Name, Image, and Likeness is the talk of the college sports world right now, and for good reason. This past weekend was the first time a player has held out for more money in this new era. Those that don't know let's fill you in.
NIL news is at the forefront of sports media because Nico Iamaleava, the former quarterback for the Tennessee Volunteers, transferred from Tennessee, because of a money dispute. He wanted a raise in his NIL earnings, and the Volunteers and head coach Josh Heupel didn't blink. That resulted in a holdout and a subsequent transfer for the Volunteers' star player.
So, why would I, a basketball writer, give you an example in college football? It's a simple answer. The same thing will happen in college basketball if the NCAA and the coaches do not get together and figure out a common ground to do business.
It has already happened to a certain extent. Take, for example, Robert Wright III. He played at Baylor as a freshman last year. After a good season, he signed a deal with Baylor totaling over 1 million dollars to stay as the Bears point guard in 2025-2026. Since no rules prevent this, the BYU Cougars rolled in and offered Wright upwards of 3.5 million dollars to play for them. Wright signed the deal and committed without ever having seen the BYU campus.
The above example is just a known example of what is happening. It's likely that these types of things happen much more frequently. It isn't surprising, given how much money is brought in every year in college basketball and how important winning is. If there is no regulation soon, college sports will be in a dark place.
I thought long and hard about this and have come up with some ideas that would go a long way toward fixing NIL and allowing everyone to operate in the same arena. There are a lot of things that must be ironed out with NIL. To get the whole picture, it makes sense to highlight its original intention.
What is NIL?
It all started in the late 2000s with a lawsuit filed by former UCLA Bruins star Ed O'Bannon. O'Bannon argued that the NCAA profited from his Name, Image, and Likeness in video games and jersey sales. The NCAA had to pay $44.4 million for attorney's fees and another $1.5 million to the plaintiffs’ lawyers. That started the "should college players get paid" debate.
Then, in 2019, California passed the Fair Pay to Play Act, which allowed players to be compensated for promotional opportunities. Many other states followed the same legislation, forcing the NCAA's hand.
It was determined that athletes can make money if it is consistent with the laws in their state. Well, who determines compliance with state laws? The schools do. The NCAA also said that schools are not allowed to pay students directly and that everything must come from a "collective" of businesses.
The rules have zero regulation, are open to much interpretation, and have yet to be enforced. The NCAA can't enforce broken rules when it doesn't grasp them well.
College sports are now subject to annual free agency. It is turning off some of the most diehard fans. They could have avoided all this if the NCAA had done the legwork upfront.
I took the liberty of doing that legwork for them and created rules that would benefit everyone. Coaches, Players, Universities, Collectives, and the NCAA will be able to support all these rules and regulations and make the game better.
NIL should be a way forward and a way to improve the game. Right now, it's just about the haves and have-nots. The Have-Nots are in danger of getting left behind. How can NIL improve itself while ensuring everyone gets a piece of the pie?
Buyout program
This one is going to be controversial. It is always easiest to start with the most contentious first. Many conferences, usually the low majors, like the NEC, SWAC, MEAC, and a few others, have little to no NIL. Saint Francis made the NCAA Tournament with zero NIL dollars. Then, the university decided to drop to Division Three, and all their players entered the transfer portal.
They are probably not the best example. Let's go to the SWAC. The Alabama State Hornets made the NCAA Tournament, won a game on a buzzer-beater, and their players got a massive amount of exposure. The SWAC traditionally doesn't have much in the way of NIL dollars to spend. As a result, all the contributors for the Hornets entered the transfer portal. What does head coach Tony Madlock get from that? Nothing!
A buyout program would provide some money to the Alabama State NIL Collective, funded by the teams that sign their players. For example, star point guard Amarr Knox, who is currently in the portal, would be signed by a team. His potential deal would be $500,000, but with this proposed buyout program, the team that signs him would provide $30,000 to the Hornets.
Knox would still receive $470,000 from the collective, but a buyout is built into the NIL deals. $30,000 was an example, and since I like using round numbers, I settled on that.
Thinking about this another way, if a team loses 10 guys to the transfer portal and a buyout is required, that team could make $300,000 for their NIL pool to use in the transfer portal and build a roster. This rule would be a nice way for everyone to get a piece of the pie.
The buyouts would be extremely important for mid and low-major teams. It would shrink the growth in talent between the mid-majors and power conference teams. It would also give teams some pause when poaching a player from a roster. Committing to pay another school money is enough to turn some teams off. Buyouts would be part of the contracts that the players sign; everything is agreed upon before the
Buyouts would be part of the contracts that the players sign. Everything would be agreed upon before the deal was finalized, cutting down on surprises. Every player would come with a buyout tier, for example. Low Majors would be $30,000, Mid-Majors $75,000, and Power Conferences $100,000. The money would go straight to the respective NIL Collectives.
The NCAA will likely never implement this because everyone, mainly coaches and athletic departments, will be opposed. If a buyout program were ever implemented, it would ensure that everything remains equal and everyone plays by the same rules, which should always be the goal.
Contracts
Let's get into the plausible changes that would 100% improve NIL. Contracts. Players and the NIL collectives currently have contracts that the players must sign, but there are many questions about how binding those contracts are.
