Carson Beck’s rumored $4 million NIL payment continues to impact the NFL game.
If it is true that former Georgia quarterback Carson Beck will receive $4 million in NIL money to play for the University of Miami in 2025, figures like that will encourage more and more high-end college football players to do what the NFL has encouraged them to do for years (possibly as a favor to its free farm system).
Stay in school.
Even though it is obviously not school. As if it’s been years. It is business. And it had been business for everyone except those who powered it. Not long ago, everyone involved in the presentation of a college football game, from the school president to the person selling stale popcorn, got compensated – except the athletes.
The curtain has dropped. The façade has been destroyed. College football is professional football. And college football pays significantly more than the early years of most rookie contracts.
Only the top 16 players in the 2024 first-round draft received four-year contracts worth more than $4 million each year. So, by staying in college football for another year or two, a player whose draft stock may not be (or never will be) as high might earn a lot of money while still gaining playing experience before moving to the NFL.
The final analysis for the player goes like this. Should I take the money that is available now, or should I go to the NFL and start the three-year clock on a market-rate second contract? This implies that the player is excellent enough to command a market-level second deal — and that the team that drafts him is ready to pay it after three years, not squat on him through the fifth-year option, and possibly play the franchise-tag game.
There’s another angle that will finally emerge on selection day. As more top-tier players transition from their professional college careers to pro football with more money in the bank, they will be better able to refuse to sign a contract with a dysfunctional club and sit out the entire season if necessary. This provides them significant leverage in telling a team not to draft them and, if they do, to immediately trade them.
Yes, that tactic continues to risk enraging fans and some members of the media, who are outraged by players’ commercial decisions. That reluctance will eventually fade, just like the teeth-gnashing that occurred when draft-eligible athletes stopped participating in bowl games.
First, someone must do it. It last occurred in 2004, when Eli Manning avoided the Chargers. Prior to that, John Elway refused to join the Colts in 1983. Given the tiny sample size, the NFL’s version of Halley’s Comet is expected to return in 2025, 21 years after the last time.
It needs to happen. Too many careers (particularly those of quarterbacks) have been derailed, if not destroyed, as a result of signing with a terrible owner, front office, or roster. Some of the finest quarterbacks in 2025 (Sam Darnold, Baker Mayfield, and Geno Smith) gained that experience early in their careers. And the teams responsible for it (the Jets and Browns) may be seeking to draft a quarterback in the first round this year.
The NIL explosion helps to avoid a player’s NFL career getting derailed early, both by giving college players more experience before heading to the NFL (and playing time has clearly aided the rapid development of Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels and Broncos quarterback Bo Nix) and by providing them with more of a war chest to fight the NFL’s Draft Industrial Complex.
It is not personal. It is business. And it has been acceptable for NFL teams to make business judgments for decades. The time for players to make business decisions has come.
