The NIL Edge – November 21st, 2025
College football is in the middle of a reckoning. Thirteen midseason firings, record-breaking buyouts, and an NIL arms race have turned the sport’s most powerful programs into some of its least stable. In this new 5 part series, I explore how championship coaches are struggling to adapt, why non-football schools are thriving, and what the “business of belief” reveals about the future of college athletics. The money, the pressure, and the shifting power dynamic between coaches, players, and boosters — it’s all here.
Part 3. The New Balance of Power: How Non-Football Schools Are Quietly Winning the NIL Era
While college football burns millions in buyouts, rebuilds, and NIL catch-up spending, something remarkable is happening on the margins: schools without football programs — and those with only modest ones — are quietly gaining ground.
The traditional hierarchy of college athletics, where football drives prestige, revenue, and recruiting power, is starting to wobble. The financial and cultural center of gravity is shifting, and the beneficiaries aren’t who most people expect.
Programs like Villanova, Gonzaga, Marquette, St. John’s, and UConn have long proven that you don’t need football to matter. But in the new landscape shaped by NIL economics, conference realignment, and settlement-driven revenue redistribution, the gap between football haves and have-nots is narrowing, and in some cases, flipping entirely.
The Football Drain
Has the modern football arms race reached unsustainable levels?
Schools that pride themselves on competing in the Power Four are now locked into a spending cycle that looks more like professional sports than higher education. Each new head coach comes with:
Multi-million-dollar buyouts.
Entirely new assistant staffs.
NIL “war chests” that have to be refilled every offseason.
Ever-growing facility demands to stay competitive in recruiting.
All of it adds up to a simple truth: the cost of maintaining football relevance is crowding out investment everywhere else.
Meanwhile, non-football schools — and those with smaller or independent football programs — have been able to redirect their resources strategically. They’re not burdened by the enormous fixed costs of football, and they’re leveraging that flexibility into something powerful: sustainable excellence.
The NIL Advantage Nobody’s Talking About
For non-football schools — and for those where football exists more in name than in national impact — NIL is simpler.
Without the burden of maintaining 85 scholarship football players, collectives can focus their resources on a few high-impact sports where national visibility translates directly into brand value.
At schools like Villanova, Marquette, Gonzaga, and even UConn — which technically competes in FBS football but operates as an independent with modest ambitions — boosters and alumni aren’t divided across multiple competing priorities. They can pour their energy and dollars into men’s and women’s basketball, where NIL deals are visible, marketable, and tied to championship programs.
Because these institutions aren’t forced to sustain the financial machinery of big-time football, their NIL ecosystems are leaner, more targeted, and more personal.
The result: while football schools are spending heavily just to stay competitive, basketball-centric programs are using NIL to pull away — building sustainable pipelines of talent and brand equity without the overhead.
The Settlement Effect
The other overlooked factor is the redistribution of money through conference and NCAA settlement agreements.
Some of that funding — designed to offset years of athlete compensation disputes — is being allocated at the discretion of athletic departments. And here’s the twist: schools without football are free to reinvest those funds however they choose.
A Big East or West Coast basketball power can take its settlement share and channel it directly into recruiting infrastructure, NIL partnerships, and player development. Meanwhile, mid-tier football schools are burning the same dollars to cover coaching buyouts and donor fatigue.
It’s an unintentional shift in leverage — a quiet reordering of competitive balance.
Basketball as the New Power Platform
As men’s and women’s basketball continue to globalize, the marketing opportunities in those sports are multiplying faster than football’s. International exposure, NIL sponsorships, and gender-equity investment are creating a far broader playing field.
Schools like UConn, LSU, and South Carolina on the women’s side, and Gonzaga or Marquette on the men’s, now wield cultural influence that rivals many football powers.
The key difference: they’re efficient powerhouses. Their operating models are leaner, their NIL collectives are more targeted, and their brands are increasingly national — even global.
When you don’t have to spend $100 million a year maintaining football relevance, you can spend $25 million building year-round dominance in basketball.
A New Hierarchy Emerges
If you zoom out, the next decade of college sports might look less like the SEC vs. everyone else and more like two distinct economies:
The Football Industrial Complex — expensive, volatile, and perpetually on the brink of financial exhaustion.
The Emerging Multi-Sport Model — sustainable, flexible, and built on NIL efficiency, athlete empowerment, and media adaptability.
The former chases scale. The latter chases impact.
And as media rights evolve, streaming grows, and NIL matures, it’s entirely possible that the schools without football — or those that no longer prioritize it — will find themselves better aligned with the future of college sports than the legacy powers of the gridiron.
The Real Irony
For years, football was the gravitational force that held college athletics together. Every realignment, every broadcast deal, every major decision revolved around it.
Now, that same gravitational pull may be collapsing under its own weight and freeing other sports to rise in its place.
The schools that once felt excluded from the top tier are discovering that the new economy rewards agility, not scale. And in that world, the next dynasty might not come from the gridiron at all.
Next up in this series: “The Business of Belief” — how alumni, collectives, and athletic departments must rethink what ‘success’ means in the NIL era.
Reach out for more info! [email protected]
