Greg McElroy explains why he thinks NIL Go 'welcomes the underbelly of college football back'

With the House v. NCAA settlement, schools will be allowed to directly pay its athletes up to $20.5 million. These are direct payments and do not come from collectives, but instead from the school’s revenue.

For athletes to receive the NIL payments that fans had grown accustomed to, they will have to screen the deal through a Deloitte clearinghouse that has been titled, “NIL Go.” All NIL deals or endorsements greater than $600 must be processed through the clearinghouse.

While some fans are excited for the process to become more organized, not everybody is convinced that NIL Go will be a success story. This past week, ESPN’s Greg McElroy revealed some of his concerns for NIL Go.

“Here’s the unforeseen circumstance that surrounds the NIL Go platform: It welcomes the underbelly of college football back into the sport,” McElroy said. “Right now, it’s free. it’s fair. You’re allowed to give guys whatever you want to give them, and you do because you want them to play for your team and you want to win games. But now that every single NIL deal could potentially be scrutinized, it welcomes
bad actors back into the game, and if they don’t want this NIL deal to be scrutinized, then you’ll just pay someone under the table.

“That is a concern for me. The sport that we know and love for a long time, there was always an underbelly of college football, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, there were things that were done in an opportunity to entice players to play at certain places for a very long time. That went away in the NIL era because it was all fair, it was all legal. Well, now it’s illegal. So does that now, welcome back some of the back alley payments that we once saw in the sport?”

The College Sports Commission will do everything it can to prevent McElroy’s nightmare scenario from becoming a reality. After all, the new rules were established to encourage order, not incentivize misbehavior. Even if the commission can catch people when they break the rules, how will they punish them?

“The only thing the CSC will be able to do, it’ll be able to penalize violations,” McElroy said. “Now, what will this look like? Will this result in players potentially being suspended for failing to report those NIL deals that they signed? Perhaps. Could it result in universities and football teams not being eligible for the postseason? Could it result in forfeiting games? Perhaps all these things, I think, are on the table.”