Playing for Keeps 

Quincy Bryant was barely out of his teens when he moved into a home he’d purchased and found himself operating a makeshift wealth management advisory out of his living room.

It was 2023, just two years after the N.C.A.A. opened the doors to compensation for college athletes, and Bryant, a football player at Wake Forest University, had brought in about $15,000 in his last season. It wouldn’t typically have been enough to buy a house, but the young linebacker had become somewhat of a financial savant beginning in high school, having known even earlier that paying for college would be up to him. Back then, an athletic scholarship hadn’t seemed plausible. So, he saved earnings from summers mowing lawns and studied the investments that would eventually position him to own property before he could legally drink.

Bryant’s teammates were eager to follow in his footsteps. “It started with people coming to me, asking me questions. Because I was a resource that was close to them and actually reachable — that they could have a conversation with,” he said. Soon, he was overwhelmed by athletes wanting his help, sitting on his sofa, as he’d analyze their finances, ask about their plans, and present a budget. Oftentimes, their goal was a car, so he’d send them upstairs to see his roommate and teammate, Trent Nicholson, who’d grown up working on cars and could advise on models and review leases. 

Bryant and Nicholson’s accidental enterprise may have been a fun side hustle for them, but the demand they encountered speaks to a deeper issue ushered in by the new era of college athletics. For the last five years, players have been eligible to profit off third-party deals related to their name, image and likeness (N.I.L.) and, more recently, earn a share of the revenue generated by their athletic departments. These were hard-won steps towards ensuring athletes receive a cut of the lucrative industry they sustain. What they have not all received, however, is truly meaningful support for navigating the many financial opportunities, and vulnerabilities, that have also emerged.

The pressing question for college athletics is what kind of protections its players are owed when it comes to their financial wellbeing, and from whom. To what extent does the N.C.A.A., do universities or coaches, have a responsibility to guarantee all their athletes are set up for success long-term, or even just to mitigate their stress in managing their money?  

Like any 18-year-olds, most incoming college athletes haven’t built or needed extensive skills in personal finance. Now they could collectively make billions. That’s billions to cultivate if they know how, and billions to lose when they don’t. Professional sports have already revealed what’s at risk when players are financially unequipped: In 2015, about one in six former N.F.L. players were found to have gone bankrupt within 12 years of retirement. In college, the athletes are younger and less experienced.

And it’s not just the highest-earning players for whom effective financial education could be critical. The majority of college athletes are bringing in anywhere from nothing, to free goods from brand deals, to a few hundred dollars, to several thousand. The revenue-generating sports, primarily football and men’s basketball, are where the most money circulates. But players from smaller sports, like men’s golf and women’s gymnastics, or even the smallest, like fencing or rifle, are still in the game. They, too, stand to benefit from lessons in understanding and capitalizing on their opportunities, securing the nest egg that could support them years later, or simply avoiding being ripped off by a torrent of dubious actors clamoring to profit off a massive developing market. 

“We wanted players to have the opportunity to earn off their labor, and we didn't put in the guardrails to hopefully promote it being more often than not a good experience,” said Greg Chick, a writer and data analyst with a Ph.D. in N.C.A.A. financial policy. Where the gaps in protections persist, he added, are likely the result of an industry struggling to keep up with its own rapid pace of change. “Hopefully,” he said, “we can get there.”

‘A lawless system’

Time and again in conversations with players and experts, the phrase they used to describe the recently transformed landscape of college sports was “Wild West.” Over the last five years, the environment hasn’t just been unpredictable, they said, but in many ways unregulated, disorienting even for those in the middle of it. 

For Bryant and Nicholson, the storm of change aligned almost perfectly with their own college careers. In 2021, the first season they played was also the first since the N.C.A.A. had, for the first time, allowed players to make money, specifically off N.I.L. It was a controversial and drawn-out decision. Advocates, as Chick alluded, wanted students to be able to share in the billion-dollar industry actualized by their labor; dissenters would have preferred to protect the amateurism of college sports and avoid blurring the line between the pros. 

The basic idea of N.I.L. was that players would be able to make money off third-party engagements, like endorsements or appearances. But opportunists were quick to take advantage of the unformed boundaries. By 2023, operations called donor collectives, funds raised by boosters and alumni, were shelling out millions to students, theoretically still in exchange for certain services, like social media promotion or their autographs. The result was that, in two years, the way top talent was recruited, and retained, transformed. Starting football players at big programs began making an average of 103,000 a year. Transferring between schools surged as athletes chased higher earnings on different teams.

By Bryant and Nicholson’s last seasons, donor collectives were simmering down, but only because they were overtaken by a more expedient way of compensating players. 2025 marked the dawn of revenue sharing, whereby schools can now pay athletes directly, originally with up to $20.5 million for all players across all programs. This move was a product of lawsuits against, and a subsequent settlement with, the N.C.A.A. for having illegally limited players’ earning rights. Ahead of the 2025 season, football players were projected to bring in a collective $1.9 billion, $1.4 million of which would come from revenue sharing. 

