Has NIL been a net positive or negative for college football?
Josh Pate argues NIL has been a net positive for college football despite its negatives -- citing Lane Kiffin's observation that players take the sport more seriously when financial incentives are tied to performance, and reveals that off-field issues have plummeted across programs since NIL's introduction. Subscribe to "Josh Pate's College Football Show" on YouTube .
Video Transcript
I think it's been a net positive, but it is not without negatives.
But I'll weigh them out for you.
This is where my mind's at.
You can disagree all you want to.
There's certainly two sides to this argument.
It's just to me it's about which side has more bullets.
So Lane Kiffin had a, I guess, a statement maybe recently at one of his press conferences.
I saw it today from the On3 NIL account.
This is a quote from Lane Kiffin.
They asked him about NIL and how it kind of makes college football a job for players.
He said, quote, "I think they do take it more serious that way and they realize, hey, if I don't play well, I'm probably not gonna make that much money next year.
And if I play well, I'm gonna make more, versus I just have the same scholarship."
Kind of just how a lot of humans work if you think about it.
Look, that's not the most college football romantic type of statement in the world, but it does bleed into one of the positives if you think about it, or maybe you haven't thought about it lately, so I'm gonna put it on your radar here.
You remember if you were covering college football or following college football in the '90s or, or maybe even the 2000s or before then, what was one of the rites of passage of spring and summer and early fall?
You saw headlines of off-the-field issues, guys getting arrested, guys getting in trouble.
Have you noticed how much that's plummeted?
I didn't say it's disappeared completely.
Have you noticed how much it's plummeted?
This is universal feedback.
100% of coaches we talk to, 100% of the places we go, they will tell you, "Oh, our off-field issues have fallen off a cliff."
I went to a, a major program this spring, and they were trying to remember any off-field issues that they had had, and this is not on camera.
Like, these are people who would shoot straight with me on this, and they were like, "Did we even have anyone?"
And they came up with one, and it was really random, and they said, "That used to be like a Even at our best, that used to be a weekly occurrence we had to deal with stuff."
Well, that's a byproduct of the way NIL has changed players' perspective on how they treat the opportunity to play college football.
So you've got far less off-the-field issue.
I'd say that's a positive
