College sports are teaching athletes some troubling life lessons

Something gross is happening to college sports, and state lawmakers could make it even worse.

As it stands, collegiate football increasingly resembles the NFL. Top college athletes are becoming millionaires and abandoning even the pretense of loyalty to their educational institutions. For fans like me, this is terrible news. I have long been a diehard college football fan who has reveled in school traditions, rivalries and the sport’s amateur nature. Sadly, it is evolving into a something unrecognizable.

For decades, promising high school players accepted college scholarships in exchange for playing sports. They couldn’t profit off of their tenure and generally didn’t transfer to other schools—thanks to various restrictions. This kept teams intact as players waited their turn to play. Two developments have fundamentally upset this order, and are now spiraling out of control.

In 2018, the NCAA established the transfer portal where unhappy athletes could enter and shop around for a new school to play for, and longstanding rules around transferring changed. Officials repealed the one-year waiting period between transferring and playing and restrictions around communicating with other schools. Now the transfer portal has morphed into a free agency.

Unfortunately, numerous athletes no longer feel the need to remain loyal to their teammates—even if their dedication prior to the transfer portal was insincere. If they believe they have a better chance at a starting position elsewhere, then many are happy to abandon their school. In fact, after the 2023 season, more than 25 percent of scholarship players in the Football Bowl Subdivision transferred. Now plenty of football players are testing the proverbial transfer portal waters in search of massive payouts thanks to a seismic shift originating in the courts and state legislatures.

Following a class action case that determined the NCAA cannot prevent student-athletes from profiting off of their collegiate careers, states began paving the way to allow athletes to enjoy enormous windfalls. In 2021, Georgia joined many other states by passing legislation creating a framework that allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness (NIL).

“[NIL] refers to a person’s legal right to control how their image is used, including commercially,” reports ESPN. “In college, student-athletes have long been prohibited from making deals to profit from their fame, so they forfeited their NIL rights by signing on with college sports teams.” That has since changed. Now Georgia college athletes can score mega-deals, and much of their salaries come from shadowy private collectives and corporate sponsors. The old system seemed unfair—only allowing schools and the NCAA to profit on students—but this is getting out of hand.

Former University of Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava reportedly garnered an $8-million four-year deal to play on Rocky Top. After starting only one season, his representatives supposedly wanted to renegotiate his contract to earn $4 million a year. Tennessee balked, Iamaleava skipped practice and ultimately announced that he would enter the transfer portal days ago.

Meanwhile, the University of Florida recruited Jaden Rashada whom the Gator Collective allegedly offered $13 million to play in Gainesville, but the financing fell through. He subsequently went to play elsewhere. This isn’t an issue only nagging our neighboring states. Georgia faces it too. The Lamborghini-driving former UGA quarterback Carson Beck had another year of eligibility to play in college. Instead of staying at UGA, he supposedly accepted a $4- million-dollar one-year deal to join the University of Miami Hurricanes.

Whereas in the past, athletes sometimes went to schools because of, say, their academic record or to play under a specific coach, it now seems that the nation’s top prospects simply look for the highest bidder. This won’t keep many of them in place as they are prone to jump ship when they sense a better deal elsewhere. That’s their right, but the state of play is a mess now.

State legislatures have presided over this change and might make it even worse. One piece of legislation introduced this year in the Georgia General Assembly seeks to make NIL payments tax exempt—as if people earning millions of dollars shouldn’t have to pay state taxes when minimum wage earners do. That’s ridiculous. The bill didn’t move during the 2025 legislative session, but expect states to continue tinkering with NIL proposals.

The system in place is disrupting the sport, likely for the worse, but it isn’t beyond repair. Sports, by their very nature, are governed by strict rules, and likewise, issues adjacent to the game need additional guardrails to restore and maintain the sport’s integrity. Doing so is easier said than done now that Pandora’s Box has already been opened. How officials respond is anyone’s guess, but hopefully lawmakers won’t exacerbate matters even further.