NIL has officially taken over college football. That won’t be a surprise to any college football fan, but every day that passes it seems like NIL is becoming more and more of a problem in the sport.
While many fans, analysts and coaches have a lot of issues with NIL, a new detail about how teams are using NIL has surfaced that might the the biggest problem to date. And none other than Kirby Smart is the one who shared this new NIL detail.
Schools are paying high school recruits to stay committed
In the above post from Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, Smart detailed a new NIL strategy some teams are using to keep their recruits committed to their program. Smart shared that schools are paying recruits upwards of $20,000 per month to keep them committed to their recruiting class.
It’s hard to express how awful this idea is and how this isn’t what NIL actually is at all. NIL was supposed to be a way for players to earn money off their name, image and likeness, but instead it has grown into an unregulated mess where everyone is getting paid for things that have nothing to do with their name, image and likeness.
Most fans have gotten behind the idea of recruits accepting NIL deals they will make when they get to college. That doesn’t make people agree with college football turning into this, but it’s become normalized over the years. But paying recruits that are still in high school just to keep them committed to their program is borderline insane.
Georgia likely is not implementing this unique NIL strategy
On the bright side, it seems like this isn’t something Georgia is doing, because if they were then Smart would never share this information publicly. So if other programs want to waste their money on high school recruits then so be it.
Georgia clearly has a method to their NIL madness that clearly works, because they have won multiple championships and signed the best recruiting classes in the country during the NIL era. So thankfully UGA is not utilizing this new strategy of paying recruits to stay committed, because if someone needs money to stay committed then that is a player no one should want in Georgia’s program.