Hardly Fair

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Feb. 22, 2025

College athletics has become fully professionalized. Amateurism and education are no longer front and center; pay-to-play is the new order of the day.

Many would argue this is only fair. College athletics is not some minor-league enterprise, it’s a full-blown industry with full-blown industrial-size money. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the 350 Division 1 schools’ athletic departments generated nearly $18 billion in 2023. The NCAA, the organization with oversight over college athletics, took in $1.3 billion itself, mostly from revenue it generates in the basketball tournaments.

Since college athletics became popular, schools have been using the athletes, especially the high-profile stars in the highest profile sports, as income generators. They used those stars to promote their programs, attract huge advertising deals and non-advertising sponsors, and generate contributions from former graduates.

The argument is the athletes doing the work did not share in the significant bounty. Coaches certainly benefited. In fact, the three highest paid public employees in Michigan are the head football coaches at Michigan and Michigan State and the head basketball coach at MSU.

(Lost in all of this is that six-figure scholarships covering room, board, tuition, and books apparently didn’t count at all. It wasn’t money athletes could spend, so it wasn’t perceived as income.)

Athletes ultimately had to take the NCAA to court. In 2014, UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon and others claimed their schools and the NCAA were profiting from the players names, images, and likeness without compensating the athletes at all. A district judge sided with the players, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision in September of 2015.

The result was that players could seek endorsements and sponsorships from collectives of boosters. As a bonus, something called the transfer portal allowed them to shop their services from school to school without much hindrance.

Lots and lots of potential for some athletes, almost none for others. No one was required to share the wealth, so the highest profile stars in the highest profile sports made the highest Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) incomes.

There are 190,000 Division 1—think big dogs like Michigan and Michigan State and others—athletes competing in 24 sanctioned sports. Few of us could name more than 10 of them on any given day.

There are another 130,000 athletes competing at the Division 2 level—Ferris State, Grand Valley, Northern Michigan, and others—and another 119,000 athletes in 431 Division 3 schools like Alma, Albion, and Kalamazoo College. That’s 439,000 college athletes all eligible for some NIL money. It’s unlikely even one percent of them will ever see any NIL money since they are not football or basketball stars. (There is at least one dramatic exception, as we’ll see.)

An outfit called SportsGrid has tried to keep track of just how much money athletes are actually making, and the income inequality is pretty glaring, though there are a couple ways to judge this.

Shedeur Sanders, last year’s quarterback for the University of Colorado, leads the pack with an NIL value of $6.2 million. His teammate, Travis Hunter, is close behind at $5.2 million. Both Sanders and Hunter were stars and are both expected to be high first round draft choices in the NFL. It didn’t hurt that their coach, an NFL Hall of Famer, was media savvy.

Next in line is Arch Manning, a quarterback at the University of Texas, with a value of $5 million despite the fact that in two years he’s started exactly two games and played in seven others. But Manning comes from a very famous football family with tons of contacts.

Next is Olivia Dunne, the outlier in the group because she is a gymnast at LSU. Not the star of the team but a contributor to their national championship last year, Dunne, a savvy user of social media unafraid to exploit her appearance, is valued at $4.2 million. To her credit, she also made sure her teammates received NIL deals, too.

Online NIL stores sell licensed merchandise of specific athletes. For men, the most purchased items represented Zach Edey, a basketball player from Purdue, and for women, it was Paige Bueckers, a basketball star for the University of Connecticut.

They might have been able to do this a bit more fairly, had the courts allowed it, by putting the NIL money into a pool to be shared by all athletes in every sport. A monthly stipend would have made sense, and then the bulk of the money could have been paid upon graduation, a nice starter gift to go along with that diploma.

The argument is that basketball and football subsidize the other 22 sports and the stars of the two big sports are what generate interest and the big television contracts. Likely true, but hardly fair to equally hard working athletes training and competing in obscurity.