College football is the second most watched sport in America. Not second behind the NFL. Second in the entire country. On any given Saturday in October, more people are watching college football than are watching the NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS combined. The ratings are staggering. The money is enormous. The stadiums seat over 100,000 people and they sell out every single week.
For most of that history, the people on the field were not allowed to make money from any of it.
That is not a rhetorical point. It was the actual rule. A college football player could not sign an autograph for money. Could not appear in a commercial. Could not accept a meal from a booster without risking their eligibility. The coaches made millions. The athletic directors made millions. The television networks made billions. The conferences made billions. The players got a scholarship and whatever they could quietly pocket without getting caught.
The system held for a hundred years because the people running it were very good at calling it something other than what it was.
What amateurism actually was
The word amateurism in college sports comes from a 19th century English concept that was itself rooted in class. The idea was that sport should be played for love of the game, not money, and that introducing money corrupted the purity of competition. It was also, not coincidentally, a way for wealthy people who did not need to earn money from sport to exclude working-class people who did.
The NCAA adopted amateurism as its governing philosophy and built an entire legal and regulatory framework around it. The argument was that college athletes were students first and that paying them would compromise the educational mission of universities. The fact that those universities were generating hundreds of millions of dollars from athletic programs was, somehow, not considered a compromise of the educational mission.
For decades courts mostly accepted this framing. The NCAA argued it was a private organization with the right to set its own rules. Players who did not like the rules could choose not to play. The scholarship was compensation. The education was the value. Case closed.
The cracks started showing when people began doing the actual math.
The math that broke everything
Alabama's football program generates roughly $120 million in revenue per year. Ohio State, Texas, Georgia, Michigan, all in similar territory. The SEC as a conference distributes over $700 million annually to its member schools. The College Football Playoff, before expansion, paid out around $470 million per year. The new 12-team format generates significantly more.
The players generating all of that revenue were receiving scholarships worth roughly $30,000 to $60,000 per year in room, board, and tuition. Some schools added cost of attendance stipends that brought the total up modestly. The coaches negotiating those scholarships were making $7 to $10 million per year. The athletic directors approving those contracts were making $1 to $2 million.
Nobody who looked at those numbers with fresh eyes could argue that the scholarship was adequate compensation for the value being produced. The NCAA spent years finding people to argue it anyway.
"The coaches still make $9 million. The athletic directors still make $1.5 million. The players get a scholarship and whatever NIL deals they can negotiate on their own. The math has not changed as much as the headlines suggest."
How NIL actually happened
The 2021 Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Alston was technically about education-related benefits, but it cracked the foundation. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence that was essentially an invitation to challenge the entire amateurism model, noting that the NCAA's business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry.
States started passing their own NIL laws. The NCAA, realizing it was about to get completely overrun, changed its rules to allow athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness. Just like that, something that had been explicitly forbidden for a hundred years became legal overnight. No compensation from schools directly. No revenue sharing. Just the ability to sign your own endorsement deals.
For the top players at top programs, NIL changed things significantly. A five-star quarterback at Alabama can now make real money from social media deals, local business endorsements, and appearance fees. Some players at major programs are making seven figures from NIL. The market for elite college football players has become genuinely significant.
For everyone else, it is a lot more modest. The walk-on offensive lineman at a mid-major program is not getting brand deals. The average college football player's NIL income is a few thousand dollars a year, if anything. The system created a market that rewards fame and the athletes who already had the most leverage were the ones who benefited most.
The CFP expansion and who it actually helped
The College Football Playoff expanded from four teams to twelve teams starting in 2024. The stated rationale was access. More schools would have a path to compete for a national championship. The little guys would finally get their shot. College football would be more democratic. Great story.
The actual rationale was money. Twelve teams means more games means more television rights means more revenue. The expansion generates somewhere around $1.3 billion annually, roughly double what the four-team format produced. Every Power conference school gets more money. The conferences get more money. The bowl games tied into the new format get more money.
The players get the same scholarship they were getting before. They get more games, more travel, more physical wear on their bodies. They get a slightly better chance of making the playoff and the exposure that comes with it, which might help their NIL earnings or their NFL draft stock. They do not get a cut of the additional billion dollars their expanded participation generates.
I want to be clear that I think the expanded playoff is genuinely better for the sport as a product. More teams in, more late-season games that matter, better stories. From a pure fan experience standpoint, twelve teams is more fun than four. I am not against it. I am just naming what it was actually about.
Revenue sharing and what comes next
Schools are now beginning to share revenue directly with athletes through a settlement framework that allows up to roughly $20 million per school per year to be distributed to athletes. This is genuinely new. Direct payments from universities to athletes was the last wall of the amateurism model and it has now come down.
But $20 million split across 500 athletes at a major program is $40,000 per athlete on average. The football coach is still making nine million dollars. The distribution within programs heavily favors revenue-generating sports, meaning football and men's basketball players get the most. The walk-on in a non-revenue sport gets very little.
The legal pressure has not stopped. Several cases still working through courts argue directly that college athletes are employees entitled to the full protections that employment status brings. If any of them succeed, the financial model of college football changes fundamentally and fast. The conferences know this. The smarter athletic departments are already positioning for it.
What I keep coming back to is a simple question. If a business generates $120 million in annual revenue and the people doing the core work that produces that revenue receive $40,000 to $60,000 in compensation, how is that structure defended? Not legally. Morally. How does someone look at those numbers and feel comfortable with the arrangement?
The answer, for a hundred years, was amateurism. The players were students. The scholarship was the value. The money was for the institution.
That answer is running out of road. The courts are taking it apart piece by piece. The athletes, now that they have agents and NIL collectives and real legal representation, understand what they are worth in ways previous generations did not. The system is cracking in ways that feel different from the cracks that came before.
The players in school right now may be the last generation for whom the old model applies in anything close to its original form. The coaches making nine million dollars are negotiating against a clock they cannot see clearly but they know is running.
College football will survive this. The sport is too embedded in American culture, too emotionally important to too many people, to disappear. What it will look like on the other side of this reckoning is genuinely unclear. But the reckoning is real and it is happening now.
A hundred years is a long time to run a system designed to keep money away from the people generating it. Eventually it ends. We are watching that ending happen in slow motion right now, and I am not sure the people running the sport have fully accepted what comes next.