The Headlines
The Battle for Equitable Collegiate Sports Pay
Now that colleges can pay their student-athletes, NCAA chief touts new online platform to help them shop around schools.
By Jamaal Abdul-Alim
“I’ve talked to thousands of student athletes. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to one who wants to be an employee."
Talking points
- The NCAA has launched NIL Go, an online platform to help Division I student-athletes assess potential financial deals, following a landmark $2.8 billion antitrust settlement.
- NIL Go aims for transparency by sharing anonymized Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deal data and tracking payments to enforce a 22.5% revenue-sharing cap. However, experts and player advocates fear potential collusion and price-fixing, challenging its benefit to athletes.
- Is NIL Go a benefit or a risk? While the NCAA champions its transparency, player advocates argue it’s a tool for collusion that could harm athletes’ earning potential.
With college athletes in the United States now able to share in the revenue related to their sports, many may feel enticed to choose colleges and universities where they believe they can score the best deal.
But how can they be assured that they’re not just being sold a dream?
If you ask Charlie Baker, the former Massachusetts Governor who now heads the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, the answer is NIL Go. That’s the name of a new online platform being set up through the newly-established College Sports Commission. The platform is meant for players in the top division of the NCAA, known as Division I, or simply “D-1”, to see more detailed financial information about what kind of deals they’re likely to land if they play a particular position in a particular sport at a particular school.
The platform, and the commission that oversees it, arose out of an antitrust lawsuit settlement known as the House settlement. The settlement pays $2.8 billion in damage claims to former athletes and permits schools to directly pay student-athletes as of July 1, 2025. Going forth, the case concerns the 150,000 or so student-athletes in the US who play D-1 sports, mostly football and basketball.
“There's going to be more data and more transparency and more process accountability than there's ever been,” Baker tells journalists during a late July talk at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “I think that's a really good thing.”
The website, which is restricted to college athletes and their agents, will rely on information from actual endorsement deals, known as Name, Image and Likeness, or NIL deals, to produce anonymised data for participating schools that want to do institutional NIL deals. The website will also track payments to student-athletes so that schools can stay within the revenue-sharing cap. The cap is set at 22.5 percent of the average revenue among schools in various Division 1 conferences within the NCAA.
But if you ask scholars and player advocates, the NIL Go database is not the positive development that Baker makes it out to be. Rather, they say, by requiring student-athletes to report their NIL deals to the College Sports Commission, the new web platform could undercut competition and lead to price-fixing.
“That database is not a friend of the athletes,” Ramogi Huma, Executive Director of the National College Players Association, a California-based nonprofit organisation that represents student athletes, tells QS Insights Magazine in a phone interview.
“It's a tool of potential collusion and it can violate a number of state laws,” Huma says, noting that several state laws that govern NIL deals prohibit placing limits on how much compensation a student-athlete can receive.
Asked if he saw anything beneficial about NIL Go, Huma says: “No, there's nothing positive about the database in my opinion.”
Huma isn’t the only one who sees problems with NIL Go.
“College athletes should be concerned about another aim of NIL Go, and that is its intent to curb payments from related entities such as collectives,” says David P. Weber, Associate Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, in reference to team supporters known as “boosters.”
“Their hope is to create more parity by avoiding teams paying extra for players, essentially avoiding pay-for-play through NIL,” agrees Neal Ternes, Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Northern Illinois University. He says the idea is to make it so a school “can’t buy more athletes using NIL money and pay over market value for them.”
Ternes says it’s unclear as to how fair market value will be determined. He also worries about whether college athletes’ data will be adequately protected through NIL Go.
Weber says the public needs more information, such as NIL deal approval or denial rates, how collective-driven deals have fared in comparison to other third-party deals, and how many deals are being renegotiated or resubmitted, in order to assess the usefulness of NIL Go.
“This information will be key to athletes’ earning potential,” Weber says.
In his talk at the National Press Club, Baker touched on a range of related issues, such as whether or not college athletes want to be classified as employees. Baker says the vast majority do not.
“I’ve talked to thousands of student athletes. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to one who wants to be an employee,” Baker says.
“What they really want is to be students who play a sport. And the reason for that is even among the most significant programmes, a lot of student-athletes don’t think they're ever gonna play professionally, and they view their opportunity to play that sport, and perhaps receive NIL money for doing that, as a really great thing
“They know at the end of the day they're going to need to get a job and launch and they don’t want this athletic thing to mean more than their time as a student.”