The Collision: Advocates – myself included – fought for college athletes to get paid. We were right to. And what we built is a mess. Now what?
Advocates fought for college athletes to get paid. They were right to. What got built is a mess — and a collision is coming.
Advocates – myself included – fought for college athletes to get paid. We were right to. And what we built is a mess. Now what?
A Market Without a Market Structure
Since 2021, NIL has created a real market for college athletes. What it has not created is any meaningful infrastructure around that market. No federal framework. Conflicting state laws. Little oversight of the agents and deal brokers moving the money. The people closest to these athletes — many of them teenagers — are operating under no fiduciary standard. There is no consensus on how revenue-generating athletes should be treated differently from non-revenue-generating ones. There is no collective voice for the athletes themselves.
We built a market without a market structure.
David White, Founder & CEO, 3CG Ventures
That is not a criticism of the athletes or even most of the institutions. It is an honest read of what happens when a decades-old system is disrupted faster than governance can respond. The people who pushed for NIL reform — again, myself included — focused on winning the policy argument. We were less focused on what came next. That gap is now the whole story.
What It Is Teaching Athletes
There is a part of this story that does not get enough attention: what the NIL era is actually teaching college athletes about how the world works.
A 17-year-old signing a $4 million NIL deal before his first college game is learning something — about value, leverage, negotiation, and expectation. He is learning it in an environment with few rules and no fiduciary standard governing many of the people around him. That is an education, but not necessarily the right one.
Some of that is fine. Exposure to a real market is valuable. But the absence of structure does not produce savvy — it produces pattern recognition built on chaos. And those patterns do not stay on campus.
The Collision Coming Down the Road
In five to ten years, many of those well-paid teenagers will be sitting across a bargaining table in professional sports. They will arrive as seasoned veterans — not just of the game, but of an open, chaotic market they have navigated since high school. They will have strong opinions about their value, their leverage, and what they are owed.
Across the table will be ownership groups increasingly shaped by private equity logic: cost control, labor compliance, scalability, and investment horizons that answer to fund structures, not fanbases.
That collision is coming.
David White, Founder & CEO, 3CG Ventures
This is not a labor-versus-capital argument dressed up in sports language. It is a structural observation. Two very different sets of conditioning — one shaped by NIL-era freedom with no framework, one shaped by PE-era discipline with a very rigid one — are on a path toward each other. Neither side is particularly prepared for what happens when they meet.
The Window to Shape This Is Still Open
The good news is that this moment is still early enough to matter. The current disorder does not have to become permanent dysfunction. The chaos in college athletics today is a preview, not a destiny — but only if the people with standing to act actually do.
What that requires is leadership willing to build durable structures rather than waiting for the next crisis to force them. Reactive governance has already given us this mess. The path forward is proactive — and specific.
The solution I keep coming back to is a new framework that fuses collective bargaining principles with federal policy: something that creates a floor, a fiduciary standard, and a legitimate voice for athletes — without dismantling what NIL got right. That is a harder political lift than passing state-level NIL bills. It is also the only version of this that holds.
More soon...
— David White, Founder & CEO, 3CG Ventures
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