Larry Ellison helped bankroll a $3 million payout to 1 Michigan college football star — who tanked. Have NIL deals 'destroyed college football'?

Of course, it didn’t hurt that Ellison also contributed to a $3 million per year NIL (name, image and likeness) offer for Underwood to join the team. Underwood’s father even reportedly predicted that endorsement deals could net his son up to $15 million before he even graduated.

Two years into his college career, however, the sophomore hasn’t lived up to the hype. He struggled on the field last season and now, following a loss last weekend in which he overthrew a pass onto the sidelines to finish the game, the team’s playoff hopes hang in the balance. Some critics, meanwhile, blame his big money deal for holding back the entire team.

“This is where NIL has destroyed college football,” Ryan Ermanni, co-host of the Good Day Detroit morning show, posted on X. “The only reason Bryce Underwood is not on the bench right now is because of how much money he’s making.”

How NIL money complicated college football

NIL deals kicked off in 2021 as a way to let college athletes cash in on their name and branding.

As sports radio host Craig Carton recently explained on the Fox News Rundown podcast, “The concept of NIL, which is not what it is today, was that … if you bring in a million bucks off of my name, my image and my likeness, I should get a small piece of that.”

However, he added, the world of NIL deals became “the wild, wild west,” where schools can pay athletes “under the guise of name, image and likeness, but no one’s holding [them] accountable to do it … it’s just bags of cash.”

Carton also claimed that “boosters are funding” these college athletic programs

Boosters like Ellison, whose investment doesn’t seem to be panning out as he might have hoped. Neither Ellison nor the Wolverines returned Moneywise’s request for comment.

The WSJ pointed to other high-priced NIL college footballers, like LaNorris Sellers with the South Carolina Gamecocks, or John Mateer of the Oklahoma Sooners’ John Mateer — quarterbacks who make $2 million and $1.5 million per year respectively — whose under-performance this season has their coaches debating benching them.

In college football, where most players used to simply get a free education and a shot at the NFL in return for hitting the gridiron, it’s difficult to justify benching million-dollar talents — even if the team might be better off for it.

But that’s not the only area where NIL deals complicate the player/school relationship.

Take the case of the Duke Blue Devils, who settled a game-changing lawsuit with quarterback Darian Mensah earlier this year. Mensah — currently the highest-paid NIL college football player at $6.5 million a year — wasn’t tanking on the field.

But when he announced his desire to transfer to the University of Miami to play for the Hurricanes rather than wait out his Duke deal until the end of 2026, the school sued him.

The two parties eventually settled out of court and Mensah now plays for the Canes, but it exposed a deeper flaw in the NIL system — college football players are school students, not employees. So while a college may commit to paying a star athlete millions of dollars, they are not contractually obligated to the school in the way that an NFL player is to their franchise.

In theory, a player can transfer if they like, leaving the school little recourse for retaining their star athlete. The tradeoff is that the player likely loses whatever remains of their NIL deal and any endorsements that accompanied it.