Is Revenue Sharing and NIL Reform Enough to Transform College Sports, or Is the Game Just Beginning?

“Bottom line, they’re professionals, they’re getting paid like professionals and we’ve got to get a handle on that. We can’t have X amount of schools paying, spending million on rosters and the rest of us million … There’s about 12 teams that’ll have a chance to win it all every year and that’s it. So I would say leveling the playing field with a salary cap, again, back to the NFL model, and making things more uniform. It works in the NFL, so why can’t it work at this level?”
There was a mad dash to sign and pay out NIL deals before July 1; deals paid out thereafter would be subject to review by Deloitte. One NIL deal platform, Opendorse, had its biggest day in company history on June 30, processing nearly million in payments.On July 1, college sports entered a new frontier.It would also establish a process for registering and certifying agents and “setting parameters for the ability of member institutions to negotiate with agents who are not registered under such process.”LEARN MORENowhere else in sports is every player a free agent after every season, except in college sports right now. But after the NCAA and the Department of Justice reached a settlement in 2024, the NCAA was permanently barred from restricting a player’s eligibility. In the previous iteration of the rules, athletes had to sit out a year before joining their new team.

The big question around college sports is this — will the revenue-sharing cap and “true market value NIL” bring a sense of parity in terms of what teams can spend?—  Utah coach Kyle Whittingham

Every NIL deal will now be sent through a clearinghouse managed by accounting firm Deloitte, which will assess those deals and has the ability to approve or deny each NIL deal according to if it meets “fair market value.”Whittingham supports going to an NFL minor league model, he said this week.Already, the system is working, sending some NIL deals back for reworking — including a few at the University of Utah.

The bill wouldn’t advance collective bargaining, in fact, it would prevent college athletes from being employees of their schools, conferences or an athletic associationAnother avenue for change in college sports would be congressional action. Texas Tech followed that up by signing five-star high school offensive tackle Felix Ojo, who will receive “an annual compensation of 5,000 per year for three years from Tech’s revenue-sharing pool,” according to The Athletic.“I realize when you say, well, college football’s not the NFL, but the NFL has been doing some good things for a lot of years and we ought to take some pages from them on how to implement salary cap, collective bargaining if it comes to that,” Whittingham said. Collective bargaining could make players employees of the schools, set a clear total salary cap and perhaps create contracts that lock a player into a school for a certain number of years.

