College football may be the king of college athletics, but they may want to take a note from college basketball. Next year, Las Vegas will host the first-ever NIL college basketball tournament, where participating teams and players will get money for playing. As crazy as it sounds, this is what NIL was meant to be. Players will be compensated for their name and image, which will help promote the tournament and their team and bring in additional TV revenue.
The “Players Era Festival” is an eight-team tournament that will take place in November and will compensate $1 million NIL payouts for the eight participating schools. But could we see something like this in college football? Here are three ways it could happen.
Early Season Games
Similar to college basketball, which has early non-conference basketball tournaments, college football normally hosts a couple of big non-conference football games that are sponsored by companies. These are very similar to ballgames, except the teams are predetermined years before, and the games count towards a regular season record. This is the first and most obvious likely scenario where I could get into a college football game.
This upcoming season, some of the big games that would potentially have an NIL behind them include LSU versus USC in Las Vegas, Clemson versus Georgia in Atlanta, or North Carolina State and Tennessee and Charlotte. These games have corporate sponsorships, and it would be easy for NIL deals to be made in the future.
Bowl Games
Conference Championship Games may be a little bit more difficult because there is definitely a sense of pay-to-play; however, if an aisle could find ways in bowl games, it would drastically improve the quality of these games. In recent years, bowl games have had a really difficult time getting players to want to participate. There have been a few cases where some of us wondered whether the team would be able to be a field team, such as Florida State last year.
Often, the players about to enter the transfer portal opt out of these games. However, if you put an AL check in front of them contingent on them playing the game, things could get very interesting. Again, the legal issue, of course, would be the pay-to-play aspect, but if we’ve learned one thing about college football the last few seasons, it’s that things can find a way to become part of the game.
Conference Championships
Every conference championship is already hosted or sponsored by a corporate sponsor, so adding an NIL to the mix would not be that difficult. With the playoff expanding to 12 teams, many have been skeptical about whether or not a team will actually care about being in a conference championship game. And they have a good reason.
For example, if a team is ranked seventh or eighth in the college football rankings, and they know they will not make it to one of the top four seeds, it would be almost foolish to play at full strength in a game where the outcome won’t really matter. And honestly, why would they? Why risk injury in a player, giving up on us more game film? We’re having game prep if the end result will be a berth in the college football playoff anyway.
However, once a game puts money into the winning team’s mix, teams will suddenly have a lot more motivated players to want to win. Again, there could be some legal issues with us and definitely some yellow tape that would have to be broken through, but it does seem, at least in principle, very possible.