The NCAA football championship game didn’t just feature college’s two best teams — it also featured two star quarterbacks, who took big paychecks to change schools before the season.
NIL money, or paying college athletes to use their name, image and likeness, has changed the landscape across all college sports, including right here in Wisconsin at UW-Madison and other state schools.
WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez talks with Wisconsin State Journal's Colten Bartholomew about NIL's impact.
Jimmy Gutierez: So we're coming off an NCAA championship game, and it was an absolute spectacle. A lot of the conversation this season around college sports and particularly college football has been around NIL: name, image and likeness. Can you break down what that means and what it means for college sports?
Colten Bartholomew: Back in July 2021, because some states were about to allow name, image and likeness payments to college athletes—which is basically like an athlete allowing themselves to be used in a sponsorship or posting something on social media and getting paid for it—the NCAA came in and said, OK, no, everybody gets to have NIL opportunities, kind of a blanket thing. If your state had laws that governed it, that’s what you had to go by, but if not, then your school had to set up its own system.
But it’s kind of morphed now into, you gotta have a pretty healthy NIL budget to maintain a roster and keep players on your team. You look at Wisconsin in particular, it’s kind of become a situation where—I'll stick to football—every football player that comes in, part of the equation is, what’s available to me NIL-wise? You’re not just talking about playing time, you’re not just talking about development or getting to the NFL.
There’s also the aspect of how much money is available for all these athletes. There are so many different things you have to unwrap with it because you’ve got the fact that these are mostly public schools. Where is this money coming from? It’s coming from private donors. And I think the toughest thing for these schools and coaches to deal with is that the rules seem to change every six or seven months. Something that wasn’t allowed six months ago becomes allowed, or it goes the other way.
Everybody talks about the shifting landscape, but it’s basically more like every week there’s some type of earthquake or disruption. The ground gets kind of taken out from under your feet, and you have to restart.
All right, so we’re talking about players getting paid. Who exactly is paying the players? And then thinking about that, what does a salary look like when you pay a player? Is there a market rate going for each position or player as well?
Right now, it’s all through third parties. What a lot of schools and donors have done is band together to create what they call collectives. So it’s a lot of big-money donors and grassroots donors contributing to a collective. All this money gets put into a pot and then, kind of with the help of the coaching staff and the school, they figure out how much is gonna go to each player.
Very recently, I think within the last six weeks, someone put out a kind of study into how much players are getting paid and what positions are getting the most in terms of football. But other than that, there is no transparency in this whole NIL world, and I think that’s one of the challenges frustrating coaches.
When we talk about these earthquakes and how things change so fast, a big thing that’s going to change everything is this antitrust lawsuit brought on by former NCAA athletes against the NCAA. They call it House v. NCAA. Several schools are going to have a pool of money, roughly about $21 million, that they’re going to be able to distribute directly from the school to the athletes going forward.
So the entire world is going to change quite a bit. There’s still going to be that piece where athletes are sponsoring things and getting money on top of what schools give them directly. But when you finally feel like you’ve got something settled or you’ve got a system, this settlement’s gonna come in and completely change everybody’s system.

Is that $21 million for every school? Because that feels like a big number for some of these smaller D-I schools that may not have the same infrastructure as, say, Wisconsin. Another question I’m thinking of is what comes next legislatively? Because we’re talking about this lack of transparency, this kind of wild, wild West nature of everything. I’m guessing we’re not done on that front either.
Yeah, the $21 million number is basically going to be a salary cap. So not every school has to pay that amount of money because that is quite a bit of money for some of the smaller NCAA-related schools or some of the lower levels of Division I that just don’t have that type of financial flexibility and freedom. However, the Wisconsins of the world, the Big Ten, and the SEC-type schools—they’re all going to be spending the full $21 million. It’s also going to be distributed throughout all athletes, not just football, at a particular school.
But to your other question about how this is going to get regulated and what needs to happen, the NCAA, since the end of 2020, when initial NIL state laws started popping up, has been begging Congress to come up with some type of nationwide legislation.
