By Davis Ramage
Name, image and likeness coupled with the unregulated transfer portal is causing the perfect storm that is leading to the downfall of our beloved college sports.
Name, Image and Likeness
Since its birth on July 1, 2021, the NIL landscape has changed drastically from its beginning to its current state, spiraling out of control as the days go by.
It started in 2021 with the simple idea that athletes would be able to profit off their name, image and likeness– something that should have happened a long time ago– and players became influencers per se, attaching their names to brands for money.
However, on December 10, 2024, it was announced that schools can directly pay players, turning recruiting and the transfer portal specifically into the “Wild West”.
In 2025, college sports have turned into a bidding war with athletes jumping from school to school, trying to see which school will pay them the most money, diminishing the core principles of college sports.
Take former University of Tennessee star quarterback Nico Iamaleava, for example.
He led the Volunteers to the No. 9 seed in the College Football Playoff and just recently made headlines when he left Tennessee after shopping himself around in an attempt to improve on the reported $2.4 million he was set to make at Tennessee this year.
After losing to Ohio State in the first round of the CFP, Iamaleava’s representatives– including his father, Nic– were reaching out to other schools behind the back of Tennessee and eventually landed on the University of California, Los Angeles, where he will be earning less than he was set to earn at Tennessee, according to ESPN.
Iamaleava, who is now being referred to on social media as “Nico Imma leave ya,” embodies everything that is wrong with the current state of NIL in college athletics.
College athletes deserve to profit from their name, image and likeness as they are the product that the college is producing, they are the reason fans buy tickets and spend money at concessions, but how NIL is being abused is not right.
Transfer Portal
In April 2024, the NCAA made a ruling that an athlete can transfer as many times as they want with immediate eligibility as long as they meet the new school’s academic requirements.
Ever since, that rule has been taken advantage of.
As of April 21, 2025, it has been reported that there are over 2,300 men’s basketball players, up 1,363 from 2019 when the portal was introduced, and over 1,500 women’s basketball players in the transfer portal.
The new narrative in college sports is that if a player has a good season at a small school, they enter the portal and try to go to a better school that can pay them more money.
If they have a bad season or don’t play as much as they feel they should at a big school, they transfer down in hopes of having a good season to transfer back up and make more money as an established player.
This narrative creates a toxic environment that encourages players to jump from team to team and to forgo the loyalty and development process that we have been used to seeing, all in hopes of benefiting monetarily.
Because of the ever-present transfer carousel, mid-majors, like Long Beach State, around the country are losing their best players year after year to larger schools that can pay them more, causing a lack of parity from top to bottom in college basketball.
We saw this come to light in this year’s NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, when the Elite 8 was an almost uniform outcome with there being four No. 1 seeds, three No. 2 seeds and a No. 3 seed in Texas Tech, which was the outlier.
Six out of the eight teams’ leading scorers for the 2024-2025 season were transfers, with Michigan State and Duke University being the only two teams not to be led by a transfer.
The parity of one of the great sporting events has been stolen away by the transfer portal. It is a small sample size, but the lack of a “Cinderella team” in this year’s tournament was evident.
Whatever happened to waiting your turn? Whatever happened to developing at one school? But most of all, whatever happened to loyalty?
Loyalty to a fanbase that has welcomed you with open arms and supported you through good and bad games, and loyalty to a coaching staff that embraced you, recruited you and invited you into their collegiate families.
College fans around the country are constantly getting figuratively slapped in the face when their favorite player abandons them to go chase more money.
This “Wild West” needs to be tamed.
