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Inside The Dark Side of NIL
Just because you SAY you're an NIL agent doesn't make you a very good one plus joining the NIL Club and SMU's momentum...
Kyle Rowland
February 24, 2026
Hey!
Thanks for reading NIL Wire today. Did you know that basically anybody can be an NIL agent, even if they have no law degree, professional certifications, or useful experience? As we’ll see today, that can create some real problems for athletes. We also have news on a lucrative NIL platform you probably haven’t heard of, the always-ambitious SMU Mustangs, and my plea to puh-leeze leave the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament alone.
Enjoy!
— Kyle
Why More Seafood (and Less Red Meat) Might Be the Wellness Shift You’ve Been Looking For
If you’re thinking about cutting back on red meat for better health, wild-caught seafood could be your secret weapon. Science shows that eating fish 1-2 times a week can support healthy heart and brain function, help reduce inflammation, and even may give your metabolism a little boost.
Here’s what wild-caught seafood delivers: essential n‑3 polyunsaturated fats (specifically, the marine-based omega-3 fatty acids that nutritionists love so much!), lean and digestible protein, and a smorgasbord of nutrients. Compare that to conventional red meat, which often comes with higher saturated fat, an unhealthy balance of omega‑6 fatty acids, and a limited range of nutrients.
KICKOFF
Unregulated and Unchecked: The dark side of NIL representation
Every few months, another story drops that confirms what anyone inside college athletics already knows: the NIL gold rush has created a shadow industry of middlemen, and not all of them are operating in good faith.
That’s why Paula Lavigne’s latest reporting for ESPN matters. She pulled back the curtain on a problem coaches, players and administrators whisper about constantly — uncertified, unregulated NIL “agents” taking advantage of high school and college athletes who are navigating the most complex financial moment of their young lives.
Anyone associated with college sports has heard the stories. Agents with no certification, no union oversight and no meaningful accountability demanding 15, 20, even 25 percent of an athlete’s NIL deal.
Joe Martin, executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association, told Lavigne, “It’s almost at a crisis.” He’s not exaggerating. Talk to coaches at Ohio State and Michigan or Louisiana-Monroe and Georgia Southern, and you’ll hear variations of the same story. Athletes are being steered into bad decisions by people chasing a quick payday.
In professional sports, agents are certified by players’ unions. In the NFL, agents earn 3 percent of player salaries and typically 10 to 20 percent of endorsement deals. In high school and college sports, there’s nothing comparable.
In December, Student-Athlete Insights surveyed 1,000 college athletes about NIL. Sixty-seven percent said they agreed to give someone who helped them a percentage of their earnings. Just over half said they were satisfied with that person’s help. That’s a massive gap between compensation and value.
About one-fourth of Texas high school football and basketball coaches surveyed by the Texas High School Coaches Association told ESPN their athletes had been contacted by agents. Of those coaches, 70 percent said they do not believe those agents are acting in the athlete’s best interest.
And this isn’t just about money. Bad advice can wreck a career before it starts. One coach told ESPN about a player who transferred schools at an agent’s urging, lost playing time at his new stop and watched his scholarship opportunities evaporate.
“There are some people that are in this industry that are doing the right thing,” said Tim Prukop, co-founder of Eccker Sports Group. “But for every one of those, there’s 10 that are out there just trying to make a buck the fastest that they can on anybody that they can.”
The most jarring example in Lavigne’s story involves former Oklahoma State cornerback Draden Fullbright and Tony Jones, a mentor figure who sought 25 percent of Fullbright’s $36,000 NIL deal. When Fullbright resisted, the disagreement devolved into expletive-laced text messages. Jones later insisted he deserved the compensation, pushing back against criticism.
If that doesn’t illustrate the imbalance of power in some of these relationships, nothing does.
Lawmakers are paying attention. In December, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Maria Cantwell introduced legislation that would require NIL agents to register with a state, create an online registry and cap agent fees at 5 percent.