And the tough part about that is Congress—so many of them aren’t really tied to college football or college sports and don’t have a whole lot of knowledge. But then every time one bill takes a step forward, another one gets introduced. That’s kind of the tough part about asking Congress for help—this isn’t the most efficient governing body either.
Does NIL apply to all college sports as well? I remember seeing something about the Wisconsin women’s volleyball team just losing a stud defender, so I’m curious who this applies to—which sports and which schools.
Oh yeah, absolutely. NIL applies to all college sports, and it’s not even just Division I—it’s all the way up and down Divisions I, II and III, and all NCAA sports. Football and men’s basketball are at the top of the table in terms of spending, and obviously, there are a lot more football players, so it’s a higher spend there. But volleyball is a good example here in Wisconsin.
Yeah, that’s a big consideration, and I think volleyball and women’s basketball are probably the top two NIL spends in terms of women’s sports in the NCAA, in part because they are the two highest spectator sports. It kind of circumvents Title IX because it’s third parties deciding who gets paid and how much, but then the school is also a little bit involved because it facilitates the conversation between the collective of donors and the athletes. So it’s definitely murky water that the NCAA hasn’t completely answered yet.
College sports would not be what it is without fans. The NCAA, the year after the pandemic, was a $1 billion-plus business and has continued to increase revenue since that point. Coaches in multiple sports are bringing home multimillion-dollar salaries. And there’s been a conversation for a while about paying college players professionally for creating these very professional revenues. But with the introduction of NIL, it’s not just the schools and players who are having a tough time adjusting, but also the fans. How are you seeing fans responding to these earthquakes that NIL has provided to NCAA and NCAA sports?
I’m going to speak in generalities here because I don’t know what the exact stats are, but the wave kind of turned in about 2018 or 2019, when a lot of people agreed with the idea that college athletes should probably be paid in some capacity on top of their scholarship because of the amount of revenue that was coming in.
And you mentioned just how big these industries were getting in terms of college football, college basketball, and the TV deals that continue to pile up money for these schools. But I think what’s happening now is a confluence with the transfer portal becoming wide open and combining it with NIL.
That’s when you get all the tampering and, “Oh, I can get paid more here, so I’m going to leave the school I’m at now.” And that’s where I think the fans are really starting to lose some of the passion they once had. One of the unique things about college sports was watching players come in as freshmen, grow through their sophomore and junior years, and then, by the time they’re seniors, fans feel like they’ve known them for six or seven years of their lives.
Right now, 20 to 25% of the [Badgers football] roster year in and year out consists of transfers. So there’s just not that same type of connection between the player and the fan that used to exist in college sports.
We’ve talked about the collective and these private donors coming together to help direct funds and pay players, but as a whole, how are you seeing Wisconsin set up to move forward in the NIL era?
In November, they released some estimates of how funded each collective was for the top [roughly] 75 schools, and Wisconsin was in the middle, toward the bottom of the middle.
I think they’ve got an adequate structure. The biggest part is that there’s a model in college sports where you have this really, really rich donor who funds all this stuff and puts their name on a bunch of buildings. Ted Kellner has been that guy for Wisconsin for a long time. But I don’t think there’s enough of that group for Wisconsin to continue hitting them up for money every time they need a quarterback, a point guard, or whatever. So I think they’re going to have to continue trying to expand their donor base.
The $21 million salary cap, or the direct payment to players, is going to help quite a bit because I think you’re not going to see such a turnover of the middle of your roster every year because of NIL.
One of the things Wisconsin is trying to balance is the fan turnoff we talked about. I don’t think a lot of their older fan base enjoys hearing that the shooting guard for the basketball team is making X amount of dollars. But the problem is the younger fan—and the next shooting guard, point guard, or star athlete you’re trying to recruit out of high school—they want to know these things. They don’t mind seeing it out in the press before they’re getting recruited.
So I think that’s a really tough water for them to navigate. They need the older fan base because that’s typically who’s in the stadiums, still coming to games, and donating money.
That’s a big challenge coming up for Chris McIntosh and the athletic department—how they thread that needle without losing the older fan base they still rely on while also trying to grow their donor base and ensure people know Wisconsin is trying to stay competitive in this evolving landscape.