College football built a billion dollar industry on the idea that the people doing the work should not be paid for it. Here is how that happened, who kept it going, and why it is finally starting to fall apart.
In the fall of 2022, the University of Alabama football program generated approximately $108 million in revenue. Its head coach, Nick Saban, was paid $9.75 million. The athletic director made somewhere in the range of $1.5 million. The television rights deal that broadcast Alabama games into millions of homes was worth hundreds of millions to the SEC over its duration.
The players who made all of that possible were on scholarship. Room, board, tuition, and a small stipend. For most of them the dollar value of that scholarship, generous as it sounds, represented a fraction of what they produced for the institution.
This was not an oversight. It was a system. And it took almost a hundred years to crack.
The idea that college athletes should not be paid goes back to the early 1900s. At the time college football was already wildly popular and already attracting criticism for the way universities were bending rules to recruit talented players. Schools were paying athletes under the table, offering jobs that did not require work, and doing whatever else it took to win games that were selling tickets and building institutional prestige.
The NCAA was founded in 1906 primarily to address the sport's violence problem. Players were dying on the field at alarming rates and Theodore Roosevelt had threatened federal intervention if the sport did not clean itself up. But as the organization evolved its focus shifted from safety to amateurism, and amateurism became the philosophical foundation on which the entire economic structure of college sports was built.
The logic was simple and elegant. College athletes were students first. They were participating in sports as part of their educational experience. Paying them would corrupt that purity, transform them into professionals, and undermine the educational mission of the institutions they represented.
What the logic conveniently ignored was that the institutions themselves were not operating as educational nonprofits when it came to football. They were building stadiums, signing television deals, hiring coaches at salaries that dwarfed most corporate executives, and extracting enormous financial value from the sport. The purity argument applied only to the people on the field. Everyone else in the building was getting paid.
College football was popular before television. After television it became something else entirely. The first NCAA television contract in 1952 was worth $1.14 million. By the 1980s those numbers were climbing into the tens of millions. By the time the conferences started negotiating their own deals in the 1990s and 2000s the money had become genuinely staggering.
The SEC Network launched in 2014 and changed the math for every school in the conference overnight. The deal with ESPN guaranteed SEC schools a minimum annual distribution that dwarfed what most programs had ever seen. The Big Ten followed with its own network. The Pac-12 tried and failed, which turned out to be a preview of the conference's eventual collapse.
Through all of it the players received nothing beyond their scholarships. The argument was still the same one from 1906. These were students. This was education. The fact that the educational experience now involved performing in front of a hundred thousand people in a stadium named after a corporation while the conference collected $400 million a year from a television network was not considered relevant to the philosophical question.
The history of college athletics is also the history of the people who tried to change it and what the NCAA did to them.
Ed O'Bannon was a forward on the UCLA basketball team that won the national championship in 1995. In 2009 he walked into a sporting goods store, picked up a video game, and saw himself. His likeness, his number, his build, his playing style. In the game. Without his permission and without compensation.
He sued. The case took years and went through multiple courts. He won an injunction against certain NCAA restrictions. He lost on the broader question of whether players should receive a share of television revenues. The legal fees consumed much of his adult life. He said afterward that he would do it again.
Around the same time Northwestern football players attempted to unionize. The National Labor Relations Board ruled in their favor at the regional level, determining that scholarship athletes were essentially employees of the university. The full board reversed the decision on procedural grounds without ruling on the merits. The unionization effort collapsed. The players who led it were celebrated in some quarters and quietly pushed out of others.
"Every time someone got close the system found a way to close the door. The NCAA was very good at winning the battles while losing the argument."
In 2021 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the NCAA in a case about education-related benefits. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence that went further than the ruling required, essentially calling the NCAA's amateurism model a cartel and suggesting it would not survive future legal scrutiny.
The NCAA, reading the room, announced that it would allow athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness effective July 1, 2021. NIL was not the result of the NCAA having a change of heart. It was the result of the NCAA calculating that NIL was preferable to what came next if they kept fighting.
What followed was a genuine transformation of how college sports operate. Players began signing endorsement deals. Collectives formed to pool donor money and pay athletes directly. The transfer portal, which had existed in limited form before, became a free agency market as players used their new leverage to find better situations.
Coaches who had complained for decades about instability in their own profession suddenly understood what instability felt like from the other side.
NIL is real. The money some players are making is real. But the fundamental structure of college football has not changed as much as the headlines suggest.
There is still no revenue sharing. The SEC distributed over a billion dollars to its member schools last year. The players who generated that revenue received none of it through any formal mechanism. What they got was the ability to make deals on the side, which is better than nothing and considerably less than what a labor share model would provide.
There is still no union. College athletes cannot collectively bargain. They cannot negotiate as a group over working conditions, practice hours, medical coverage, or any of the other things that employees in every other industry take for granted.
There is still no pension or long-term healthcare for players whose bodies break down doing a violent sport for four years in their physical prime.
The coaches still make $9 million a year. The athletic directors still make $1.5 million. The television networks still write nine-figure checks to the conferences. The players still get a scholarship and a meal plan and whatever NIL deals they can negotiate on their own.
The legal pressure on the NCAA has not let up since the 2021 Supreme Court ruling. Several cases working through the courts now argue directly that college athletes are employees and are entitled to the legal protections that come with that status. If any of those cases succeed the financial model of college football changes fundamentally and almost immediately.
The conferences know this. The schools know this. Some of them are already positioning for a world in which revenue sharing is required rather than optional. The SEC and Big Ten, the two conferences with the most money, would survive that transition relatively well. Most of the others would not.
College football has been one of the most profitable sports businesses in America for decades. It built that profitability on a legal and philosophical framework that most labor economists consider indefensible and that the courts are slowly dismantling.
The players who are in school right now may be the last generation for whom the current system applies in its current form. The ones who come after them may inherit something that looks very different.
A hundred years is a long time to run a con. But it does eventually end.
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