NIL isn’t going away. The money isn’t shrinking. College sports built NIL at breakneck speed. Regulation, education and enforcement haven’t caught up. Until they do, athletes will remain vulnerable.
How NIL Club quietly became a $16 Million force in college sports
NIL Club, an app largely unknown to most fans and focused on athletes on the margins of Division I sports, has quietly grown into a significant force in the NIL marketplace.
According to Daniel Libit of Sportico, roughly 650,000 athletes have earned a combined $16 million through the platform. Among them is Tymir Jones, an esports player at Cleveland State, who has made more than $10,000 via NIL Club. Jayson Philpot-Dixon, a running back at Central Michigan University, is another notable earner.
Mick Assaf, a former walk-on football player at Notre Dame, and Auburn fan Bailey O’Sullivan, co-founded NIL Club. The platform combines a marketplace model with subscription-based, team-specific clubs in which athletes share pooled revenue. NIL Club retains 15 percent of subscription income.
“It is like having an agent finding NIL deals for you,” Jones said. “It just takes away the time of not searching for yourself and putting in the work.”
Rather than competing for splashy, high-dollar endorsements, NIL Club has carved out a niche by working with lesser-known athletes at smaller programs. Deals typically fall under the $600 reporting threshold established by the College Sports Commission’s NIL Go clearinghouse.
Assaf estimates that more than 90 percent of NIL Club users do not participate in revenue-sharing arrangements. The highest-earning groups on NIL Club include Iona women’s water polo, at $1,796 per athlete annually, and Butler women’s tennis, which averages $2,100 per athlete per month.
Even as the platform expands, it has drawn scrutiny. Several state high school athletic associations have raised concerns about the potential for confusion or exploitation tied to NIL Club’s model, underscoring the broader unease that continues to surround the evolving NIL landscape.
SMU’s money, momentum and ambition are no joke
It’s time for the college sports ecosystem to take SMU seriously.
The Mustangs are operating with a level of ambition and financial backing that few programs can match. This is a school that agreed to forfeit nine years of ACC television revenue just to join the ACC. Then, donors raised $200 million to offset the lost revenue. Then they raised another $100 million in one week!
The results were immediate. In Year 1 in the ACC, the Mustangs won the conference and reached the College Football Playoff.
Last week reinforced the point. Four couples pledged $50 million for scholarships, NIL advancement and revenue sharing, launching the Boulevard Society,a high-level giving organization designed to drive long-term philanthropic investment in SMU athletics, with the stated goal of raising another $50 million.
When SMU trustee David Miller, a billionaire oilman, was asked by the Dallas Morning News whether the university would reach that goal, his answer was Texan to the core: “Hell yeah!”
SMU’s donor class is not only wealthy but coordinated and aggressive. In the modern NIL and revenue-sharing era, alignment matters as much as raw dollars. SMU has both. The new college sports economy rewards three things: access to capital, administrative boldness and a willingness to operate aggressively. SMU has demonstrated all three.
Recent history shows how transformative that formula can be. Indiana just won the national championship. The ACC, even with programs like Miami on the upswing, is not an impenetrable fortress. It is a league in transition, and transition creates opportunity.
Elite resources combined with ambition dramatically raise a program’s ceiling. SMU has the market, the momentum, the infrastructure and, most importantly, the financial commitment.
More news and links:
The Mountain West has partnered with the Creator Sports Network and Opendorse to launch an “Athlete Rights Window,” which will allow athletes to stream live game broadcasts on their Instagram and TikTok accounts.
Richard Johnson of CBS Sports takes Sacramento State to task for its iffy economic projections.
The Wisconsin Assembly approved a bill that would allocate $14.6 million in taxpayer funding to the University of Wisconsin athletics.
Wyoming AD Tom Burman said the Cowboys should spend $3 million on revenue sharing across all sports next year.
UCLA will play the 2026 season at the Rose Bowl.
Michigan businesses are taking a strategic approach to NIL deals with high schoolers.
