NIL is Ruining College Sports…
College sports are being ruined year after year due to NIL. Players seem to be going after money in college rather than playing for the schools they hoped and dreamed about since they were little kids.
College sports like basketball, football, lacrosse, and many others are starting to become like a professional sport. You see 18-year-old Division 1 players making hundreds of thousands of dollars every year just from playing a college sport, when what they should be focused on is school, family, friends, and just becoming themselves instead of chasing after money at big schools.
And it’s not just younger athletes its seniors and graduate students as well that are staying in college longer because they’ll make more money from NIL in one year than they would from their rookie contracts at the professional level. Take Miami’s quarterback Carson Beck as an example
Beck was supposed to go to the NFL Draft in 2024 after playing four years of college football. Beck ended up transferring from Georgia to Miami for a graduate season where he earned upwards of 4 million dollars. The average rookie contract in the NFL is 4 million for four years, and Beck made that in one year, which shows how corrupt the college NIL world is these days.
Look at college basketball as well, so many players these days are going to a lower school, play amazing there, and then get a massive NIL deal to transfer out of the program going into the next year at a much bigger and better school.
This doesn’t just impact players; it impacts the programs as well when there is constant transferring. Especially during March Madness, you rarely ever see a Cinderella story in the playoffs now because all the best players in the nation are on the best teams either as freshmen or transferred in as upperclassmen.
Stephen A. Smith thinks that NIL is corrupt as well because he sees college sports turning into “free agency.” Smith thinks it is unfair that both players and coaches can transfer schools whenever they want to chase money, and he believes that it is unfair to the schools.
Smith has also shared his views about holding players and coaches accountable if they want to chase after money, and has said, “I think if you’re going to transfer, you should have to sit out. You should have to miss a year. I think stuff like that should happen. But I just think the same should be applicable to coaches as well as the players. Why should the players play under different rules than the coaches have to?”
I think that this would be a great rule to start implementing into college sports if you are going to transfer from school to school more than once. Players should have the opportunity to transfer to a better school if they want to, but if they keep doing it year after year, then there should be consequences behind it, like sitting out for a year, as Smith says.