College sports generate millions each year. Who should profit?

Whether it's multimillion-dollar endorsement deals or just enough money to cover lunch every day, money from ads and social media endorsements is changing the game for college athletes.

The change could force smaller schools to cut their less popular sports programs.

If you follow college athletes on Instagram, you may have noticed — they're doing a lot more commercials lately. And for doing this kind of work, some athletes are raking in big bucks.

In a paid video last year, University of Washington Husky football players appeared as World of Warcraft characters. In an Instagram video, then-quarterback Michael Penix (now an Atlanta Falcon) made surprise deliveries as an fill-in Amazon delivery driver.

Washington State University linebacker Keith Brown (sadly injured this year) advised Seattle fans who can’t make it to Pullman to watch Cougar games at the Marco Polo Grill. UW Volleyball player Kierstyn Barton hawked Yerba Mate, “a trusted beverage to help me get through my lectures and labs.”

This year’s ads include video of Husky football players Demond Williams Jr. and Jonah Coleman flying an Alaska Airlines plane — or at least a flight simulator.

These deals represent a big change to the way colleges treat their athletes.

For decades, colleges considered them amateurs, which means they couldn’t be paid. In 2021, the Supreme Court overturned that, opening the door to student athlete payments.

Experts say this created an arms race of escalating student compensation packages, funded through third-party booster clubs. These clubs, which used to donate to entire college athletics programs, shifted their money to pay specific star athletes who come play for their school. Many experts described this 2021-2025 period as the “wild west” of college sports payments.

A legal settlement and NCAA rule change in the summer of 2025 allowed universities to get directly involved in those payments, and capped the total amount each participating university could pay all its athletes at $20.5 million.

Boosters may still raise independent funds, but this change was widely seen as a way to reign in out-of-control costs that UW Athletics Director Pat Chun considered bad for schools and for students.

“An unregulated environment was unmanageable,” he told the Seattle Times in June 2025, after the settlement.

This new landscape is changing how university athletics departments spend, says Dan Rascher who teaches sports economics at University of San Francisco.

“In the past, [colleges] would pay coaches and build huge training facilities to try to recruit athletes,” he said. “And now you can spread more of that, direct it to the athletes.”

Athletes as influencers

The specific right that athletes won in 2021 was the right to their “name, image and likeness,” or NIL for short. It means your personal brand, or your value as an influencer.

Most other students — whether they were musicians or authors or anything else — already had this right. Only athletes were denied NIL rights, the students’ side argued in court — and won.

While some star college athletes in top sports like football and basketball can pull in millions of dollars from NIL deals, for others, the earnings look like what they’d take home from a part-time job.

A nationwide survey of athletes showed that, like many part-time jobs, the work competes with other responsibilities. Many athletes are sacrificing academics — or even coming late to sport practices — to complete their NIL work.

“So if you're willing to sacrifice what got you that NIL deal in order to do the NIL deal, there's a little tension there,” said University of Florida’s Molly Harry, who conducted the survey.

Balancing practice, studies, and social media campaigns

Sophia Ramuno is a pitcher on the University of Washington softball team. She’s studying biotech, and wants to specialize in “de-extinction.”

She approaches her NIL time commitment with the same discipline she brings to her sport. She’s busy from sunup to bedtime every day with practices, classes, labs, and homework. But halfway through her evening, she takes an NIL break.

"I'll come up with a post or I will talk to the management team in regards to the brand deal, and I'll get a feel for what we need to do," Ramuno said. "I'll either film it then, or I'll keep generating ideas."

Ramuno wouldn’t say exactly what she’s making, but said that NIL deals — which don’t come with the same strings attached as scholarships — have allowed her to buy a car, get through college debt-free, and have enough money left over to rent an apartment while she looks for a job after graduating.

This is possible in part because women’s softball is enjoying growing popularity. NiJaree Canady, who pitches for Texas Tech, has made headlines as the first million-dollar softball player.

For people in less popular sports — the kind of sports most people only see in the Olympics — NIL deals can be much smaller.

Megan Lee is a former UW rower, whose college sports career included time both before and after recent changes to NIL rules. Her deals earned her $12,500 a quarter.

“I know NIL has talked about making college athletes rich and everything, but for me, I think it's just helpful… College students need money to buy food, to just do your essential, everyday things,” she said. “And I think that this is a great way for people that can't have a part-time job because they're always pursuing their sport.”

Lee rowed for other schools before coming to Seattle. She would have moved on, except a coach invited her to take an extra year at the UW. She jumped because it would be mostly covered by NIL deals. And as she rowed that year, she earned a digital marketing certificate on top of the degrees she’d already earned.

New financial problems, especially for smaller schools

One major concern about NIL deals is the impact the recent NCAA rule change could have on smaller colleges, which may not be able to raise the funds to meet the $20.5 million spending cap that larger schools can.

“There is no guarantee that suddenly, because you are allowed to spend $20.5 million every year on paying athletes, that suddenly you have $20.5 million more in your budget,” said Thilo Kunkel, who researches athlete branding at Temple University.

Following the NCAA rule change in summer of 2025, Washington State University athletics director Anne McCoy announced her department would cut jumping, throwing, and hurdling events from the school’s track and field program — focusing instead on distance running.

This is part of a trend. Even as college football reached some of its biggest audiences ever last year, since May 2024, 41 sports programs have been cut from the top competitive division in college sports.

The University of Washington — located in a wealthier town, and now in a bigger conference — has not had to cut those same programs.

This is all changing quickly. In the short term, we’re likely to see more emphasis on bigger sports, and fewer opportunities to play smaller sports in college. Experts say that could hurt the United States' chances in the Olympics, which rely on these student athletes.

There are bills in Congress both at the federal level and in Washington state that could further change the relationship between athletes and schools.

Students are not considered employees of their schools, and if that changes, then it’s a whole new ball game. Hourly pay, health insurance, collective bargaining — all these things are on the table for athletes.

To hear more about college athlete pay, listen to KUOW‘s economy podcast, "Booming."