The number that started this whole conversation was $20.5 million.
That's the soft cap — the amount each university can now pay athletes directly under the House v. NCAA settlement that took effect this past June. Danny laid it out for me on this week's show: $20.5 million per school, spread across all sports, increasing roughly 4% a year for the next decade. The number represents 22% of average athletic department revenue across power conference schools. The players get 22%. The school keeps 78%.
I stayed on that for a second. I needed to, because the first time you hear it, it sounds like progress. Athletes getting paid. Schools writing checks directly. NIL finally becoming something more structured than a booster slipping a handshake deal through a collective nobody's auditing. It sounds like the sport is growing up.
Then you do the math on Bryce Underwood. The Michigan quarterback — freshman, not yet proven a thing at the college level — reportedly got somewhere around $10 million. Half the entire pot. For one player. At one school. In one sport. And under this new structure, that's allowed, which means the remaining $10.5 million has to cover every other athlete on that roster, across every other sport, including the women's volleyball team that's probably filling seats and winning titles and generating its own revenue.
That's not a salary cap. That's a ceiling with a trap door built in for the people who already know where to stand.
The 22% problem — and who decided it
Here's the question I kept coming back to: where did 22% come from?
Danny did the research. It's 22% of average athletic department revenue across power conference schools. That's the methodology. They looked at what schools collectively bring in, averaged it across the programs, took a little more than a fifth of it, and said: that's what the players get.
Nobody asked the players. There's no union. There's no collective bargaining agreement. There's no players' association sitting across a table from the NCAA saying "22 is too low, let's talk about 45." There's a settlement — meaning lawyers negotiated a number that ended litigation, not a number that reflects what the labor is actually worth.
In the NFL, the players' share of revenue is about 48%. The NBA is close to 50%. Those numbers came from decades of organized labor fighting for them, CBAs getting torn up and renegotiated, strikes and lockouts and enough leverage on both sides to produce something approximating fairness. College football players have none of that infrastructure. So they got 22% handed down by a federal court settlement, and the framing is that they should be grateful.
I'm not in college football right now, and I'll be honest — I said on the show that I don't care about this cap much until my own kids get to that age. But I care about the principle. And the principle is: when you don't have a seat at the table, somebody else decides what your labor is worth. The answer is always going to be less than it should be.
A soft cap isn't a cap. It's a permission structure for the rich.
Here's what a soft cap actually does in college football: it tells Alabama and Michigan and Ohio State that they can spend $20.5 million from the school itself — and then whatever the booster collective wants to pile on top of that still has to clear NIL Go, the new clearinghouse run by the College Sports Commission and Deloitte, but it can still exist.
So the soft cap governs the rev share piece. The NIL collective piece — boosters, donors, alumni money — still flows separately, just with a new paper trail. What changes is that everything over $600 now has to go through NIL Go for a fair-market-value determination. You can't hand a quarterback $10 million for three Instagram posts anymore without someone at least asking whether three Instagram posts are worth $10 million.
Which sounds reasonable, until you realize: if you're Stephen Ross and you want Bryce Underwood at Michigan, you can structure something that passes fair-market scrutiny and still moves eight figures. If you're a mid-major athletic department without a billionaire donor in your corner, your ceiling is the soft cap, period. The governance structure didn't create parity. It created the appearance of oversight while leaving the underlying resource gap completely intact.
This is the part I compared to the NBA market problem on the show. The Portland Trail Blazers aren't worth $4.2 billion because Portland is a bad basketball city. They're worth $4.2 billion because Portland isn't Los Angeles. The market differential is real and structural, and no soft cap changes it. Same logic applies to the University of Nebraska versus the University of Michigan. Nebraska has Warren Buffett up north in Omaha. If he wants to get in the game — really get in — the playing field tilts immediately. A cap at $20.5 million doesn't change that; it just moves where the money flows through.
The transfer portal is now the draft, without the draft's protections
The other thing that's happening — quietly, under all the noise about the rev share numbers — is that college football has developed a free agency system with none of the protections that make free agency functional.
Danny walked me through the Felix Ojo deal: Texas Tech, offensive tackle, top-10 recruit, three-year fully guaranteed contract at roughly $760,000 a year. One of the first multi-year revenue-sharing deals of its kind. It sounds like progress — real contract, real money, real security.
But then he asked me the question that actually matters: if you're Ndamukong Suh at Nebraska, do you sign a three-year deal, or do you bet on yourself year by year?
