Money is turning NCAA sports upside down

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In 2021, 363 players entered the NBA draft despite not having graduated from college or never having done so, due to being foreigners. In 2025, the number dropped to 106, of which, due to retirements and second thoughts, only 32 were former college players. What happened, the NBA no longer attracts as much as it once did? Nope: the answer is always the same: money. Over the last five years, money has dramatically changed the landscape of college sports, turning it into a hybrid that appeals to many in the media, many fans, and many players, but has also distorted it in every aspect.

The pattern, for decades, had been the same: for your athletic ability, a university would award you a scholarship, worth upwards of $100,000, and in exchange for the opportunity for a high-level education, you would represent them by taking to the field. A straightforward and even democratic quid pro quo, because it allowed millions of kids who otherwise wouldn't have even dreamed of college to pursue a degree, even though the payout was never fair. In exchange for that concession, colleges and the body that governs them, the NCAA, earned literally billions of dollars from television rights for basketball and, especially, football games. And it is precisely for this reason that the system has been periodically subjected to attacks: for (alleged) exploitation, for the hypocrisy, for example, in defining players as 'student-athletes' when they are, above all, athletes, for the thousand complexities and flaws that would take too long to list here, but which did not undermine the foundation, the rock on which everything was founded: scholarships and the opportunity to build a sporting or professional career in exchange for competitive performances.

But everything changed in 2021: that year, the Supreme Court authorized players to receive compensation for name, image, and likeness rights, or NILs (name, image, and likeness). This decision perhaps followed the lingering 2009 lawsuit filed against the NCAA by Ed O'Bannon, a basketball player (also in Trieste, 1998), for the failure to pay athletes, once they graduated from college and thus from alleged amateurism, precisely those royalties, such as for video games. Immediately after the ruling, consortia (collectives) linked to colleges, though formally independent of them, emerged, creating advertising opportunities for players. These organizations quickly included so-called boosters, successful entrepreneurs who traditionally, with their donations, had subsidized the athletic departments of the universities where they had once been students, but who had often contributed to the system's bad reputation. There are countless, often bizarre and grotesque, stories about the methods many boosters used to help players, in addition to official (and tax-deductible) funding: from fictitious hiring for summer jobs that never took place but were paid handsomely, to visiting the locker room after the game and handing out shower robes to athletes, whose pockets contained envelopes containing hundreds of dollars in "tips," and so on. With the NIL contracts, everything was regularized, but in some cases the situation spiraled out of control, also due to another innovation that the NCAA was effectively forced to implement: the introduction of an online portal through which players can request to change universities and effectively put themselves on the market.

It's clear why we can confidently call it a revolution, a momentous change: a world once founded on amateurism, on the assumption that a coach, once convinced an athlete to accept a scholarship, could count on him for the entire four years of his studies, has become a world in which you can change teams every year and for money, choosing the college whose consortium offers you the best. At that point, obviously, the only difference with pure professionalism is that after a while you're forced to leave college due to the expiration of your competitive terms, but otherwise, if you're not a candidate for a top draft pick and therefore an immediate good contract, it's better to stay in college and earn even more, especially if—as is often the case—you can decide where to play. If someone like St. John's coach Rick Pitino openly says he no longer even wants to rely on players fresh out of high school, preferring to fill the roster with athletes already trained by other colleges (or foreign clubs; FIP president Gianni Petrucci recently said on RadioRai's "Politics in Football" that "many young Italians have also gone to play at American universities. I think it could be a great experience and be beneficial for our national team as well"), then it's clear the old rules no longer apply. This is even more true since July 1 of this year, when, following yet another lawsuit filed against the NCAA, the Court ruled that from now on, colleges themselves can pay athletes up to a maximum of $20.5 million (for the first year). Consortia remain in place, but in theory, any advertising contract exceeding $600 must now be reported for review, which is unlikely given that the appropriate office would have to review and approve tens of thousands of contracts.

But other problems arise: almost exclusively from television rights revenue are football and basketball (men's and women's), and logically, those $20.5 million would go to the members of their respective teams, but that could lead to legal complications due to discrimination. The upheaval remains, further highlighted by the increased competition between colleges and the absolute need for athletic results, which has never been more important. This is evidenced by the fact that three-quarters of the way through the college football season, five top coaches have already been fired. They will receive a total of $169 million in severance packages, a sum their respective colleges are willing to spend to desperately find someone who can improve athletic results, make the team more desirable on the market, and generate additional revenue. Money, as always.

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