How NIL in College Football Compares to All of College Athletics
With the College Football Playoff upon us, it’s a good time to look at 4 key pieces of data to explain how different - or similar - NIL is for college football players versus other student-athletes.
football players make more nil compensation
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first: NIL is different for college football players because they make more money than other student-athletes. They make more on a per-activity basis and more overall.
When reading about average NIL compensation, it’s good to recall the phrase popularized by Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Average NIL compensation per activity ($1,300) is one of those kind of lies, because what football players earn skews the average drastically upward. The median NIL compensation (value that's exactly in the middle of a set of numbers) is about $65 per NIL activity and is more accurate reflection of what most student-athletes make per activity.
a larger percentage of football players participate in nil
The percentage of all student-athletes participating in NIL across the country is still murky. I believe about 17% of DI student-athletes have completed an NIL activity in the last 12 months. That number is considerably higher at Power Five schools and at institutions that have provided NIL education and other support.
There are at least two factors resulting in far more football players participating in NIL versus student-athletes generally. The first is (and again, sorry for the obvious) is college football’s popularity, resulting in NIL opportunities for more football players than other athletes. The second is the role that Collectives have played; not only do Collectives support football more than other sports, but they are frequently providing NIL deals for entire football rosters.
the types of nil activities are different for football players
It’s important to realize that “NIL Activities” is a catch-all term, but to make sense of it, we need to break it down. The main activities that student-athletes are participating in to earn NIL income are:
Social Media
Appearances (with or without Autograph Signings)
Instruction (camps, clinics, private instruction)
Athlete Brands (usually Merchandise)
Endorsements
Group Licensing
Social Media is dominant, accounting for 72% of all NIL activities by all student-athletes. But here is where it gets interesting: when I remove football data, that percentage shoots up to 91%. In other words, practically all the NIL activity of non-football student-athletes is social media - with instruction a growing and meaningful second activity.
Conversely, football student-athletes are much more likely to have more varied opportunities. For example, football players are far more likely to do appearances and autograph signings in their local communities - often managed by a Collective.
nil may not impact transfers like we think
If you believe anything I’ve written here to this point, you can make the assumption that NIL is a pretty good opportunity for football players. So it would make sense that they would use the Transfer Portal en masse to find greater NIL opportunities. But that’s not proven to be true - at least yet.
Since it opened on December 5, over 1,600 college football players have entered the Transfer Portal. With a lot of time left, the total number of transfers may surpass the 2021 total of 2,538 - or 16% of all FBS football student-athletes.
While those may seem like big numbers, they’re not really when you compare them to two other metrics:
16% is above the average student-athlete transfer rate (10%) and the median (9%), but still below the transfer rates of baseball (18%), men’s basketball (31%), and women’s basketball (22%.)
As I’ve written about recently, lots of college students transfer; the percentage of the general student body that transfers is historically around 30%-35% or double that of FBS athletes.
Bill teaches NIL in College Sports at the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business. He consults and educates brands, universities, and sports organizations on Name, Image, and Likeness. Bill’s a SportsBusiness Journal Forty Under 40 Award winner and former co-founder of the athlete & event marketing agency Fuse, which he operated for 20+ years before selling in 2019.