student-athletes from revenue sharing become public, that can lead to tensions with professors and other students. Last week, KCUR in Kansas City published an article outlining this very issue at the University of Kansas. Its author, Sam Zeff, noted, “For years, KU Athletics transferred money to the rest of the university. Now, with a projected $15 million deficit this fiscal year, that payment is gone.”

The biggest players

NIL and its many iterations remain a work in progress. When it comes to the big deals that draw headlines, football dominates. Research shows that among the top 10 names in these deals by income, nine of them are football players. The lone men’s basketball player is AJ Dybantsa of the BYU Cougars. No female student-athletes were on the list.

The top female student-athlete NIL earners come predominantly from basketball and gymnastics. Basketball star Azzi Fudd of the reigning NCAA Champion University of Connecticut recently announced deals with Geico and the Jordan Brand. Having a large number of followers on Instagram and TikTok typically translates to NIL valuations.

Fudd currently has 719,000 Instagram followers, JuJu Watkins of USC (not playing this year while recovering from a torn ACL) has 1.1 million, and Flau’jae Johnson of LSU has 2 million. On the other hand, quarterback DJ Lagway, previously with the Florida Gators and now with the Baylor Bears, has only 108,000 Instagram followers and a reported decline in income, but is still projected to have earnings similar to or slightly more than those of these three social media mavens.

“Male student-athletes get paid based on their prowess in their sport; women student-athletes do not — it’s more beauty,” said Hawley-Alexander, who previously worked with the New York Liberty and the Westchester Knicks. “You see the difference in the types of deals that they get.” Individual deals still exist in small amounts — anywhere from $100 for a social media post to a few thousand dollars for an appearance — and many student-athletes adopt an entrepreneurial mindset to earn the money.

The NCAA Legacy Lab held earlier this month helped Division I sophomore and junior student-athletes explore entrepreneurship while they are still competing. One of the topics addressed was “Brand in Motion: Explore how to monetize your name, image and likeness responsibly and effectively.” About 50 student-athletes participated.

“Fandom is shifting,” said Hawley-Alexander, who led the workshop Market Like a Boss and helped develop the Legacy Lab. “Fans aren’t necessarily following institutions, organizations or teams at the same rate as they used to. They’re looking for the athlete because they’re following the athletes a lot sooner. … Now, there’s an opportunity for student-athletes participating in NIL to be able to market themselves because there is an appetite for fans who want to get that content.”

Making the math work

There are still collectives, which are third-party organizations — typically alumni or other supporters of a specific college or university — that come together to create NIL opportunities for student-athletes. Since revenue sharing began last year as a result of the House v. NCAA case, people involved in college sports have expressed concern for non-revenue generating sports, especially Olympic sports like track and field, swimming, diving, and fencing, which rely on the collegiate system as a crucial training ground for American athletes. But it still all comes down to dollars and cents.

Not only are athletes, both female and male, from sports like field hockey, wrestling, soccer, tennis, and volleyball, receiving only a tiny amount of revenue sharing, but there is serious concern that these sports will either see drastic cutbacks in funding or elimination to free up the big payouts to football and men’s basketball.

Last week, University of Louisville president Dr. Gerry Bradley, along with vice president and director of athletics, Josh Heird, and chairman of the board of trustees, Dr. Laurence N. Benz, released a white paper outlining the trouble they see in college sports.

“Penn State is now the most leveraged public athletic program in the country, carrying $534 million in athletics-related debt. Rutgers has accumulated $516.9 million in total athletic losses since joining the Big Ten in 2014. And Louisville — a program that generates $1.28 billion annually in economic impact for our city and Commonwealth — is running a $12.5 million deficit with reserves drawn down from $34 million to $3.4 million. These are not stories of mismanagement. They are symptoms of a structural crisis that no individual institution can fix on its own,” they wrote.

Bradley, Heird, and Benz explained that a system that was already strained has endured litigation, NIL, and the House settlement with direct compensation obligations. Their paper noted they are not advocating for cutting sports or threatening reductions, particularly of Olympic programs, but there needs to be structural reform. In simple terms, Louisville is asking to change the rules of the television media rights. “The advent of name, image, and likeness rights and the coming era of direct revenue sharing have been celebrated as long-overdue compensation for college athletes,” they concluded. “We do not disagree that student-athletes deserve to share in the value they create. But the uncomfortable reality is that, as currently structured, these changes benefit a small number of athletes in a handful of sports while placing enormous pressure on everyone else.”