Is there too much money in college sports?

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**Charlotte Wilder** (0:30)
You have to be delusional to be an athlete. You have to believe that you're better than everybody else. Otherwise, how could you do it?

**Alice Wilder** (0:38)
I'm Alice Wilder, and you're listening to This Is Uncomfortable, the weekly show from Marketplace about life and how money messes with it.
My first real exposure to college sports was as a first year at UNC, back in August of 2013 Basketball players were campus celebrities, and they were bringing in millions for the school. And their coach was the highest paid public employee in the state of North Carolina. But the players were not getting paid at all.
All of that changed in 2021, when the NCAA changed their rules around NIL, that's shorthand for Name, Image and Likeness. That means college athletes can now make money off of their star status. Okay, but this whole NIL thing is still kind of the Wild West. I wanted to come to y'all with real numbers about how much student athletes are making, but it turns out no one really knows. There isn't a lot of transparency and every school handles it differently. So some athletes are making millions of dollars a year, but the majority are probably earning more like hundreds. But no matter the amount of money, NIL is changing the game. So today, we're digging into how all of this change has impacted student athletes. In terms of the money, yes, but also their emotional lives and their sense of identity.
Here to help me understand how NIL has turned college sports upside down are the hosts of the Sports Gossip Show, Charlotte Wilder, No Relation, and Madeline Hill. Charlotte and Madeline, welcome to the show.

**Madeline Hill** (2:04)
Thank you so much for having us, Alice.

**Charlotte Wilder** (2:06)
Great last name, if I do say so myself, Alice.

**Alice Wilder** (2:09)
Thank you. We should get a 23 and me going at some point.

**Charlotte Wilder** (2:12)
Just to make sure. Who knows?

**Alice Wilder** (2:14)
Okay. Do you guys have any favorite NIL deals that you've seen, like particularly random ones? I remember seeing a Carolina basketball player last year making an appearance at my local Verizon store and I was like, what is going on here?

**Charlotte Wilder** (2:26)
I do have a favorite. It was a player named Grady Dick who went to the University of Kansas.
He was taken by the Toronto Rafters in the draft, so he did go pro. Even after he went pro, this guy was doing more ads for local car dealerships than I even knew there were car dealerships in Kansas. It was a master class in making sure he hit every one of those car dealerships. For some reason, to me, the romance of college sports now is student athletes doing car dealership ads. That is pure to me. That is the pinnacle and I hope that every student athlete out there gets a chance to do a car dealership ad.

**Alice Wilder** (3:10)
I love that. Honestly, I agree with you. How about you, Madeline?

**Madeline Hill** (3:14)
I think my favorite that came to mine is Fernando Mendoza, who was the quarterback at Indiana and now plays for the Raiders professionally. And I believe this was still when he was a student athlete, but he did a deal with LinkedIn finally after a lot of online chatter around people being like, Fernando Mendoza needs to do a deal with LinkedIn because he posts on LinkedIn as if he is looking for an entry-level job.

**Alice Wilder** (3:39)
That's so charming. That's really charming.

**Madeline Hill** (3:41)
So charming. It totally fit his brand. It felt very on brand. And I think people who were fans of his were very excited that he actually did a paid partnership with LinkedIn. And I hope he does a TED Talk one day because I think he would be an unbelievable speaker about business and NIL deals.

**Alice Wilder** (3:59)
Were either of y'all college athletes or student athletes?

**Madeline Hill** (4:03)
I was a volleyball player throughout my entire life. And when I went to college, I played like basically like essentially intramural club volleyball at the University of Georgia.