What is NIL in college football?

When it comes to college football, NIL has opened up a whole can of worms and what have you.

College football and NIL go together like lamb and tuna fish, so step up to the plate and dig in, bro!

No matter how casual of a college football fan you might be, odds are, you will come across the phrase, acronym, or whatever it’s called, NIL at some point this fall. It’s not nil and it’s not nothing, it is something, something very important to ever-changing landscape of college athletics. It is here to stay, but we will almost certainly have various iterations of it coming down the pipeline.

For those who like learning things from an idiot, let me take you to school. What’s NIL, Buhler?!

College football NIL, explained: What is it and why is it so incredibly important?

Well, NIL stands for name, image, likeness. While Dabo Swinney wants to create a program in God’s name, image and likeness, this newfangled acronymical phenomenon is all about getting players paid, dude! Though student-athletes have received compensation in the form of scholarships, stipends, housing and food, they had not been able to capitalize on their brands…

This all changed roughly two years ago ahead of the 2021-22 academic year. Players can be compensated financially for appearances, autographs, commercials, you name it. While name and image are pretty straight-forward, likeness is a tad more complex. This last bit is about somebody using essentially a visual representation of an athlete without a name or an image attached to it.

For example, college sports video games used to get away with not paying the players featured in the games by just not naming them. But when you saw a 6-foot-3 quarterback with a 98 overall rating who looked kind of like that one guy who liked rooting for at State University, you knew something was up. The Ed O’Bannon case on the hoops side of this opened up the can of worms.

For those who also hear the words collective and inducement associated with this, let me explain…

A collective is essentially a group of boosters or an agency around town that helps pool money together to pay players for the names, images and likenesses on a particular college campus. Some universities have done a great job of unifying this new part of college athletics this soon, while others appear to be behind the eight ball or are eating the dust of rival teams doing work.

As far as inducement is concerned, it’s not particularly kosher to pay for a player to commit to a school. NIL is supposed to be about paying players who have already established a brand in their sport, not paying them to attend a university. It is pretty seedy, to be honest, but we should expect for there to be some kind of guardrails implemented at some point in the next few years over this.

Simply put, NIL helps student-athletes get compensation for being the face of a college town’s chicken finger establishment. It is meant to do good, but the road to hell was paid with good intentions. As far as blue-chip prospect committing to State University for a pre-determined sum of cash, that is another animal. It will still probably always happen, but it is now not totally illegal.

Ethics are a huge part of NIL, but expect for this form of compensation to stay in college athletics.

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