Pay to Play: How Money Transformed College Athletics
In 2021, the NCAA first allowed college athletes to be paid. In just a few years, athletes in multiple sports were being treated as assets. They were guaranteed payouts, performance clauses, and buyouts if they transferred.
The road to NIL started in 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Board of Regents. The court decided that the NCAA could not control the television rights of its member schools. The decision treated college sports as a commercial market which would boom. Schools and coaches got rich, but the athletes who made the product possible were told they were still amateurs.
NIL was sold as the long-overdue fix. Athletes could finally earn from their own names, images, and likenesses. But the money that followed has behaved less like a wage and more like a market. Players are now valued on projected performance, social reach, and injury risk. Top tier athletes like Arch Manning and Jeremiah Smith have commanded estimated NIL valuations exceeding $3 million dollars a year, proving that star players are now priced like professional players.
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Scholars call this financialization. That is when money and markets take over something that used to run on other values. NIL turned the college athlete into a tradable asset, a process the 1984 ruling started. The question is who profits from that shift and who carries the risk.
It happened through a chain of court rulings, with each loosening the one before it. Board of Regents turned college football into a bidding market, but athletes still couldn’t be paid. O’Bannon v. NCAA (2014) found the NCAA had broken antitrust law by blocking athletes from sharing in licensing revenue. Then NCAA v. Alston (2021) ruled unanimously that the NCAA couldn’t cap education-related benefits, and Justice Kavanaugh warned in his concurrence that the NCAA’s business model was on shaky legal ground.
Almost overnight, a whole market grew around college sports. Transfer rules let athletes switch schools like free agents every year, booster collectives pooled cash to sign recruits, and agents began putting price tags on players based on their market value. By 2025, the House v. NCAA settlement took it even further, allowing schools to pay athletes directly from their own budgets. This system was unplanned. Each ruling removed another rule, and money moved into the space it left behind.
Baseball had its own version of this in the 1970s. The reserve clause bound players to their teams for life until the 1975 Messersmith-McNally arbitration ruling opened free agency, and, like Alston and House, it turned a controlled labor system into a market. Salaries soared and players became assets surrounded by agents and long-term contracts. But baseball’s players had a union, led by Marvin Miller, that negotiated pensions and a share of revenue.
NIL mainly profits the schools, the collectives, and the agents. The athletes are the ones who can get hurt, get traded, or get stuck in a bad contract, and most of them are young and negotiating on their own. Baseball players had Marvin Miller and a union to do that for them. College athletes don’t have anyone like that yet.
