THE NIL NUMBERS GAME: Who Gets Paid and Who Gets Played

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Introduction

Yes — there is a real argument that NIL is raising the baseline for what a serious student-athlete must become.

Not automatically. Not for everyone.

But structurally?

Yes.

Before we go any further, let’s put real numbers on the table so the landscape is honest.

The Math Most People Get Wrong

When people hear NIL, they picture Arch Manning, Bronny James, JuJu Watkins.

Seven-figure deals. Lamborghinis in the parking lot.

That’s the headline.

Here’s the actual landscape.

A record 554,298 student-athletes competed in NCAA championship sports during the 2024–25 academic year — an increase of 15,368 from the year before, and the highest figure ever recorded.

That’s the denominator.

The breakdown:

Division I had 204,255 student-athletes, crossing 200,000 for the first time since 1982.

Division II had 141,067.

Division III led all three with 210,878.

Basketball alone — the sport everyone defaults to when NIL comes up — accounts for 35,926 total NCAA basketball student-athletes, with only 10,655 at the Division I level:

5,607 men
5,048 women

In other words, the entire Division I basketball pool — men and women combined, every conference from the SEC to the Patriot League — is smaller than the freshman class at Ohio State University.

Now overlay the NIL distribution on top of that pool.

The 99% Most People Never Hear About

Only 1% of athletes earned more than $50,000.

Only 0.3% earned over $1 million.

41% of all NIL deals were allocated to football players.

The average NIL deal remains under $1,000.

An independent industry report puts an even sharper point on it:

68% of NIL deals are worth less than $1,000.

Run the math against the full population of 554,298 athletes.

Roughly 1,660 athletes in the entire country earn $1M+.

Roughly 5,540 athletes earn $50K+.

The other 548,000+ athletes earn between $0 and a few thousand dollars.

And 41% of all deals flow to football players alone.

The concentration goes deeper than the sport-by-sport split.

Inside the dollars themselves, the money pools at the very top of a handful of teams.

According to a Washington Post investigation reviewing roughly 22,000 individual NIL transactions, no program disclosed more NIL income than the Texas Longhorns football, which reported $20.8 million in deals from July 2021 to July 2024.

LSU Tigers football came in second at $8.7 million.

What Revenue Sharing Did to the Picture

The House v. NCAA settlement and the new revenue-sharing era didn’t flatten the curve.

It steepened it.

Pennsylvania State University became one of the first schools to publicly report how it would allocate revenue-sharing dollars to its sports teams.

Penn State reported a total revenue-sharing commitment of over $18 million, with football and men’s basketball receiving 89% of the revenue-sharing payments.

Football and men’s basketball got 89 cents of every dollar before anyone else got in line.

Zoom out and the macro figures confirm the same shape.

When NIL launched in 2021, estimated player earnings totaled $393 million.

That figure surged to $1 billion in 2024 and reached an estimated $1.9 billion in 2025.

The pie is bigger.

The slices are just as uneven.

What This Means for the 99%

The field hockey player.

The discus thrower.

The javelin athlete.

The Division II tennis player.

The Division III swimmer.

The cross-country runner.

They’re not getting Lamborghini money.

Most of them aren’t getting pizza money.

The NIL era for them looks like a $200 deal with a local chiropractor, if anything at all.

It might be a free pair of running shoes.

It might be a coupon code to share on Instagram in exchange for a percentage that never breaks three figures.

The Honest Bottom Line

So when someone tells a high school sophomore that NIL has changed everything, the honest answer is:

It has, and it hasn’t.

It has changed everything for roughly 1,660 athletes earning over a million.

It has changed something meaningful for the next several thousand earning real money.

For the other 548,000+ — the overwhelming majority of people the NCAA counts as student-athletes — the calculus of why am I doing this hasn’t changed at all.

Scholarship.

Education.

Identity.

Love of the sport.

The shot at something more.

NIL didn’t replace those reasons.

It just gave the top 1% a microphone loud enough to drown them out.

That’s the landscape.

Now we can talk about what it means for what a serious student-athlete has to become.

Sources

▪︎ NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report, 2024–25
▪︎ NCAA Basketball by the Numbers
▪︎ American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine
▪︎ RallyFuel NIL Earnings Report
▪︎ DraftWorth NIL Market Report
▪︎ Washington Post NIL Investigation
▪︎ Penn State Revenue-Sharing Allocation Report
▪︎ Opendorse NIL Data

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