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DOWN TO BUSINESS
Stop trying to ruin the NCAA tournament
March is sacred. Not in a Hallmark-holiday way. In a cancel-your-meetings, pretend-you’re-working-while-streaming-TruTV way.
The madness starts with conference tournaments and a low hum of anxiety, crescendoing into the glorious, nerve-shredding chaos of the NCAA tournament. On the first Thursday and Friday of March Madness, America collectively stops pretending productivity matters.
Wall Street. Main Street. Third-period algebra. It all ceases to matter. Instead, everyone is locked into CBS, TBS and, once a year, whatever channel number TruTV happens to be.
It’s one of the last truly communal sporting events we have. From Duke to Dartmouth, North Carolina to Nevada, blue bloods to bus riders, we all tune in. Brackets are taped to cubicles. Grandmothers at the retirement home debate the merits of 12th-seeded South Dakota State.
Which is precisely why the looming expansion is frustrating yet predictable. Because in America, we like ruining things. Discussions about NCAA tournament expansion are not only back on the table, this time it feels inevitable.
Charlie Baker is on the record saying he favors expansion. Nothing will be finalized until after this year’s tournament, according to NCAA basketball czar Dan Gavitt.
The NCAA and its broadcast partners stand to gain revenue from additional games. But this isn’t even something the networks are asking for. Maximizing short-term profits risks long-term brand damage. The tournament’s value derives from its intensity and scarcity. Oversaturating the product could lead to viewer fatigue. Part of what makes the first round so thrilling is the rapid succession of meaningful, high-stakes games. If early rounds are padded with marginal teams playing preliminary games, the urgency and excitement are diluted.
The magic of the NCAA tournament lies in its exclusivity. The current format strikes a delicate balance between opportunity and merit. Bubble teams fight desperately in February and March because they know one loss could cost them a bid. The tension fuels compelling regular-season matchups and conference tournaments.
Expand the field, and you flatten that urgency. And let’s drop the fairy tale that expansion is about giving plucky mid-majors a better shot. It’s not. It won’t mean more Indiana States and Illinois States. It will mean more 10th-place finishers from the Big Ten and SEC sneaking in with 9-11 conference records and a shiny top-50 NET ranking. Woo hoo!
Did commissioners not consider that when they wanted 16- and 18-team conferences?
One of the tournament’s defining traits is that it doesn’t operate like the NBA, where more than half the league makes the playoffs. Yet Baker and Greg Sankey act as if it’s a flaw that needs correcting.
Seth Davis, who’s more in the tank for the NCAA than RT is for Putin, made the asinine case for expansion because Division I has expanded by more than 30 schools in the past two decades, so the tournament has to keep up. Huh?
What makes March magical isn’t volume. Every possession feels consequential because the margin for error is microscopic. That tension is engineered by exclusivity. Cinderella stories prove the point. They resonate because they’re rare and earned.
If 13-seed Cal Poly storms into the Sweet 16, it becomes a national moment. If 11-seed Oklahoma does it, it’s a footnote. Expansion increases the odds that more mediocre power-conference teams squeeze out the very mid-majors that give the tournament its soul.
Oversaturation is real. Ask college football. The playoff now stretches so deep into January that it feels like a second-semester sport. When everything is expanded, nothing feels special.
And here’s the most underrated factor of all: the bracket. Yes, a piece of paper. The fact that the entire tournament fits cleanly on one page is not trivial. Office pools are the gateway drug for casual fans (and hopefully not problem gamblers). It’s why fathers, their 7-year-old daughters and your dentist care about 12–5 games.
A 76-team bracket is complicated and creates unnecessary confusion for the consumer.
Most importantly, Selection Sunday means something right now. When a school hears its name called, it’s validation. There’s a reason why making the NCAA tournament increases enrollment at mid-majors. It matters because not everyone gets in.
Make entry easier, and you cheapen the accomplishment. Scarcity creates value, economically, emotionally and culturally. The NCAA tournament is an American original. Like our national parks, its value lies in preservation.
Yellowstone and Yosemite don’t need a parking garage. And the NCAA tournament doesn’t need more teams.