We have all heard the stories of coaches not keeping their NIL promises and the collectives not paying up. That leads to excess transfers and usually results in the coaches retiring or resigning. Former Florida State Seminoles coach Leonard Hamilton is the most recent example.
I will keep going back to the example of Robert Wright at Baylor. He signed a deal with Baylor for this season. The agreement with the Bears was around $1 million. A few days later, the point guard was in the transfer portal with a "Do Not Contact" tag because he had been promised a deal of around $3 million from BYU. That is, tampering with rules would be forbidden. Since there are no enforceable rules, this is the lay of the land.
If the goal is to entice players to stay at their current schools, I propose a system that would force players to honor their commitment to the contract they signed or lose out on the NIL money. If a player signs a contract and leaves voluntarily before it is over, that player would lose out on the NIL money they were expected to receive in the contract terms.
The same would go for the other teams. If a player signs a contract, that player is off-limits from recruiting. They have committed to that school and are no longer eligible to sign an NIL deal with any other school. If the school breaks the rule, they will be penalized for losing out on some NIL Money.
The contracts will be for a maximum of 2 years and can not be voided by the school. In other words, you cannot sign a player for 2 seasons, and if that player doesn't work out, you cut them or push them to the transfer portal by recruiting over them. The school would have to eat that money and still pay the player if that player were moved to the portal.
After those two seasons, the NIL collectives must renegotiate the deals. Players will have a chance to leave and get a better deal, and coaches can now tell student-athletes that they no longer have a spot for them. After the second season of the contract is exhausted, no one will incur an NIL penalty.
This rule is in the vein of guaranteed contracts. Kids are leaving trying to find the most dollars, and schools are trying to entice those students to leave by offering them the most dollars. That is upsetting the competitive balance in college basketball.
The only way out of the contract for the players is a coaching change. Coaching changes would nullify a contract and let the players move freely within the transfer portal window to get the best deal. The same rules would apply after that player signs with their new school.
The maximum two-year contracts that cannot be terminated and the prevention of tampering with the recruits by losing NIL money should curb the mass exodus into the transfer portal and help restore the competitive balance back to college basketball.
Enforceable contracts would be a good idea. How they punish participants who do not fulfill their part of the bargain is up in the air, but NIL money should be lost as a consequence. This does have a chance to be implemented if things keep trending the way they are.
Salary Cap
Anyone who truly wants competitive balance and wants every team to experience NIL should be pushing hard for a salary cap. It would allow teams at all levels to play with the same set of parameters. Every team would hit the recruiting trail with the same amount of money available to offer to recruits.
I am not naïve enough to think that all the schools have the same pool of money or that all the schools in a particular conference have the same amount of money to work with. Obviously, some teams are still going to build a team with more money than other teams, but a salary cap would make this more equal.
Here is an example: The Big East doesn't have college football; those schools are able to spend more money on basketball than the schools in the football conferences. The fear is that if revenue sharing in college basketball gets approved, the Big East will be able to buy whatever player they want.
A salary cap would tell the Big East that no matter how much NIL money they have, they would only be able to spend a certain portion on players and not a cent more. The cap would be based on the average amount of money each team in power conferences will have. The salary cap would affect everyone at the power conferences. Teams like Indiana, Michigan, Duke, and North Carolina would also be affected by this.
Those schools listed above have high NIL budgets and would have to rein them in to fulfill their salary cap obligations. The salary cap doesn't change based on which pieces of the roster are gone; it is the same for the entire roster. If the cap is used, we are hopeful that the roster will be built.
Everyone should know how salary caps work. The amount will likely reset yearly, and the players on the roster count toward that season's cap. As a result, the NCAA would need to move the transfer portal window from the second week of April to the second week of May.
Why? There will need to be a window for players to declare their allegiance to their current team and let everyone know they are returning to fulfill their NIL deals. The window must be before the transfer portal, so coaches know what budget they have heading into the portal season.
A salary cap is doable and easy to implement. It would require teams to make their NIL budgets public, and revenue sharing would have to pass, but this is a probable solution to improve the NIL process.
Maximum Number of Transfers
This is the one that will likely exhibit the most significant positive reaction from the masses. The only problem is that the court systems have already shot it down as illegal. However, the silver lining is that it was shut down before the current NIL process was implemented and vetted.
The goal is that contract length and a salary cap will curb many transfers. The one-time transfer rule is a thing of the past. The new rule should be two total transfers. If a player decides to transfer after their two-year deal with a team, they will transfer to another team that will give them a two-year contract.
If the player still wants to use their graduation transfer year, that would be the second transfer. Grad transfers can only sign a minimum one-year deal, but it counts against a team’s salary cap number, making it one less two-year deal they are allowed to sign.
The transfer portal is out of control, with some players transferring every year they are in the college game. This rule, if implemented properly, would hopefully stop that. All these NIL rules can make the game better and make it easier for coaches and athletic departments to navigate recruiting, knowing that everyone will be operating under the same set of rules.
Sure, I know it was tried before, but teams and players never lost money before. Now, if a rule is broken, the NIL money is gone, and there is no way to recoup the loss for the player or the coaching staff.
Two total transfers, excluding graduate transfers, is a lot better than the old way of one transfer and then sitting out a year. Players will still have the autonomy to guide their own careers while also having to display a little bit of loyalty to the team they committed to. Hopefully, this will help the overwhelming feeling we get when it seems like players are just chasing the best paycheck.