After years of debate and protest about whether college athletes should be able to profit from their names while playing collegiate sports, Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) finally became legal in 2021. Players have been allowed to make money from their names while playing for their schools, and the schools have been allowed to pay players directly in return. This new era ushers in a new question: Is NIL suitable for collegiate sports?

While the concept of NIL and paying players is good for the sport, the current model and its restrictions are flawed. NIL has become schools building collectives to pay players to play for them, with athletes making millions of dollars for one year of playing for a school. After recent court rulings, schools no longer need to funnel money through a collective and can instead pay players directly.

Later this year, schools will receive more money from television revenue payouts from each conference. The schools in the more prominent conferences like the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference (SEC) will receive the most money, as their ratings are higher and network contracts are much more lucrative. In comparison, smaller conferences like the American Athletic Conference (AAC) and the Mountain West will receive less money. In a landscape that heavily favors the few teams who can raise enough money to build championship-caliber rosters in their respective sports, the added imbalance of revenue payouts will tilt the scales even further in their favor.

The emergence of the transfer portal in collegiate sports has further contributed to the increased dominance of the bigger programs. In baseball and basketball, any time a player at a smaller program has a productive year, the larger program can offer that player a large amount of NIL money to transfer schools, leaving the smaller programs helpless.

Before the restrictions around players transferring schools were lifted, athletes would have to sit out for a year if they transferred, which provided an initiative not to transfer. It limited player movement and made it hard for bigger schools to tamper with players. Now that these rules are gone and players can transfer every year if they want to, it has become a free-for-all for big schools to tamper and get players to transfer.

If NIL will be a permanent factor in the new college landscape, it should be regulated to allow smaller schools to be competitive. This could be achieved simply by reinstating the old transfer portal rules.

Schools paying players directly and using TV revenue payout money should also be removed. Players should be allowed to profit off their name through endorsement deals, but enabling the schools to pay players directly will only further skew the odds in favor of the few dominant programs. Instead of spending on the players directly, schools can use the new TV revenue payout money to upgrade their facilities, stadiums, and coaching staff so that the players can be adequately developed and have better resources and environments on gameday.