College Players Should Get Paid. But College Should Never Pay More Than the Pros.
College athletes deserve to make money. That debate is over, and it should be. For decades, schools, conferences and television networks generated billions of dollars while the athletes responsible for the product faced strict limits on how they could benefit financially. NIL and, more recently, direct revenue sharing have finally begun correcting that imbalance.
But fixing one broken system doesn’t mean we should create another one.
College sports now has a problem that would have sounded ridiculous a decade ago: for some of the best players in the country, staying in college can potentially be more lucrative than becoming a professional. When the developmental level can financially outbid the professional level for professional-caliber talent, something about the structure is backwards.
There should be a simple ceiling: the most a college basketball player can receive in athletics-related compensation should be tied to the lowest full-season NBA contract signed by a drafted player from the previous year’s NBA Draft.
Using the 2025-26 NBA season as an example, a full-season NBA two-way contract paid $636,435. The NBA itself states that a two-way salary that season was 50% of the rookie minimum salary. (The NBA G League) That would put the theoretical college basketball ceiling at roughly $636,000.
That’s still life-changing money for a college athlete. It doesn’t take us back to the days of pretending a scholarship is adequate compensation for athletes generating millions of dollars in value. It simply establishes a logical hierarchy.
College basketball should pay extremely well. The NBA should pay more.
Think about what that would accomplish.
An excellent college player could make $200,000. A star might make $400,000 or $500,000. The best players in the sport could approach the professional threshold. But once a player’s market value exceeds what the lowest-paid drafted NBA player earns, there is a natural next step available: become a professional basketball player.
That is how virtually every developmental system is supposed to work.
The number wouldn’t need to be arbitrarily selected by the NCAA, either. There would be no committee deciding whether $400,000 or $700,000 is “fair.” The market would determine it. NBA salaries increase? The college ceiling increases with them. The professional game would establish the value of the line between elite amateur-level competition and professional basketball.
There is an important distinction, though: legitimate outside NIL should remain uncapped.
If Nike believes a college basketball player is worth $2 million to appear in commercials, sell shoes and promote the company, Nike should be able to pay him $2 million. That money exists because of his actual commercial value, not because a booster wants him playing point guard for a particular university.
The cap should apply to compensation tied to playing college sports: school revenue sharing, collective payments, booster-funded recruiting arrangements and school-associated NIL. Genuine endorsement income from companies using an athlete’s name, image and likeness should remain separate.
Interestingly, college sports is already attempting to draw a similar distinction. Following approval of the House settlement in June 2025, Division I schools were permitted to share up to $20.5 million with athletes during the first year of the new system. (NCAA.org) Meanwhile, third-party NIL agreements are supposed to have a legitimate business purpose and compensation within a reasonable range for someone with comparable NIL value. Payments simply for attending or competing for a particular school remain prohibited under NCAA rules. (NCAA.org)
What’s missing is an individual ceiling.
The current system limits the overall amount a school can distribute, but it doesn’t create a clear philosophical line for what a single college athlete should be paid for playing college sports. That leaves programs competing to determine how much of their available money they are willing to concentrate on one player, while outside groups continue searching for ways to increase those numbers.
And that’s where college sports risks losing itself.
This isn’t an argument for taking money away from players. A $600,000-plus annual ceiling, scholarships, education, housing, training, medical care and unlimited legitimate commercial NIL would represent an extraordinary compensation package for a college athlete.
It’s an argument that there should still be a difference between college athletics and professional athletics.
If a player can command $1.5 million from Nike because millions of people know his name, good for him. That’s NIL.
But if one university needs to pay him $2 million simply because another university is willing to pay $1.8 million for him to play basketball there, we are no longer talking about NIL. We’re operating a professional sports league without contracts, salary structures, a draft, collective bargaining or most of the mechanisms that make professional sports sustainable.
College sports doesn’t need to return to what it was.
It does need boundaries.
Pay the players. Let stars capitalize on their fame. Let schools share the revenue athletes help generate. And make the ceiling generous enough that being a great college athlete can change someone’s life.
But there should always be one financial step above college basketball.
The NBA.
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