WAYNE KNUCKLES: They Broke College Sports & They Did It Fast

I've been watching college athletics for a long time.

Long enough to remember when a kid's scholarship, room, board, tuition, books, was considered a pretty good deal. Long enough to remember when the term "student-athlete" wasn't a punchline.

That was over four years ago.

In 2021, the NCAA opened the door to NIL, Name, Image and Likeness, deals. The idea was reasonable enough. Let kids profit off their own brand. Sign some autographs, do a local car commercial, maybe shill protein powder on Instagram.

Nobody mentioned $12 million.

That's what Michigan's NIL collective reportedly offered to land an 18-year-old high school quarterback named Bryce Underwood. Reports placed the deal somewhere between $10.5 million and $12 million over four years, before the kid ever took a college snap.

They reportedly brought in Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and one of the richest men on the planet, along with Tom Brady and Dave Portnoy, to help recruit a teenager out of Belleville, Michigan.

Tom Brady. Dave Portnoy. Recruiting a high schooler.

This is what we've built.

Underwood had already committed to LSU. Michigan came in with the reported NIL package, and he flipped. You can't blame the kid. You can't even blame Michigan, not entirely. They were playing by the rules everybody agreed to.

The rules are insane.

At one point, Arch Manning's NIL valuation was reported north of $6 million before he had even become Texas's full-time starting quarterback. The backup quarterback at Texas was being valued like a seasoned professional athlete.

There's a basketball player at BYU, freshman phenom AJ Dybantsa, tied to NIL deals reportedly worth between $4 million and nearly $7 million.

A freshman.

One report noted that, based on NIL valuations, sixteen college football players were valued at more than Brock Purdy's $870,000 NFL salary during his Super Bowl season with the San Francisco 49ers.

Sit with that.

The starting quarterback of a Super Bowl team had a lower salary than the projected NIL value of sixteen college players.

And look, I understand the argument on the other side. These programs rake in billions. The coaches make obscene money. Somebody was always cashing in, just never the players. There's logic there. I get it.

But we've skipped straight past fair and landed somewhere that makes no sense.

Seventeen-year-old recruits are now reportedly showing up with lists of NIL expectations and financial demands before they'll even visit campuses.

Seventeen.

I covered high school football kids who couldn't afford new cleats. Who shared practice jerseys. Who were one bad grade away from losing the only thing keeping them pointed in the right direction.

Nobody handed them a list.

The whole thing was supposed to even the playing field a little. Instead we've got billionaires in bidding wars over teenagers and a transfer portal that makes free agency look stable. Recruiting analysts now talk about top prospects more like investment opportunities than athletes.

That sentence ought to keep somebody up at night.

Four years.

That's all it took to turn a scholarship and a shot at a degree into the minor leagues with better marketing.

I don't know exactly where this ends. But I know it won't end quietly.

Wayne Knuckles covered sports for newspapers in PIneville and Middlesboro for over a decade. He currently publishes a free weekly newsletter focused on Appalachia. You can sign up at thewaynetrain.com.