“Biggest issue is we’ve got to have somewhat of a level playing field with the NIL space, I shouldn’t say NIL, but with what we’re paying them,” Whittingham said.“Instead of 20 or 30 guys turning over each year, it’s 60 guys. Half your roster is new.”“Biggest issue is we’ve got to have somewhat of a level playing field with the NIL space, I shouldn’t say NIL, but with what we’re paying them.”Capping agent fees is something Whittingham is in favor of.Nearly every Big 12 coach at media days told Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger that they support employment/collective bargaining.The new system attempts to make NIL what it was originally intended to be — sponsorship opportunities for athletes at a true market value.“I don’t think the rev share is an equalizer or is going to be the equalizer that everyone thinks it’s going to be because they’re going to circumvent it,” Whittingham said.The Houston Chronicle reported that Texas will spend – million on its 2025 roster, between revenue sharing and NIL deals, many of which were signed before the NIL clearinghouse went into effect.Utah was able to retain key players like offensive tackles Spencer Fano and Caleb Lomu, cornerback Smith Snowden and others, and got New Mexico quarterback Devon Dampier and Washington State running back Wayshawn Parker out of the transfer portal.Whether through the new NIL rules and revenue-sharing cap being tightly enforced, collective bargaining or an act of Congress, the powers that be feel like change needs to come to college sports.July 1 marked a seismic shift in the world of college athletics — for the very first time, universities have stepped into the ring to directly compensate their student-athletes, unleashing a new era under the landmark “House v. NCAA” settlement. This bold move enables schools to funnel up to .5 million annually to their players, a hefty slice—about 22%—of the typical athletic department’s revenue at Power Four universities. Naturally, the lion’s share lands in the pockets of football and men’s basketball stars — the cornerstones of collegiate sports income. But this isn’t just about handing over cash; it’s a recalibration of the entire NIL (name, image, likeness) ecosystem — wresting order from the chaos that had made NIL deals resemble the Wild West of pay-for-play. With Deloitte stepping in as the gatekeeper to oversee and validate each deal’s “fair market value,” the game is tightening up, reshaping what athlete endorsements should truly represent. At the University of Utah, this new reality is already in motion, sparking spirited debates about fairness and the quest for competitive balance — questions that ripple through locker rooms and boardrooms alike. As coaches, directors, and lawmakers weigh in, the question looms: can this financial revolution level the playing field, or will it carve deeper divides? The future of college sports is unfolding—and it’s anything but predictable.The bill would also provide protections for athletes, such as requiring schools to provide “coverage of medical expenses for athletic injuries for up to 3 years post-enrollment,” and would cap agent fees at 5%. In a video published by the Daily Universe’s Sam Foster, Snowden replied to a question about if BYU reached out to him this offseason.“I think it would help the players. Some of these guys are taking 20, 25% from these guys. That’s outlandish. It should be 3 to 5%, just like the NFL is, and certification would be certainly, absolutely a step in the right direction.”“I think that’s the only real way to get a grasp and a handle on things. As distasteful as it might sound to some people, I think an NFL minor league model is the best direction to head personally. That’s my own opinion.”“We’ve had all but a few approved here at Utah, the ones that haven’t been approved, we go back and we help the student-athlete restructure to make sure it’s in that range of compensation.”“We’re excited to be able to, again, to have a dramatic increase for what football had,” Harlan said. “You don’t retain two first-rounders (Fano and Lomu) and guys like Smith Snowden and others if you don’t have capital and great donors involved. It’s never enough because there’s always someone that’s got more, obviously Texas Tech.”On Thursday, members of the House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan bill — the SCORE act — that would make conferences exempt from antitrust lawsuits and would let the NCAA once again set parameters “for the manner in which a student-athlete may transfer between institutions, if such rules provide that at least one occasion each student-athlete may transfer between institutions and be immediately eligible.”“They’ll find ways around it just like everyone always has. And so you’re still going to see a big disparity in the opportunity to build rosters. But again, until we get to an NFL model, where there’s a salary cap and that’s it, and if you break that cap, then you get huge penalties — I mean huge penalties, then it’s not going to work.”From the beginning, Harlan has said Utah will be “all-in” on revenue sharing. Men’s basketball player Keanu Dawes was the first to receive a revenue-sharing deal from the university, with others, including football players, following shortly after.Fueled by the infusion of money into the space, the unlimited transfer portal has turned college football from a place where players would be developed for three or four years at one school into one in which half or more of every annual roster is comprised of new players.With the revenue-sharing agreement comes a crackdown on NIL (name, image and likeness) deals. Prior to revenue sharing, the NIL was the Wild West, and essentially boiled down to pay for play. “I think it’s heading that way,” Whittingham said of collective bargaining.It would also codify into law the House settlement, including the current 22% revenue-sharing cap and the new NIL rules. NIL deals would need to serve a “valid business purpose” and have fair market value compensation.“There’s teams that are front-loading all the extra money they had prior to the rev share kicking in,” Utah coach Kyle Whittingham said. “We got teams spending supposedly million or more on players, and that’s five, six times what we got.” A solution to all of it could be collective bargaining, just like what happens in all of professional sports, but the implementation could be extremely difficult. The new age, where players can transfer without penalty, has both helped and hurt the Utes. This offseason, Utah lost star defensive tackle Keanu Tanuvasa to BYU and star cornerback Cam Calhoun to Alabama. After spring practices, promising receiver Zacharyus Williams took off for USC.Even players not in the transfer portal are being contacted to play for other schools.“I don’t know if I support or don’t support it. I know that the system we have in place is not sustainable and even with the rev share and the changes that have been made, I’m still not buying the fact that it’s the answer.”“It wasn’t directly to me,” Snowden replied. “… BYU wasn’t the only school (to reach out), it’s kind of what the name of the game is right, with the transfer portal. I wouldn’t say that it was any tampering type thing, it was more of agents and all that type of stuff.”One thing is clear from talking to coaches across the Big 12 — the current system is unsustainable.

That’s the hope — but Whittingham is unsure if it will work in practice.—  Utah coach Kyle Whittingham

For the first time ever, universities began directly paying their players as part of the “House v. NCAA” settlement. The settlement allows each university to pay its student-athletes up to .5 million per year, which works out to approximately 22% of the average athletic department revenue at Power Four schools. The vast majority of that money will go to pay athletes in football and men’s basketball, the two most revenue-generating sports for most universities.Whittingham has long said that there will eventually be a “super conference,” and he doubled down on that this week.“I will say with the settlement, with the cap, with NIL Go and our athletes have been submitting on NIL Go. Since the settlement was decided three or four weeks ago, the turnaround has been pretty quick,” Utah athletic director Mark Harlan said in an interview on ESPN 700.Meanwhile, Utah has used the transfer portal to its advantage with players like Dampier, Parker, Cal receiver Tobias Merriweather and cornerbacks Don Saunders (Texas A&M) and Blake Cotton (UC Davis).“Instead of 20 or 30 guys turning over each year, it’s 60 guys. Half your roster is new,” Whittingham said.Texas Tech, as Harlan mentioned, has made waves in the past year, signing one of the top transfer classes this offseason, including Stanford edge rusher David Bailey and North Carolina offensive tackle Howard Sampson, spending over million, according to The Athletic.“I still believe that super conference concept is on its way. I really buy into that and I think that there’ll be X amount of teams that break away. They’ll have their own conference commissioner and they’ll do things the way they want to do and everyone else is going to kind of have to fend for themselves,” Whittingham said.