Making Millions at Nineteen Comes at a Cost

A few weeks back we talked about NIL, the system that's let college athletes in the US get paid for their own personal brand since 2021, something that had been completely banned for over a century. But the legal change is only half the story. The other half is what all this money is actually doing, both to the kids cashing in and to college sports as a whole.

College sports now go toe-to-toe with the NFL

For years, college sports got treated as a warm-up act, something fun to watch while waiting for the real stars to turn pro. The numbers don't back that up anymore. In the 2025 season, the NFL averaged 18.7 million viewers per game. Ohio State versus Michigan that same year averaged 18.4 million, basically the same. The Rose Bowl hit 23.9 million, and the Cotton Bowl hit 19, both above the NFL's average. It's not that college football wins across the board, but its biggest games go head to head with any given NFL Sunday. And that changes everything about how brands see these kids: they're no longer a cheap bet on the future, they're a real audience right now.

The gap widening between schools

Here's one of the least talked-about effects of all this. The groups that pay players, known as collectives, rely on money from alumni and businesses tied to each school. That means a high school kid, before playing a single college game, can basically calculate how much he's going to make depending on which school he picks. Big schools, with wealthy and highly engaged alumni bases, can offer six or seven figures to a recruit with zero experience. Smaller schools simply can't compete with that. Choosing a college has stopped being just an athletic or academic decision. Now it's also a financial one, calculated in advance, and it's widening the gap between big and small programs faster than ever before.

What this creates inside the locker room itself

I'm veering more into opinion than hard data here, but it's something you hear constantly on college football talk shows, so it's worth thinking through. Inside the same team, two teammates can be training side by side, putting in the exact same effort day after day, with one making millions and the other not seeing a dime. It's easy to imagine that messing with team dynamics in a way that just didn't exist before, back when nobody got paid. You don't need a study to guess that envy, resentment, or just the feeling of playing a completely different game than the guy next to you in the locker room, is a real risk to team chemistry.

Why some players are in no rush to turn pro anymore

It used to be, especially in basketball, that jumping to the draft as soon as possible was almost a financial necessity: there was no way to make money in college, so the sooner you got to a real paycheck, the better. That's changed. Now a player can keep studying, keep playing at the college level, and earn real money off his image at the same time. For a lot of guys, there's just no rush anymore. And that has a ripple effect beyond college itself: pro leagues are getting these kids a little later, a little less hungry for that first paycheck, because that hunger's already been satisfied before they even arrive.

The problem of not knowing what to do with that much money, that young

There's a real risk here that doesn't get nearly enough attention, and it doesn't just affect the kid cashing the checks, it hits the whole family too. A lot of these families have never seen this kind of money in their lives, and it's easy to fall into thinking that pace of income is going to last forever. It won't. Even the careers that do make it to the pros don't last as long as people think: the average NFL career is just 3.3 years. And the numbers afterward are even rougher: a huge share of former NFL players end up in serious financial trouble a few years after retiring, some filing for bankruptcy outright. I

f that happens to guys who actually made it to a pro paycheck, imagine the risk for a nineteen-year-old who's never managed a dollar in his life, suddenly handling hundreds of thousands with zero guidance. Financial education for these kids depends entirely on the school and the state, with huge gaps from one place to another, and a lot of them genuinely don't know where to start. It's such a big problem that the US Senate held a hearing in March 2026 specifically about it, with a title that says it all: don't fumble these kids' future, on the field or off it.

The risk of coasting too early

And here's another thought, more mine than anything backed by hard data anywhere: if a nineteen-year-old is already making what an established pro would make, what real incentive does he have left to keep pushing himself to the limit before he's proven anything at the actual professional level? It's reasonable to think that, for some guys, the hunger that used to come from having nothing guaranteed fades a bit once the money shows up before the results do.

What the legends of the past are saying about this themselves

You don't have to speculate much, because they're saying it themselves. Lonzo Ball and Michael Porter Jr., both established NBA stars, spoke openly about this recently on Porter's podcast, remembering how tight things were financially back in college and doing the math out loud on how much more they could've made if NIL had come along just a few years earlier. They were born, as one of them put it, a few years too soon. Other analyses have run that same exercise with more names: Zion Williamson, according to economist David Berri, would have been worth about $5 million a year at Duke, with a brutal stat to back it up, the day his shoe blew out during a nationally televised game, Nike's stock dropped $1 billion. Johnny Manziel could have been pulling in $35 million according to various analysts. Tim Tebow, somewhere between $22 and $35 million.

And to see just how far this has actually gone, no speculation needed: Arch Manning, the country's most valuable current quarterback, is already making between $5.4 and $6.6 million a year, at the University of Texas at Austin. And Shedeur Sanders, back when he played at the University of Colorado Boulder, used to warm up before games sporting a $350,000 Richard Mille on his wrist.

Why basketball forces players to build their image so much earlier than football does

There's a structural difference between these two sports worth understanding. In basketball, top prospects usually spend just one year in college before jumping to the NBA, so if they want to arrive with a high NIL value, they have to have already built a media presence back in high school, through recruiting rankings and national exposure starting at fifteen or sixteen. In football, on the other hand, a player usually spends three or four years in college before making the jump to the NFL, giving him way more time to go viral, build his brand, and drive up his value while already inside the college system. Two completely different paths to the same kind of money.

What sparks debate in the US is completely normal everywhere else, and has been for generations

It's worth putting this in perspective. In the US, this whole shift is generating Senate hearings, op-eds arguing it's "ruining" college sports, and constant comparisons to an out-of-control pro market. But in the rest of the world, a teenager signing a professional contract and getting paid for their talent is completely normal, and has been for generations. In Spain, the minimum legal age to sign a first professional soccer contract is sixteen, and clubs like Barça have been doing this systematically for decades, with Lamine Yamal as the most recent and high-profile example. In tennis, competing professionally and signing sponsorship deals as a minor is nothing new either. What looks like a radical break from the past in the US is, for a huge chunk of the planet, simply how it's always been done.

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