Take a walk on the red carpet at the College Football Hall of Fame in June 2022, and you’ll find it hosting an event that might have been unthinkable 12 months ago: the inaugural NIL Summit. The three-day event included an awards show that recognized athletes not just for their competitive exploits, but also for their marketability and commercial success in college sports’ new era.
On July 1, 2021, the economics changed forever when nearly half a million college athletes became eligible to make money off of their name, image and likeness (NIL) overnight. For better and for worse, college sports is a uniquely American institution, and it makes it difficult if not impossible to separate NIL from the myriad issues surrounding the NCAA. In fact, because the enterprise is so wide-ranging, the tentacles of NIL have interwoven and amplified things. While sources agree NIL is a positive in itself, the way it has played out has made the college athletics source who told Sports Illustrated on the eve of the initial rollout that “it’s going to be a clusterf----” look prescient.
NIL is not going away, and Sports Illustrated spoke to a cross section of people from athletes to lawyers to school administrators—and many in between—to get a sense of what it’s been like to live through this radically evolving market.
