Before July 1, 2021, student-athletes could lose their eligibility to compete in NCAA competitions if they accepted a free sandwich at their local deli or a Big Mac at McDonald’s, but what a difference a day makes. After that pivotal date, student-athletes could make personal appearances, endorse products, and earn money for their name, image, and likeness (NIL).
While there are still substantial rules to follow, for the past four and a half years, some past and present student-athletes, like BYU forward AJ Dybantsa, and LSU guard Flau’jae Johnson – both college basketball superstars – have become wealthy, some have earned enough money to help their families, while others have been mostly left out of this new iteration of collegiate sports.
College athletics is a multi-billion dollar business. According to CNBC’s 2025 official college valuation list, the United States’ top 75 athletic programs, fueled by men’s football and basketball, have a combined valuation of $51 billion, a 24% increase from 2024. The University of Texas heads the list at a valuation of $1.48 billion as colleges have adapted professional sports business models and exceeded many major professional franchise’s monetary worth.
For example, the University of Oregon’s athletic program, second on the aforementioned list at $1.35 billion, has the same valuation as Major League Baseball’s Pittsburgh Pirates and a higher valuation than five of the league’s franchises. The rising appraisals have been primarily driven by massive television deals and other corporate partnerships such as stadium and arena naming rights.
Until nearly six years ago, college athletes were denied the opportunity to earn a piece of the massive economic pie while attending their respective schools. Their compensation was limited to non-guaranteed athletic scholarships.
But decades of activism from athletes and their supporters, leading to federal court cases, has reshaped the collective infrastructure of athletic programs as athletes are now profiting from name, image and likeness (NIL), a student’s legal right to earn money from their personal brand. The result has been widespread ramifications in how college athletic programs operate and its effect on the Title IX law and sports programs that are not generating revenue.
The through line of today’s college athletics economy can be traced to two landmark federal court cases that successfully challenged the NCAA, the nominal nonprofit that governs Division I, II, and III sports, and its long-standing concept of amateurism.
In the first case, Edward O’Bannon was a former UCLA basketball star and first-round NBA draft pick by the then-New Jersey Nets. He went on to have a 10-year pro career, and in 2009 sued the NCAA and the Collegiate Licensing Company for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. He accused them and their corporate partners of using his likeness from UCLA’s 1995 championship team without his permission in the EA Sports video game “NCAA 09,” while athletes were prohibited from being compensated by NCAA bylaws.
O’Bannon v. NCAA, which eventually became a class action lawsuit, was decided in 2015 by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals after U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled in plaintiff O’Bannon’s favor.
In the second case, Shawne Alston, a running back for West Virginia University from 2009-2012, and co-plaintiffs, disputed the NCAA’s rules limiting compensation, including restrictions on non-cash, education-related benefits such as internships, fellowships, tutors, and computers.
Alston’s lawyers filed NCAA v. Alston in 2014. Like the O’Bannon case, it was also argued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and assigned to Wilken, who ruled against the NCAA in March 2019. It was upheld in both the appellate court and unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the court’s opinion and in a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sternly penned that the “NCAA is not above the law.”
The business of being a student athlete
A seismic and seemingly irreversible shift in college athletics occurred exactly one month after the Alston decision.
Since its introduction on July 1, 2021, the landscape for name, image, and likeness (NIL) in college sports has evolved considerably from deals for individual student-athletes to collectives (alumni forming a company with the goal of providing NIL opportunities to student-athletes) to now revenue sharing. The last item was made possible by the House Settlement, which is the result of an antitrust lawsuit, House v. NCAA. Colleges and universities are now allowed to directly compensate collegiate athletes for their NIL.
All of the iterations of NIL now co-exist. High-profile student-athletes like Ohio State Buckeyes wide receiver Jeremiah Smith still receive huge individual deals, alumni fans still get behind their favorite sports, and some student-athletes now get payouts from their institutions, with gaps growing ever larger.
Multiple media outlets reported late last week that former Duke University quarterback Darian Mensah, who signed a two-year, $8 million NIL deal in the winter of 2024 to transfer from Tulane to Duke, and is now in the NCAA transfer portal after having an outstanding 2025 campaign for the Blue Devils, has a proposed package on the table from the University of Miami for roughly $10 million — including a buyout of his Duke contract.
Beginning July 1, 2025, participating schools can distribute up to 22% of average revenue from media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorship, with a cap of $20.5 million per school for this academic year.
“It’s an NIL deal or revenue deal directly with the school,” sports and entertainment attorney Kassandra Ramsey explained to The EDU Ledger. “It’s supposed to be for all the sports at all the schools that opt in.”
