Five years into the NIL era, the question is no longer whether college athletes should be paid for the industry they have built. It is whether this diverse mix of commissioners, presidents, lawmakers, regulators, athletic departments, collectives, GMs and agencies will ever work from the same plan, rather than tossing conflicting ingredients into the same pot.
To outsiders, NIL still looks simple: An athlete signs a contract, works with a brand on marketing deliverables, and they get paid. Or an athlete receives a portion of the revenue share directly from the school. On the ground, it is anything but simple. One missed detail can void an agreement, hold up payment for months, threaten eligibility or blow up a roster plan.
The stakes have escalated because NIL now affects everything that matters in college sports: multimedia and apparel rights, recruiting, retention, the transfer portal and revenue-sharing mechanisms that tie payments directly to institutional budgets. “When a coach says, ‘We need to be competitive in NIL,’ they really mean, ‘We need a compliant, scalable financial and legal infrastructure that did not exist on this campus three years ago’ — and they are saying it in a room where everyone thinks they own the menu.”
Those of us who have worked in this space from the beginning do not see NIL as a talking point. We see that athletes are begging us for clarity and ease of use. From that perspective, the gap between rhetoric and reality is evident in every recruiting meeting and during tax season. Very few people outside a small inner circle truly know what NIL budgets are in practice — how much is earmarked for revenue sharing and how much supports “above the cap” deals that serve as competitive ammunition.
The hidden cost: Confusion and burnout
We celebrate the big wins and seven-figure headlines. We talk far less about the day-to-day confusion that drains everyone involved. Administrators, athletes, and service providers are constantly interpreting shifting rules, managing risk, and responding to rising demands from donors, fans and brands.
The result is decision fatigue. Deals get turned down not because they are bad opportunities, but because no one has the time or clarity to unpack the implications, or “this is the way it has always been done” prevails. Athletes sign contracts they do not fully understand. Collectives step into roles simply to fill gaps. Departments quietly hope they will not be the test case for the next enforcement memo. Everyone in the kitchen feels the pressure; almost no one feels in control.
Beyond ‘pay them’ vs. ‘protect them’
The public NIL debate keeps collapsing into two slogans: “Just treat them like employees” versus “You’ll destroy the student experience.” On campus, the reality is far more complicated.
Athletes already live with many of the demands of employment — on performance expectations, contractual obligations, commercial visibility — layered on top of full-time student and social responsibilities. At the same time, their legal standing, bargaining rights and protections do not align neatly with traditional employment models. Add conflicting signals from courts, presidential summits, Congress, statehouses and governing bodies, and you get a messy middle where most of today’s risk lives.
Those forums matter for the next phase of NIL, but they are not where calendars get set, deals get executed, or content goes live. If we want a system that both compensates and safeguards athletes, we have to design for the ordinary Tuesday — when a women’s soccer player signs a local clinic deal, a backup offensive lineman weighs a car offer and a coach tries to hold together a locker room in the portal era while reporting to three different on-campus “owners” of the NIL strategy.
What competence looks like
From my perspective, it has four practical features:
1. Clear responsibility lanes. Athletes should know who handles what — the athletic department, the collective, the agency, the agent, the brand — and where to go with questions.
2. Standardized registries for representatives and agents. “Street lawyers” and others show up claiming to represent athletes and demanding double-digit percentages on top of NIL deals. There is no consistent registry confirming that those helping make multimillion-dollar decisions for their “clients” are qualified, prepared and accountable.
3. Integrated education, not one-off workshops. Financial literacy, tax fundamentals, contract comprehension and brand management cannot be confined to a single preseason meeting.
4. Honest communication about trade-offs. NIL money influences scholarship strategies, school calendars, playing time and locker-room dynamics. Pretending otherwise has done more harm, especially when so many promise slightly different versions of the same future.
None of this is glamorous. It’s the basic blocking and tackling of a functional marketplace. But until we determine who writes the recipe and who follows it, the promise of NIL will keep being limited by the industry’s willingness to professionalize itself on any given day.
A workable recipe is possible. We’ve seen athletes thrive when expectations are honest, documents are clear and everyone at the table understands their role. The problem isn’t that NIL can’t work. It’s that too many powerful voices keep rewriting the recipe for success from 30,000 feet without listening to the people doing the cooking.
NIL has moved college sports into its own Jordan-Nike moment, where the value created by athletes is too obvious to ignore and too visible to underpay. The question is no longer whether to share that value, but whether this many stakeholders can stop competing for control long enough to build the competence and transparency that a billion-dollar enterprise demands.
Rob Sine is CEO of Blueprint Sports, advising athletic departments, collectives and athletes on NIL strategy, compliance and revenue growth.
