What you said was true *before* the House settlement went into force on July 1. It no longer is. If you like, you can look at the site of the College Sports Commission. You will see that NIL deals between boosters and athletes are limited to deals that endorse a product that is generally available to the public and that compensate the athlete the same as a non-athlete would be compensated. The collectives that were funding NIL are now greatly limited and have been complaining that the Commission is holding up their deals. (The best article on that, unfortunately, is behind The Athletic's paywall). Here's the link to the Commission's site.
https://www.collegesportscommission.org/nil
I've mentioned that before here but at least in the short term unlimited 3rd party NIL still has an effect. Some of the more well funded schools front loaded player deals before the July deadline. So the effects of that have allowed them to go significantly above the cap this year and potentially still have an effect next year.
3rd party NIL is still unlimited but it has to be verified as "legitimate" and I'm sure some places will go around it but the player can risk eligibility if it's ever discovered.
I've mentioned how TT went all in this year with its billionaire boosters to take a big swing at the B12 and CFP. The Athletic had a story on it earlier this year and now Dellenger has another nice one as well. Mind you Cody Campbell, the billionaire booster spearheading it has even said "legitimate" 3rd party NIL isn't that much in most cases so after this short term surge of front loaded deals wears off, the revenue sharing pool from the school will be biggest thing as far as paying players....provided there are no lawsuits and the rules don't change again (which we know is always possible).
This article mentioned that platform they used to evaluate players. It's not mentioned in this article but Campbell mentioned in the Athletic article like 80-90% of the info is wasted and useless but if you can hit on that 10-20% it can be big and fortunately for TT this year they seemed to have hit on that 10-20%.
From the article:
They took advantage of the circumstances. This year, the old NIL era and the new revenue-share concept overlapped to create the final uncapped market for college players — a last gasp of booster-funded deals before a new enforcement entity arrived July 1.
In all, Tech donors raised a jaw-dropping $49 million from July 2024 to July 2025, much of that front-loaded cash paid to players (of all sports) before this academic year began.
And they aren’t afraid to talk about it, either.
The portal hunt last December started at a goal of signing 12 players. It finished at 17, McGuire says. According to On3Sports, the transfer class ranked No. 1 in the country.
“We hit home runs,” the coach says.
The recruiting effort was an organized outfit from several men — the evaluating mainly from general manager James Blanchard, the recruiting from McGuire and primary funding from Campbell, Sellers and Petersen.
Blanchard and company used an analytics platform in their evaluation, Big League Advantage, to project players into their system.
“We didn’t want to bring in mercenaries or were bad teammates,” says Campbell.
But perhaps the most important part was the funding — an effort that began with a Dallas-area meeting well before the December transfer portal period opened.
“It wasn’t cheap,” says Campbell, “but it wasn’t about the money we spent. It’s about how we spent it.”
That “X” is about $49 million, Petersen says. Though a portion of that was spent on men’s basketball and other sports, the football roster accounted for the lion’s share.
Multiple power conference football and basketball programs orchestrated a similar plan of frontloading booster money this past spring. In fact, booster spending on athletes this past June was more than 800% higher than last June, according to Opendorse, an NIL platform used by dozens of collectives.
But Texas Tech outspent most of them, especially fellow Big 12 member schools, many of which are financially stressed and devoid of a billionaire donor base. Frontloading so much cash is an advantage not just this year but next year, too. It gives Texas Tech the ability to save the $20.5 million revenue-share pool allotted to schools for this academic year to be spent on next year’s roster, a new transfer class and a high school signing class this spring.
