The talking points were ready before the ink dried. When the NCAA finally stopped pretending it could hold back the NIL tide in 2021, the messaging was clean: athletes would finally get paid, the playing field would be more honest, and college sports would emerge from its long era of shameless exploitation. What nobody said loudly enough was that “more honest” doesn’t mean “more fair.” It just means the advantage is now denominated in dollars you can see.
Five years in, the picture is stark. Power 4 schools — SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC — are running NIL collectives with annual budgets ranging from $5 million to $30 million or more. According to Sports Business Journal, programs in the SEC alone have pushed collective funding to levels that would have been absurd to contemplate a decade ago. Group of 5 schools — your AACs, Sun Belts, MACs — are working with $500,000 to $2 million if they’re lucky. That’s not a gap. That’s a different sport.
What NIL Promised vs. What It Built
The promise was athlete empowerment. And for athletes at Alabama, Texas, Ohio State, and Georgia, it delivered. Arch Manning’s NIL arrangement at Texas is reportedly worth millions annually — and that’s before we get to the broader ecosystem of Austin that surrounds him. When a recruit is deciding between Texas and, say, Tulane, the pitch used to be about playing time, coaching staff, and the vague promise of NFL scouts in the stands. Now there’s a number on the table. And Tulane can’t match it. Nobody pretends otherwise anymore.
That’s the honest version of NIL: it made visible a dynamic that was always operating underneath. The Power conferences have always had better facilities, better coaches, better exposure. NIL didn’t create the hierarchy. It just put a price tag on it and handed it to a 17-year-old to read.
The Numbers That Show the Gap
The House v. NCAA settlement — finalized in the 2025-26 cycle — created a revenue-sharing framework that allows schools to distribute approximately $20 million per year directly to athletes. Power 4 schools can afford to hit that ceiling. Mid-majors cannot. The Athletic has reported on the downstream effects: recruiting classes at Group of 5 programs are being assembled with the full knowledge that the top targets have already been priced out of reach.
Memphis. Tulsa. South Florida. Tulane. Coaches at these programs have been saying it publicly for two years now — they’re losing recruits not because of coaching quality, academic reputation, or scheme fit, but because they cannot write the same check. The House settlement was billed as a landmark moment for athlete compensation. For mid-major athletic departments, it functioned more like receiving a formal notice of exclusion.
Why Mid-Major Schools Are Already Playing a Different Game
Here’s the part that should bother you: the Group of 5 schools aren’t failing. They’re doing everything right within the rules available to them. The rules just aren’t designed for them to win.
Pre-NIL, a program like Memphis or Tulane could sell a recruit on upside — you’ll get early playing time, we’ll develop you, we have a path. That pitch still exists. It’s just harder to make when the school down the road is offering a six-figure NIL deal on signing day. The scholarship stopped being the anchor of the recruiting conversation. The collective budget replaced it.
This is what institutional capture looks like in practice. The Power conferences spent decades building a system that extracted labor from athletes without compensation. When compensation finally arrived, they were positioned to dominate that market too. Of course they were. They built the room, they know where the exits are, and they wrote the guest list.
This is an obvious move. NIL is so exhausting year to year that it’s going to drive college coaches away in both basketball and football. https://t.co/HFiThmpImu
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) June 22, 2026
Is Anyone Actually Going to Fix This?
Probably not, and here’s why: the people with the power to restructure NIL governance are the Power conferences themselves. The SEC and Big Ten operate essentially as separate commercial entities from the rest of college athletics — the $7 billion media deals, the conference realignment that absorbed Cincinnati and others, the House settlement structure — all of it was negotiated by power brokers whose programs benefit most from the status quo.
The NCAA, neutered and structurally incapable of enforcing anything meaningful after decades of self-inflicted legal wounds, is not riding to the rescue. Congress has floated a federal NIL framework approximately eleven times and passed nothing. State NIL laws created the patchwork chaos that made federal intervention theoretically necessary, and then nothing happened.
What you’re left with is a college sports landscape where the outcome of recruiting is increasingly predictable before the season starts. Where a program like Memphis — a school that’s developed NFL-caliber talent for decades and regularly competes for AAC titles — is operating in a different financial reality than schools two conferences up the ladder that are working with ten times the collective budget.
The athletes are doing what rational people do: following the money. You cannot be angry at them for that. Be angry at the machinery that built a system so thoroughly tilted that “student-athlete empowerment” turned into a permanent funding moat for the schools that were already winning.
That’s not a broken system. That’s the system working exactly as the people who designed it intended.
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