My answer was both, which sounds like a dodge but it isn't. You can lock in some security and still build in the mechanisms to grow. My rookie contract in the NFL had Pro Bowl escalators — make the Pro Bowl, the base goes up. There's no reason a college deal can't have conference accolade triggers. Make All-Big 12, your base jumps. That's not complicated. What's complicated is that nobody's built the infrastructure to make it standard.
Right now, every deal is its own negotiation with its own terms and its own buyout language — or no buyout language. Madden Iamaleava left Arkansas for UCLA, and Arkansas's NIL collective is trying to claw back $100,000 from a kid who transferred. That's the system working exactly the way it's designed to work — case by case, school by school, collective by collective, with no consistency and no protection for either side.
In the NFL, if a team cuts you, there are rules. In the NBA, if you're traded, your contract travels. In the NCAA, if you leave, you might owe money to a booster collective that has no formal relationship to the school, governed by a clearinghouse that's been operating for a matter of months. That's not a labor market. That's the Wild West with a Deloitte logo on it.
PULL QUOTE: "1% of you will make it to the league. But I can get you handsomely paid because you did an amazing job in college." — Ndamukong Suh
The one thing the money actually can do
Here's where I want to be careful, because it's easy to spend 1,500 words poking holes and never say what you'd actually build instead.
The financial literacy piece is real, and I think it's being underweighted in almost every public conversation about NIL. What the House settlement has done — whatever its structural flaws — is put meaningful money into the hands of 20-year-olds before they get to the NFL, before the draft slot volatility, before the tax bill they didn't look at because they didn't want to know. A college running back making $500,000 a year has an opportunity that no college running back in history has ever had: the chance to build actual wealth before professional sports gets its hands on him.
But only if he knows what he's looking at.
I told Danny about Kiewit Construction — one of the biggest engineering firms in the country, a major booster at Nebraska, tied directly to the College of Engineering I graduated from. If I don't make it to the NFL, I roll out of Lincoln with a degree, a relationship with Kiewit, and a potential six- or seven-figure career path that most people in this country will never have access to. Add $500,000 or $700,000 in NIL earnings on top of that, invested right, starting at age 19 — and you've built something real.
Just over 30% of Americans make six figures a year. These kids can graduate with half a million in the bank and a network that took their predecessors a decade to build. The question isn't whether the money is enough. The question is whether anyone is teaching them what to do with it before it disappears.
What I'd actually build, if I were making the rules
Three things, in order of what would actually move the needle:
- Start the CBA conversation now, not after the next lawsuit. The settlement bought the NCAA maybe five years before the next round of litigation. The players need a formal bargaining entity — not a collective, not a conference, an actual union with the standing to negotiate revenue splits, transfer protections, and contract standards. The 22% number isn't fair. It can't become fair until there's someone with real power sitting across the table arguing for something different. Every year that doesn't happen is another year the players leave 78% of the revenue on the table while everyone else argues about structure.
- Mandate financial literacy as part of every revenue-sharing contract. Not a seminar, not a pamphlet. If you're going to hand a 19-year-old $760,000 a year, the school has an obligation to build financial education into the deal — an actual team: accountant, advisor, someone who can translate what a tax bill looks like on that income, what it means to invest versus spend, what the difference is between a net worth that's growing and a bank balance that just looks like it is. I sat in cash from 2010 to 2012, missed one of the best market rallies in a generation, because I didn't have the right people around me yet to explain what I was looking at. These kids have the chance to avoid that. But not if no one tells them what they're walking into.
- Build the contract standards before the chaos compounds. Every multi-year college deal right now is a bespoke negotiation with bespoke buyout language and bespoke escalator terms — or none of those things, depending on who the athletic department hired to write it. That has to change. There should be a standard term sheet: here's what a conference accolade trigger looks like, here's how a buyout clause functions if a player transfers, here's how compensation moves if a coach leaves and the program changes around the player who signed. The NFL didn't get its contract structure right overnight, but it built one. College football needs to build one before the litigation catches up to the chaos.
The money is real now. $1 to $2 million a year for a quarterback. $500,000 to $1 million for an edge rusher. That's generational-wealth territory for a kid who plays his cards right. The settlement gave them the money. Nobody's given them the map.
The cap is fake. The opportunity is real. The window to do something with it is short — shorter than anyone playing right now probably understands.
Figure out the second part. The first part already happened.