College football made millions from Inky Johnson.
Johnson made almost nothing.
Raised by a struggling single mother in Atlanta, football wasn’t just a game — it was Johnson’s family’s best chance to escape poverty.
After earning a scholarship to play for the University of Tennessee, the undersized cornerback developed into a serious NFL prospect. Then, with less than three minutes remaining in a 2006 game against Air Force, one tackle changed everything.
Air Force receiver Justin Handley caught a pass and turned up field, lowering his helmet into Johnson’s right shoulder. The collision permanently paralyzed Johnson’s right arm, ending his football career on the spot.
Despite the injury, the television contracts kept paying. The coaches kept collecting million-dollar salaries. Tennessee kept filling the stadium.
Johnson’s earning potential vanished the moment his body gave out.
Tennessee didn’t owe Johnson a dime. Per NCAA rules at the time, they couldn’t have paid him even if they wanted to.
That’s exactly why the old NCAA system needed to change.
For decades, the NCAA wrapped itself in the comforting language of “amateurism.” The model aimed to preserve the academic integrity of college sports and emphasize athletes as students first.
Universities built billion-dollar athletic enterprises. Coaches signed multimillion-dollar contracts and athletic departments built NFL-caliber facilities, while the athletes fans came to watch were expected to accept scholarships as payment in full.
Worse, the NCAA enforced its rules inconsistently — overlooking major violations while punishing athletes for accepting modest payments or signing memorabilia.
Eventually, reality caught up.
In 2021, this issue reached the Supreme Court. In NCAA v Alston a landmark 9-0 ruling rejected the amateurism defense, finding the NCAA’s restrictions on athlete compensation violated antitrust law. The NCAA’s resulting interim policy still barred schools from paying athletes directly. But athletes could finally profit from endorsements, appearances, social media, memorability, and other uses of their own name, image and likeness.
It was a long-overdue victory for economic freedom.
But then the pendulum swung so far in the opposite direction that college sports barely resemble college sports anymore.
Welcome to Free Agency U
The biggest problem with NIL isn’t that athletes are finally getting paid.
It’s that almost nobody is steering the ship.
Instead of replacing the NCAA’s outdated system with national standards, NIL became a patchwork of state laws. Texas has some of the country’s most restrictive rules, while Alabama has virtually none. An athlete’s opportunities now depend as much on geography as talent.
That’s not a free market.
That’s regulatory roulette.
The chaos extends beyond NIL. The transfer portal has turned every offseason into college football’s version of NFL free agency. In one case, an athlete will suit up for his seventh school in seven years in 2026. Before 2021, he would’ve been required to sit out a mandatory season upon each new transfer.
Loyalty has become a year-to-year lease, renewed only if someone else doesn’t offer a better deal.
Freedom Needs Rules
The NCAA’s old model was unfair, hypocritical, and overdue for retirement.
But liberty isn’t the same thing as chaos.
Markets function best when everyone plays under the same rules, contracts are enforceable, and competition is fair. College athletics deserves no less.
Congress has floated several bills — namely the SCORE Act, the SAFE Act, and the Protect College Sports Act — to establish national standards that replace today’s patchwork of state regulations, empowering the NCAA to enforce uniform rules, oversee agents and collectives, restore reasonable transfer restrictions, and provide a narrow anti-trust exemption necessary for enforcement.
Any reforms should preserve athletes’ right to profit from their own NIL, while avoiding heavy-handed price controls or revenue mandates that create new distortions. The goal isn’t to shrink NIL, but to give it the structure it’s been missing since day one.
Money Doesn’t Just Talk – It Recruits
College athletics has never been perfectly equal.
But NIL has widened the long-standing gap between programs as the current unregulated NIL structure benefits schools with larger donor bases. The University of Texas’ estimated NIL budget ($22.2 million) is more than triple that of its’ conference rival Mississippi State’s ($6.5 million), illustrating how power programs increasingly dominate recruiting. Today, opportunity increasingly follows whichever booster collective writes the biggest check.
The result isn’t greater competition. It’s an arms race.
Everyone Else Pays
Worst, current policies are hurting the very athletes they intended to help. NIL driven costs have triggered the elimination of more than 415 athletic programs since May 2024.
The athletes losing opportunities aren’t usually star quarterbacks with lucrative endorsement deals.
They’re swimmers, gymnasts, wrestlers, tennis players, and athletes in dozens of Olympic sports whose scholarships quietly disappear.
Given that less than 2% of all college athletes turn pro, this directly undermines the NCAA’s student-athlete model.
The Bottom Line
The NCAA spent decades pretending college sports wasn’t a business.
Now, in many ways, it’s pretending it isn’t responsible for managing one.
Inky Johnson deserved better than the old system that profited from his talent while offering almost nothing in return.
Congress can fix that by building a stable regulatory environment that lets student athletes profit from their efforts without sacrificing the integrity of college sports.
NIL was a long-overdue victory for economic freedom. Now policymakers must finish the job by pairing that freedom with clear rules, fair competition, and accountability.