What Impact will Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) have on College Sports Recruiting?

The confusion over the commodification of college sports has gotten even crazier in the present day it ever has been before. The year 2021 has marked the dawn of a new age as the traditional definition of "amateurism" by the NCAA has been reinvented to grant Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rights to student-athletes across all three divisions. NIL battle has gone on for decades, as all college athletes for generations have not received compensation outside of tuition and other educationally related fees. That is until now when the United States congress stepped in to ensure that such exploitation of college athletes without the opportunity for compensation would be no more.

      In the short term, this brand new era of sanctioned endorsement deals for college athletes has been messy, to say the least. Currently, the laws and regulations range from state to state and even within institutions. There is really no way to know how this will play out in the subsequent years for recruits at the extremes. But what matters most for my purposes is how these NIL rights will affect the landscape of recruitment overall. Policies are being changed based on what is happening at the top of the NCAA. In fact, one could argue those are the only conversations that need to be had. In 2014 Darren Rovell of ESPN conjectured that a Heisman Trophy winner might be able to profit at least $800,000 on average for completing such a feat. This without considering the potential NFL money that player might receive. This must be what Congress had in mind when they wanted to end the exploitation of college athletes.

      However, the answer to the question of what impact NIL deals will have on recruitment already appears to be essentially "little to no impact." The fact is that the vast majority of college programs are not making "millions" of dollars off the backs of student-athletes. Specifically, it is a select number of schools in D1 football and men's basketball that are genuinely profiting from the efforts of college athletes. And even still, much of that money is reinvested into the athletic department, using profits to create opportunities for "non-revenue" sports to exist. But the actual numbers related to student-athlete NIL profitability lead right back to the conversation of who gets what and why in the NCAA world.

      The only college athletes who will be impacted, even marginally by NIL agreements, must be elite talents for hire in the market. The types of athletes who are the difference between national television coverage and not. Otherwise, the metrics just wouldn't make sense. Early reporting from the NIL era suggests that these agreements have little to no impact on the lives of most college athletes, mainly if you are not a high level D1 football or basketball player. Through October 2021, research has already revealed that D2 and D3 athletes are essentially making no money from NIL agreements. It was stated that a whopping 60 percent of all NIL deals signed to that point were from college football players! Furthermore, the average NIL agreement across all D1 athletes came out to only $471, with D2 and D3 contracts coming in at roughly $81 and $47, respectively. Though the NIL era may be here to stay, the impact will overwhelmingly be inconsequential to the recruitment world for even the highest-tier recruits in their sport. Buyers are valuable to a college program because they help teams win or make money. And according to the NCAA scholarship allocation metrics, there are fewer than 2 percent of them throughout the entire NCAA (total athletic scholarship recipients). So for the other 98 percent, NIL rights will be much more of an idea than a reality.

This excerpt is taken from the book “Winning the Ship: How to Win the College Athlete Recruitment Game”

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