Beyond the Big Deals
Non-NIL student-athlete perspectives on NIL at Michigan
—By Daniel Murphy and Eric Yang
“Name, Image and Likeness really only affects the big sports,” says Logan Zucker, a junior at the University of Michigan and member of the swim team. “I think there’s one or two people on the swim team who make a moderate amount of money.”
Zucker and countless others make up the majority of student athletes who have witnessed Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) transform sports like Football and Basketball, while leaving their teams largely unaffected. Since the NCAA passed NIL in 2021, news coverage has focused on the athletes who have signed record deals. Other athlete perspectives on NIL, however, have been largely overlooked.
What is Name, Image and Likeness?
NIL refers to a student athlete’s right to earn money from their personal brand. The NCAA, the nonprofit athletics organization which regulates 60% of colleges nationwide, reversed its long standing policy barring this type of earnings in 2021. Previously, top athletes were required to wait until professional careers to begin earning off of their talent.
At the time of NIL’s passage, commissioner Mark Emmert described NIL as one way in which the NCAA can better fulfill its goal of serving student athletes.
Students take advantage of NIL by signing contracts with whichever sponsors seek to advertise through their brand. Similar to professional sports, sponsors and athletes are joined through middlemen; on the athlete’s side, this is a sports agent. Because athletes are busy training for their sport, hiring a career agent outsources the sponsor search and allows them to focus on building their brand. In return, agents are typically paid a commission on each deal. These agents can be a great source of revenue for star athletes; however, it can be difficult for athletes with smaller followings to find an agent.
Universities and institutions like the University of Michigan have to embrace the new rules and regulations and do the best they can to maintain athletic excellence. Cyrus Raiszadeh, a senior philosophy major and student Michigan Football Defensive Manager, states, “NIL has made it essential for schools to offer competitive financial agreements with players.”
Fortunately, here at Michigan, athletes have access to Assistant Athletic Director for NCAA rules and NIL education Danielle Davison. As a staff member of Michigan Athletics, she provides athletes with the information and resources needed to start earning off their brands. Students who enter school are most concerned with excelling on the field. They don’t necessarily understand the ins and outs of NIL or have time to set things up. Just choosing an agent to manage their affairs can be a difficult process.
“They need help trying to figure out what agent they should sign with. Or they’ll just send me the contracts ahead of time so I can review them to make sure that there’s no issues that would jeopardize their eligibility,“ Davison says. “I’m a jack of all trades.”
According to Davison, education in NIL is sought out by all athletes. Even those who don’t necessarily earn off it today reach out to ask about earning off their brand in the future. Davison says she teaches skills from graphic design to parsing contracts, all of which may be useful later in life, regardless of whether an athlete goes pro.
For those who do use NIL, an understanding of taxes and the legal environment is a must. “We’re going to help you understand how to pay your taxes. We’re going to provide you with legal services.” Davison says of her students.
Different athletes, Davison says, have different needs. Football players reach out to ask about their contracts and gain legal advice. Same with basketball. Players in other sports actually reach out to her more often, but she says this is because they have a harder time gaining contacts in the NIL space.
Most athletes look to take advantage of NIL opportunities. Who then, actually earns from NIL?
What the data says
In 2024 the New York Times published an investigative piece which explored where exactly NIL dollars are made. They provided a table of average annual earnings for the top-50 athletes in each position. For some sports, it was an average for all positions.
Top football positions began the list in a wide range from $90K to $1M. Top basketball positions fell within another large range of $500k to $700K, whereas baseball landed at $70K. After this, earnings dropped sharply. Top cross-country and track athletes fell under $20K, whereas swimmers like Zucker come in at just $5K.
The table reveals not only an uneven distribution between sports, but also within them. For football, nearly all positions are listed in order from most to least lucrative. The table begins with quarterback at over $1M and ends with tight end at over $90K. Sports like cross-country and swimming, however, show the average for all athletes because most positions do not earn anything. As Zucker noted, the Michigan swim team has one or two moderate earners. Most other athletes, including Zucker, do not earn from NIL. The data, it turns out, paints a much different picture than the media headlines.
Furthermore, a 2024 Sports Illustrated article reported the median NIL earnings for athletes across all three divisions to be just $480, while the median NIL deal was just $62. Over 37% of those deals were in football.
These averages provide a picture of the full NIL earnings distribution, complementing the New York Times data on upper tail earnings. Here, one can get a true understanding of the vast earnings inequality between the biggest names and tens of thousands of others.
When it comes to male/female earnings, the disparity is sharp. Forbes reports that among the twelve schools which report NIL earnings by gender, men have earned $92 million to just $19 million for women. The source of this difference is, of course, sports viewership, but it goes to show another dimension of inequality in NIL earnings.
Clearly, NIL benefits a select few. How then, has it otherwise affected athletes at Michigan?
The team, the team, the team
At the University of Michigan, student athlete perspectives on NIL vary widely. Those who don’t earn from it disagree on whether it hurts college sports, or whether it is understandable for top players to earn off their performance.
Julia Fliegner is a senior on the tennis team and a student at the Ross School of Business whose accomplishments include two-time Big Ten Athlete of the Week, the ITA Midwest Region’s Most Improved Player, and MVP of the Big Ten Tournament in 2024. Despite being one of the top players in college tennis, Fliegner earns nothing from her brand.
Asked her opinion on NIL, Fliegner says, “I didn’t come into college with the expectation of making money. I was just happy to be a scholarship athlete.” While she wouldn’t mind NIL earnings, she says, “I want to be here because I want to be here. Not because I want the money.”
