Heart to Heart: NIL’s effect on collegiate athletes
Name, image, likeness. You’ve probably heard about NIL alongside phrases like “game-changing” and “a long time coming,” but this massive shift in the world of collegiate athletics comes with more baggage behind the scenes.
Let’s start from the beginning. NIL has been in the works for decades, with cases stacking up against the NCAA’s strict student-before-athlete mindset. Athletes Jeremy Bloom, Ed O’Bannon and Shawne Alston were just a few of the big names that helped push the issue of fair compensation to the forefront of the collegiate sports world.
Prior to NIL, the ideas that the NCAA was enforcing were outdated and unfair, as collegiate athletes make billions of dollars for their universities by succeeding in their respective sports.
In 2019, California became the first state to pass a law enabling collegiate athletes to be paid through NIL rules. The Fair Pay to Play Act inspired similar movements in states all over the United States, and the new policy, enacted July 1, 2021, allows any NCAA student-athlete to be compensated for their name, image and likeness.
The benefits of these legal changes are already being reaped by athletes all over the country. College athletes earned a collective $917 million in just one year of NIL, with football and basketball players accounting for a whopping 67% of all NIL compensation.
Despite this substantial step forward, the discrepancies between athletes just keep growing. The average Division I athlete has received just under $4,000 in NIL payouts in the law’s first year, compared to big name athletes like Alabama quarterback Bryce Young and LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne, who, combined, have made over two million dollars through NIL compensation alone.
The key to the cash? Followers.
Dunne is reported to be one of the most-followed collegiate athletes, currently standing at 3.7 million followers on Instagram and 7.3 million followers on TikTok. For brands looking to sponsor young people in the collegiate sports space, there is no better marketing strategy for young athletes than social media.
The downside to this reality is a harsh one: if you don’t market the hell out of yourself on social media, you won’t attract the attention of the companies that will fill your pockets. As if collegiate athletes don’t have enough on their plate as is.
This social media marketing strategy, like NIL as a whole, comes with some baggage. Social media is known to be dangerous for young adults in terms of mental health. Increased use of social media increases the likelihood that an individual will develop anxiety, depression and feelings of loneliness. The reason social media is forced down young athletes’ throats is clear: money.
The opportunity to finally reap the rewards that have been fought for decades is too great to pass up, especially for Gen Z TikTokers and influencers who innately understand how to succeed on the small screens that seem to be sewn to our hands at birth.
But this generation doesn’t see the long-term. We live in the moment, sometimes for the better, but we also live in the moments of every person around us. We live in the moments of every person we’ve stumbled into the bathroom with at a party, every person we went to high school with, every friend-of-a-friend we’re too scared to unfollow because they were really sweet all those years ago.
We absorb so much content every day that it’s a mystery how our brains don’t explode when we finally close our eyes at night. And, now, the incentive to this absorption of content is tangible. It’s money. And that’s what makes the whole NIL machine work … for a lucky few.
The student-athletes with the followers and the dollars represent a very small portion of the total student-athlete population. It’s no secret that this version of NIL is simply a bandaid over a bullet hole.
I’m not saying we should get rid of NIL altogether. The benefits that it has had for the select athletes who have taken over the media landscape are undeniable and life-changing. However, we cannot pursue a discourse around NIL without acknowledging the fact that it should be a temporary solution, not a concrete answer, to the problem of accurate athlete compensation.
Dana Hammerstrom is a sophomore writing about the mental health of collegiate athletes, as well as the emotional pressures they face, in her column, “Heart to Heart.”