NIL and the Transfer Portal Are Breaking College Sports (And I’m Conflicted About It)
The landscape of college athletics has changed forever. Photo: Pixabay
Ard, let me be honest with y’all about something. As a former college athlete, I believe players deserve to get paid. The NCAA was making billions while telling kids they couldn’t accept a free meal. That was wrong. But what we have now? This jawn is chaos and I don’t know if we can put it back together.
This week Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava—the former #1 recruit in his class—entered the transfer portal. Not because he wanted to leave. According to The Daily Campus reporting, he entered “contract negotiations” with his own school looking for a bigger NIL deal. His current deal reportedly pays $2 million per year. He wanted more. Let that sink in.
The whole situation gets crazier. Iamaleava’s father allegedly shopped him around to other programs—including Oregon—while he was still enrolled at Tennessee. Oregon’s coach Dan Lanning found out and told Tennessee’s Josh Heupel about it. That’s wild. These are supposed to be student-athletes and we have agents shopping them around like free agent baseball players.
Marcus’s Take:
Let’s look at the numbers. In 2023, more than 31,000 college athletes entered the transfer portal. This year it’s even higher. According to Butte Sports, players are using the portal to chase NIL deals, creating bidding wars between programs. Loyalty to a team and school is becoming a relic of the past. Some teams are losing entire rosters year to year.
Ohio State has reportedly handed out $20 million in NIL money. TWENTY MILLION. They’re in the national championship game so you could argue it’s working, but what about the smaller programs that can’t compete with that? Schools like Tulane or Boise State—how are they supposed to build anything sustainable when a bigger school can just buy their best players?
The 2025 NCAA Tournament made this painfully clear. By the Sweet 16, the only teams left came from Power Four conferences. ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith blamed NIL and the transfer portal directly, saying if this continues it will be “the death of college basketball.” No more Cinderella runs. No more mid-major magic. Just the rich schools buying championships.
Real Talk:
Here’s what I think the solution looks like: Keep NIL—athletes deserve to profit from their name and image. But add some guardrails. Maybe limit the number of transfers without penalty. Maybe require academic progress to maintain NIL eligibility. Maybe create some kind of salary cap system so Ohio State can’t outspend everyone 10 to 1.
President Trump signed an executive order this year called “Saving Collegiate Athletes” that tries to address some of this. It disallows third-party pay-for-play payments while allowing fair market valuations for legitimate deals. Whether that actually changes anything remains to be seen. The NCAA has proven completely incapable of governing this space.
The Other Side:
I played college ball. Not at a high level, but I know what that experience meant to me. The relationships, the discipline, the sense of being part of something bigger than yourself. I worry we’re losing that. I worry college sports is becoming just another professional league but with worse pay and no union protections.
The old system was exploitative. The new system is chaotic. Somewhere in between there’s a model that pays athletes fairly while preserving what makes college sports worth watching. We just haven’t found it yet.
Ard, that’s my take. Feel free to disagree—this is genuinely complicated and I don’t think anyone has all the answers. Including me.
