In college sports’ big money era, here’s where the dollars go

What wins college football championships? A potent defense? An explosive offense? In the era of name, image and likeness, it is money.

Lots of it.

It can cost as much as $10.5 million for a title-contending starting offense and defense in the new Power Four conferences. The big-ticket item, of course, lines up behind the center. A blue-chip quarterback in a Power Four conference — schools including Alabama, Michigan and Washington — can expect to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars annually through name, image and likeness, or NIL, deals. A quarterback in the Southeastern Conference can bring in more than $1 million, on average.

And that is merely an average. Ask the Texas Longhorns.

Their starter, Quinn Ewers, has NIL deals worth nearly $2 million annually, according to the website On3, which tracks deals for college athletes. Arch Manning, his backup, who hails from one of football’s royal families, has deals worth more than $3 million. Georgia’s quarterback, Carson Beck, brings in enough that he recently bought a Lamborghini that retails for $270,000.

Between the cash pouring into athletic programs via collectives — a fancy name for boosters who funnel much of the NIL money to players — and more lenient transfer rules, a sort of eBay to buy athletes has been created, transforming how powerhouse teams are built.

“It’s whoever wants to pay, the most money raised, the most money to buy the most players, is going to have the best opportunity to win,” Nick Saban, the recently retired football coach at the University of Alabama, told Congress in March.

But how do athletes, coaches and administrators determine the going rates? Many consult the Black Book, a kind of Zillow for college sports, which details an athlete’s expected annual earnings, and, in the case of sports including football and men’s and women’s basketball, even breaking them down by position and conference.

— Opendorse, the company behind the Black Book, projects around $1.7 billion in transactions in the NIL market this year.

— Of that, 80% will come through collectives including Texas’ Team One Foundation and the Classic City Collective at the University of Georgia. But even that is an incomplete picture of a rapidly changing NIL frontier awash with money.

— There is no universal requirement for athletes to disclose how much they are being paid. Less than a third of the money that student athletes are making is publicly known, according to Opendorse.

Still, the Black Book is a must have for university collectives and collegiate athletic officials, as well as the lawyers involved in House v. NCAA, an antitrust case in which the Black Book and all Opendorse data from 2016 through 2022 was subpoenaed. The sides recently agreed to a $2.8 billion settlement. If a federal judge approves it, schools will be allowed to set aside around $20 million per year, beginning in the fall of 2025, to pay athletes. (The proposal also calls for a program by which athletes’ NIL deals could be reviewed.)

The Black Book, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times, shows that, even as football remains the dominant sport financially, sports such as women’s basketball have become increasingly lucrative.

In her final season at the University of Iowa, Caitlin Clark sold out arenas, increased television ratings and had sponsorship deals valued at $3 million.

Clark may have been the sport’s unicorn, but title-contending programs are expected to spend more than $730,000 on their starting five, with guards being the most valued at $225,000.

The NIL era has also created a new generation of entrepreneurs and given them a more concrete sense of their earning potential. For instance, Alex Glover, a star volleyball player who recently concluded her career at Southern Methodist University, made more than $100,000 from sponsors who wanted to be associated with her Instagram video series, called “Day-In-The-Life of a D1 Volleyballer.”

— Olivia Dunne, a gymnast at Louisiana State University, has become something of a celebrity in recent years. Dunne, who goes by Livvy, has leveraged a large social media following — she has over 5 million followers on Instagram — to notch deals with major brands including Nautica and Vuori.

— Paige Bueckers, a standout basketball star at the University of Connecticut, similarly has millions of followers on social media and has signed NIL deals with Nike, Gatorade and Verizon.

Top NIL earners in women’s gymnastics usually make around $20,000 annually, about 10 times as much as their male counterparts, according to data from Opendorse. Besides the major men’s sports — football, basketball and baseball — collegiate female athletes typically earn more than male athletes in the same sport.

“By nature, athletes are disciplined and purpose-driven,” said Blake Lawrence, the co-founder of Opendorse. “What has been really cool to see is how many athletes on our platform, especially the women, lean into the opportunities to be creative and build a brand. They don’t want to get paid just for going to practice and games.”

Lawrence, a former starting linebacker at the University of Nebraska, began Opendorse in 2012 to help his former teammate Prince Amukamara monetize his brand after he entered the NFL as a first-round draft pick with the New York Giants. Lawrence understood the commitment required of college athletes and anticipated that the pay-to-play model was coming sooner rather than later. More than a decade on, some 150,000 athletes have used his platform to grow their name, image and likeness revenues.

The company compiles its numbers based on previous NIL marketing deals signed by a large cross section of football and basketball players and competitors in the so-called nonrevenue Olympic sports. Clients that pay for the information include university athletic departments, their collectives and athlete agencies.

“I know what it takes to be an athlete and wanted to create something like Expedia or Zillow that took the mystery out of getting good value and putting that power in the hands of athletes,” said Lawrence, who offers tutorials on topics such as marketing and pay benchmarks on his Instagram feed.

“This is all new to them. I see six contracts a second and want them armed with information to make what could be life-changing decisions.”

Like the U.S. economy, college sports have a hierarchy, and its “1 percenters” are the so-called Power conferences like the SEC and the Big Ten.

The expected annual NIL compensation for a top-10-earning football player at any position is $216,000 for the Big Ten and $565,000 in the SEC, which is more than three times the annual earnings of $159,000 in the Big 12.

The SEC’s stature is even more pronounced this year. Former Big 12 powerhouses Texas and Oklahoma have joined the conference, which is made up of state universities that have long taken football seriously and invested heavily in athletics.

The top-10-earning SEC players at every position — except for tight ends and specialists — earn more annually on average than players in any other Power Four conference. A running back in the SEC can now expect to make about half a million dollars, almost as much as a Big 12 quarterback. Offensive and defensive linemen in the SEC do even better, tallying upward of $700,000.

For the smaller, so-called Group of Five conferences, which include Conference USA and the Mountain West, the new NIL environment puts football championships even further out of reach. The average value of Top 25 players at any position at schools such as Liberty (part of Conference USA) or Boise State (in the Mountain West) is just under $50,000.

The money is lucrative in the top tier of men’s and women’s basketball, as well: A starting five of Top-25-earning men’s basketball players costs about $3.3 million, with forwards on the top of the pay scale making around $750,000. And while women’s basketball earnings are comparatively much lower, top-level women’s players have had substantial growth since last year, with pay across all positions up by $30,000.

For many athletes — those who aren’t top stars in the marquee sports — the NIL era is different, though no less exciting. Zoe Ledet, a 19-year-old sprinter at West Virginia State University, joined TikTok in 2020, at the height of COVID-era teenage boredom. She said she quickly amassed a following for “funny skits, hair care, you know, relatable stuff” and now has 1.7 million followers on the platform and nearly 300,000 on Instagram. Still, Ledet never thought brands would be interested in working with her as an athlete.

“I knew that big track athletes like Sha’Carri could get deals with Nike, but I didn’t know there were smaller deals to be had,” said Ledet, referring to Olympic sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson.

Last year, during her freshman season, Ledet was approached by BE Collective+, an organization that supports student athletes from historically Black colleges and universities in the NIL market. She signed with the group and had NIL deals worth about $3,500 in her first year.

For Ledet, those earnings aren’t life-changing money, but she has been able to use platforms such as the BE Collective+ and Opendorse to gain a better sense of her value in the new marketplace. Her followers now ask her to post more about track and to share videos from meets, content that she hopes will in turn lead to more NIL deals.

“There are a lot of athletes bigger than me, of course, but NIL has allowed athletes like me to widen our platform and get more recognition, too,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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