NIL has had its critics since day one. Some coaches hate it, and some fans think it has turned college football into a bidding war. There have been actual concerns about roster instability and locker room tensions over paygaps. But none of that noise was ever going to turn a former Florida State linebacker against a system. Because it didn’t exist when he needed it most. 

“I don’t care if these kids are blowing through their NIL money,” Vince Williams wrote on X. “NIL is the best thing to happen to college football. I was the co-MVP of the Orange Bowl (10 tackles, 3 TFLs, 1 sack), and I had $137 in my account. College athletes deserve compensation.”​

To understand why that tweet hits so hard, you have to go back to January 1, 2013, at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens. Florida State took on Northern Illinois in the Discover Orange Bowl. The Seminoles thoroughly handled business, winning 31-10. Williams, a senior linebacker for FSU, was everywhere that night. He racked up 10 tackles, 3 tackles for loss, and a sack to earn co-MVP honors. 

The contrast between what Williams had in his account after that Orange Bowl and what today’s top college players earn is almost impossible to wrap your head around. In 2025, Texas Longhorns quarterback Arch Manning was pulling in roughly $6.8 million in NIL value. Ohio State wide receiver Jeremiah Smith, a sophomore, was valued at around $4.2 million. 

The total NIL market across college athletics started at $393 million in the first year of the policy and was projected to reach $2.4 billion by 2026. These are actual dollars flowing to actual college athletes for the work they put in.

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A 2025 Carnegie Mellon University study found that NIL has actually improved competitive balance across college football. Now, elite talent is not limited only to blue-bloods. Players are making decisions based on the financial prospects, too. It gives smaller programs at least a little leverage, whereas before they had none.

Bryce Underwood, the top quarterback in the 2025 recruiting class, chose Michigan over LSU partly because of a reported $10.5 million deal from the Michigan NIL collective. The money is spreading, and even if it isn’t perfectly distributed, it is reaching players it never would have touched a decade ago.

Vince Williams’ tweet is a time capsule. He was one of the best players on the field in a major bowl game. He had given four years of his body and career to a program that made millions off his effort. But he had $137 to show for it. The system wasn’t broken by NIL. It was broken long before that. 

NIL just finally acknowledged what everyone already knew. These athletes were generating enormous value, and getting almost none of it back. Williams isn’t angry about kids spending their NIL money freely, because he remembers exactly what the alternative looked like from the inside of his own bank account.​ 

However, there have been some fair critiques of NIL. But, the epicentre of these critique are not actually players, at least not in majority of the cases. Let’s look at who exactly is the epicentre of the problems related to NIL.

Agents are creating problems for the coaches

College sports now see massive NIL money flowing into recruiting, and that’s creating a massive issue for coaches to keep their players locked in. But what creates the most problems is the agents who help players with their NIL pitch and tell them about teams interested in them.

“I think it’s almost at a crisis, to be honest,” executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association Joe Martin said. “We’ve got situations where we… have the street agents moving kids from place to place and representing them that are charging them a lot more money than they should be charging them.”

One of the major examples of this kind of situation is the Draden Fullbright recruitment gamble, who committed to Oklahoma State with an NIL of $36,000 per year, but when his agent, Tony Jones, got to know about it, he asked for 25% of that amount. Now, when he and his family refused to do that, Jones started sending rude messages.

Even former NFL player Derrick Gibson said that agents mess up the deals.

“But when it comes to your NIL money, he should not have 20% because that’s your number, and your number is not going to change,” he said. “I can give you a lot of examples where agents pretty much messed up a deal.”

In this chaos, college football is shaping into a world where everything remains uncertain.