Is NIL a pro or a con?
This widens the gap between institutions, sports, and genders. While newsletters like The Gist and TOGETHXR share genuinely good news about the growing numbers of sponsorship deals that individual female student-athletes and teams get, the fact is that there has been massive gender inequality since the onset of NIL in 2021 due to fewer opportunities for women as well as less promotion and marketing.
The majority of revenue-sharing money is going to men’s football and men’s basketball. It is expected that these two sports will receive approximately 90% of that money. Women’s basketball is expected to only get around 5% and all the sports considered Olympic sports or non-revenue generating sports — male and female alike — including swimming, diving, track and field, wrestling, volleyball, and fencing, will get the remainder.
“I’m really concerned that we’re going back to the 1970s and earlier, before Title IX took effect,” Attorney Jayma Meyer, a visiting clinical professor and adjunct professor at the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, told Ms. Magazine.
As of mid-2025, 32 states have enacted laws related to NIL. However, to date, there is no national NIL law. The Student Compensation and Opportunity Through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act is designed to establish a national framework for collegiate athlete compensation, particularly in the case of NIL. It passed the House Education & Workforce Committee, but has stalled in the House due to various issues, notable among them the lack of reference to Title IX.
A federal civil rights law passed in 1972, the 37 words of Title IX, note: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
“There’s a lack of mention of Title IX and lack of mention of gender in the SCORE Act, which is extremely disappointing and leads to a lot of ambiguity as to any protections,” Dr. Lisa Delpy Neirotti, director of the master’s in sport management program at George Washington School of Business, told Ms. Magazine.
The lack of reference to Title IX is not surprising because on Feb. 25, 2025, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) rescinded guidance previously issued under the Biden administration that advised institutions of higher education to ensure equal NIL opportunities and resources to male and female student-athletes. OCR indicated that the guidance was “overly burdensome, profoundly unfair, and … well beyond what agency guidance is intended to achieve.”
Members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus have pushed Congress for explicit Title IX protections related to NIL in the SCORE Act. In a letter to Congressmen Brett Guthrie, Tim Walberg, and Jim Jordan, they wrote, “Women college athletes have been consistently shortchanged in the rapidly growing NIL economy, and that disparity is heightened for Black women.”
Ramsey, who is also president of the Drake Group, an organization that works to educate Congress and higher education about critical issues in intercollegiate athletics, told Ms. Magazine, “I do think Title IX applies to NIL anytime that the school has a close relationship with an NIL collective or, in this case, as the schools are now able to engage in revenue sharing with the athletes.”
There is also the Saving College Sports Act, based on an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in July 2025, which refers to preserving women’s and non-revenue-generating sports. But details on how to do so are not outlined. There is also the Student Athlete Fairness and Enforcement (SAFE) Act introduced in the Senate in September, which largely focuses on athlete welfare.
On Jan. 16, the NCAA announced four new NCAA Championships: acrobatics and tumbling, stunt, Division II bowling, and Division III women’s wrestling. This is the first time four championships have been added at one NCAA convention, which is being credited to the meteoric rise of emerging women’s sports at the NCAA level. It will be interesting to see how these sports fare in the current college sports landscape.
A few months ago, Geno Auriemma, now in his 41st season as the women’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut, which has won 12 NCAA Division I Championships, joked on the “Fudd Around and Find Out” podcast that had NIL existed when one of his greatest players, Diana Taurasi (UConn ‘04), was in school, she would have changed institutions every year to get the best deals. No way of knowing what Taurasi, who won three NCAA titles during her time in Connecticut, would have done, but in this era of NIL, transferring has significantly increased.
There are still some programs that see minimal transferring, such as Columbia University women’s basketball, a team that has seen increased transfers coming in but virtually zero outgoing. The Ivy League does not have athletic scholarships, nor has it opted in for revenue sharing, so money earned via NIL can be quite valuable to the players.
“How you show yourself is your brand,” said Columbia senior guard/forward Perri Page, who was named Ivy League Player of the Week for the week of Jan. 5-11. “I think the coaching staff and also our media team, our NIL team, have done a great job of putting us out there and figuring out what our interests are and how we can maximize or utilize potentially our brand.
“The Ivy League doesn’t give us that money,” she added. “I think that’s what makes us special. We’re not in it for the money, but it’s good to have [opportunities]. We’re really building relationships with brands and having the longevity of that rather than just getting a check and moving on to the next.”
For several years, I have been following Jamie Harris, and in my opinion, he is undoubtedly one of the most exceptional writers.
For several years, I have been following Jamie Harris, and in my opinion, he is undoubtedly one of the most exceptional writers.
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