It’s like we talked about at the very beginning five years ago. A few kids will make a ridiculous amount, mostly for their off field personality, not their pro playing potential. And the regulators will clean up with $150,000 jobs but essentially be able to control nothing. The rest of the kids will get comparatively nothing. And after 10 to 15 years the facilities will fall into disrepair as donations go to overhead and not capital maintenance and improvement. The sport will collapse on itself without major reforms. The kids deserve to get paid but not at the expense of bankrupting the sport. As Mike Gundy just found out.
All of that said, yes, there’s a growing number of well documented cases of athletes earning $6 million or more per year, mostly young women. A gymnast clears that not counting her internationally recognized swimsuit modeling which is probably another $1 million. One exceptional case was a crypto payment that supposedly hit for just over $30 million for a men’s basketball player.
If you’ve got $20 million in the bank at age 21, you aren’t worried about college or the college experience if you are getting good advice and protecting yourself from yourself.
That said Landon Donovan recently gave an extended interview where he talked about the first time he ever let himself taste alcohol was when the USA beat Spain in one the biggest upsets in sports history. He took a couple of swigs from a champagne bottle because he felt he had to so the team would stay cohesive for the next game in the tournament. He had his first beer at a USA-Mexico game he watched from the stands a few weeks after he retired. He talked for awhile about how much of being a young man he missed and will never be able to revisit now that he is married with kids. He clearly has regrets despite being a generational talent.
We all make decisions in life that we think are the best for us at that time. Unfortunately the younger one is, the more likely said decision is to be misguided. Some of these guys have folks in their corner trying to help, but many who they think are helping them are really just ripping them off (hence agents openly loling about taking 20% of these college kids deals during interviews).
Now if the money is insanely good and sets up a kid from poverty to start the pathway to generational wealth, then I can’t blame him, but from what I’m seeing, while these kids are making decent amounts of money, they aren’t quite enough to set them up for the long haul… especially if they aren’t using said money wisely (like the pic saw yesterday on x where several guys had hundreds of boxes of shoes with the caption “NIL money just hit”).
At the end of the day, that money, even modest amounts is going to look really good to some of these guys who have come from generational poverty. Unfortunately, we’ll likely see it play out like we have with some guys in the NFL - where they blew all their money and can barely afford to live (the 30 for 30 on that is really interesting).
All that being said, I can’t hate on these kids for taking what would be (or what they think would be) life changing money. But I can damn well hate on the system that set all this up and is effectively ruining d1 sports and likely hurting these kids in the long run.