Her sentiment is echoed by Davison, when describing NIL’s impact on recruiting. “We want people that want to buy into the team, the team, the team… Those student athletes [who] are just in it for themselves.… I’m not sure that those are the kind of student athletes we want.”
Fliegner doesn’t see NIL as negatively altering the distribution of talent at select schools. She loves that NIL allows others to benefit from their brand. She acknowledges that sports like “professional tennis are expensive,” and that NIL gives student athletes opportunities to recoup the costs of play, let alone compete at a high level. In tennis, young athletes without sponsorships will likely spend thousands of dollars on equipment like tennis rackets, shoes, restringing, coaches, indoor court rentals, and more. Fliegner views NIL as a positive force that gives athletes “the resources to [compete] a little bit better.”
At the end of the day, Fliegner says, “I don’t think about NIL that much.”
Swimming against the tide
Ozan Kalafat and Logan Zucker are student athletes studying at the Ross School of Business and competing members of the Michigan men’s swim team. While they both support the idea of student athletes being able to generate revenue off their hard work, they emphasized a hidden impact NIL is having on non-revenue generating sports: tightening budgets and smaller roster spots.
This largely comes down to the House v. NCAA decision. Brought by Grant House, a former competitive swimmer at Arizona State University, and Sedona Prince, a former Texas Christian University basketball player, the lawsuit seeks compensation and damages for the NCAA’s historical revenue restrictions on student athletes. This pending decision may force Universities to back pay now graduated student-athletes. The ramifications of this decision will have outsized impacts on athletic budgets and strain the already tight allocations given to smaller non-revenue generating teams.
Zucker and Kalafat have already felt the impacts on their own team. Next semester, Zucker sees the team having to “cut…almost ten people,” a sentiment echoed by Kalafat: “we’re going to have to cut at least ten people.” Zucker and Kalafat believe that cutting roster spots and limiting team sizes will impact not only the present team culture, but also lead to a decrease in the number of D1 roster spots. The sport itself, they say, will suffer.
Kalafat says limited roster spots will make “college athletics way harder to break into.” As younger generations see fewer opportunities, viewership will decrease and have a ripple effect on the future of these sports.
Zucker referenced the gymnastics program at Ohio State University (OSU), which, as reported by NBC4, recently announced that the University is “eliminating scholarships for its men’s gymnastics team.” OSU houses one of the twelve remaining Division I men’s gymnastics teams, and declining scholarship opportunities and roster sizes will continue to hurt the sport that has already been in decline. Since 1981, Division I men’s gymnastics programs have already declined by 79.6%. Although athletes in this field can capitalize on NIL to remedy the lost scholarships, student athletes, particularly in smaller sports, do not always get the same opportunities to do so.
Program cuts
While larger schools like the University of Michigan and OSU have yet to shutter teams and cut programs entirely, this is not the same situation found in colleges and universities with smaller budgets.
Concordia University, home to just 1,200 students, has announced that after the 2024-25 academic year, “all athletic programs at its Ann Arbor campus will be discontinued.” The University cited financial challenges and a net negative athletic budget as reasoning for its cancellation, undoubtedly worsened by increased scholarships and costs the University is facing after the passage of NIL and the impending House v. NCAA decision.
On the other side of the state, Kendall Smith, a Junior forward on the Lake Superior State University (LSSU) basketball team, has already seen the impacts of NIL at his school. LSSU competes at the Division II level and within the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
“We had two of our sports get cut,” Smith says. “Our men’s and women’s tennis teams, and our men’s and women’s golf teams.”
Davison does not see team cuts as having “a large impact here at Michigan,” as Michigan has a large enough budget to maintain current teams; however, scholarships are not as certain as recently indicated at OSU’s gymnastics teams. NIL has put Universities and Athletic Directors in a tougher position.
Smith says that now more than ever, college athletics is all about money. Sports that do not generate significant revenue are left in the wind.
Frederickson & Byron, a Minneapolis based law firm specializing in sports and entertainment law, has backed up this negative impression of House v. NCAA. In a blog post titled “The Future of Name, Image and Likeness: Past, Present and Future,” they predicted that House v. NCAA would, “stifle smaller schools with fewer resources as they may not be able to compete for talent with larger schools which could offer all their players full scholarships in addition to lucrative NIL opportunities.”
One trend that Smith has seen is the increase of “rates of people transferring is [now] a ridiculous amount.” Smith attributes this to athletes “shopping around every year…for their best offer.” Smith believes that will hurt the sport and the athletes as it creates poor short-term incentives, as opposed to what the sport should be about: focusing on getting better or getting a good education for what comes next. “They really get caught up in it,” he says.
Raiszadeh also sees this. “Players are less willing to sit behind other players, as they would rather play immediately to grow their brand.” What this entails is that players are looking towards transfer portals and exits. There are “situations where certain schools may be perfect for their growth as football players, but if they are paid more to go elsewhere, they often transfer.”
What the future holds
The future of all these impacts is hard to predict. Even Davison is unsure. “I think we’re being fortune tellers… you’re trying to take in all the information in and make the best decisions for your coaches or student athletes.”
While NIL has undeniably transformed the landscape for high-profile athletes in football and basketball, for the vast majority of college athletes, the reality brings far-reaching consequences to their sports.
From shrinking team rosters to increased transfer rates, from budget cuts at smaller schools to new recruiting pressures at powerhouse programs like Michigan, the ripple effects are real and growing.
Feature photo by Lectrician2 on Wikimedia Commons.