In the Wild West, the more money that circulates, the more potential there is for conflict. In college sports, when young players began profiting from their success, they became vulnerable to financial mismanagement and exploitation.

Nicholson estimates he helped save tens of thousands for his friends collectively just by reviewing the terms sheets for their car purchases and steering them appropriately. From the dealership, they’d text him a picture of the agreement. “Then I would call them and be like, ‘Tell them you’re not paying for this,’” Nicholson said. A 20-year-old college football player coming in to buy a pricey car, he imagines, likely set off salesmen to upcharge wherever possible.

It's not just strangers, though, who end up looking to profit, or maybe even just for some help staying on top of the bills. Navigating requests for money from people within your circle can be a major, and frequent, challenge. “One of our earliest things that we focused on was, ‘Here's how your family's going to treat you. It’s going to change,’” Nicholson said. “Unfortunately, that’s the reality.”

While at Wake Forest, Bryant said, he took about half a dozen guys to the local branch of Wells Fargo to open new accounts. His existing connections there helped some teammates open a line of credit. Half, though, needed a new bank account because their only existing one was from “when they were 13” and still tied to a family member. “My money’s disappearing,” a confused teammate might express after seeing his savings inexplicably decrease. “Well,” Bryant would respond, taking a look at the transaction history, “there’s a transfer out to your parents…”

Family members may also play a role in players’ business dealings to mixed results. Last week, The Athletic published an investigation highlighting the “little-to-no certification” requirements for someone to become a college player’s agent. “A lot of times it's Uncle John that's doing this for players, and that's ripe for exploitation, not even by the family member,” Chick said. “I mean, a well-intentioned family member could do a lot of good, but they could also be taken advantage of by the schools, by the brands, by any number of actors in this space.”

Unlike in the professional leagues, there aren’t caps on the percentage an agent can earn from a college-level contract. The N.F.L.’s 3 percent limit is dwarfed, for example, by a one reported college “standard” of around 20, The Athletic found. Combined with the loose certification requirements, that unchecked room for profit makes the college market appealing to less than scrupulous individuals. Meanwhile, Chick said, the lower price tag on the average college-level deals compared to the pros might keep more qualified ones away. 

Instagram has become the N.I.L. underground, where bad actors can slip into athletes' DMs in the light of day. On the one hand, Nicholson said, it’s often a red flag when brands or agencies reach out over social media. On the other hand, Byant said, “That’s the only way that people are able to get in contact with these athletes. Because you don’t have their phone number. No athlete uses their email.”

Bryant recalled a time he discovered someone had been pretending to be his agent and shopping around on his behalf for offers from other universities, as if he planned to transfer. He had no such plans and didn’t learn about the fake-search until other people started asking him about his intentions to leave. 

On the legality of this kind of move, Nicholson jumped in: “There’s no rules,” he said. “It’s a lawless system.”

The business of education

The first image to pop up upon a quick Google search for David Clawson is evocative of just about every villain coach from “Friday Night Lights.” The former Wake Forest football coach is screaming from the sidelines, ripping off his headset in apparent frustration. 

On Zoom, broadcasting from his daughter’s apartment, he presents another persona, calmly transparent about the challenges of college football’s ongoing transformation and prone to giddy pauses to chase after or scoop up one or both of his miniature dachshunds, Scout and Piper.

Clawson got into coaching with the intent to educate, he said. That was before the first “million-dollar coach,” he explained, and long before all the “deregulation” that’s come since revenue sharing. “There was a very holistic element to what we did,” he said of the way college football recruitment and development used to be. “We were going to develop them physically and as football players, but also academically and spiritually and build their character.” This approach, he feels, was good for players as people; it was also good for team performance.

Even as Clawson adapted to the new, more payment-driven way of recruiting and retaining players upon the onset of N.I.L., he sought to maintain that core focus on education. From a personal-finance perspective, it was immediately clear to him that students would need support. “It was not hard to predict that. All of a sudden you have 18- and 19-year-olds that were going to make more money in a year than their parents had ever made in their lifetime,” he said. “So it's just like anything; you wanted to give them the truths and the knowledge and give them the equipment to deal with it.”

John Currie, the athletic director at Wake Forest, agreed that one of his department’s priorities should be serving students, and he said it’s his job to set that expectation. As college sports begin to resemble the pros more and more, he maintained, “We’re still in the education business.” If anything, he added, coaches and staff may find it’s more important now than ever to provide holistic support to players in order to “maximize the return on these dollars that are being invested in them.” 

Attention and programming for student athlete wellness do seem to be on the rise. When Chick analyzed the staff directories of all Division I athletic departments, he uncovered a swath of personnel explicitly dedicated to supporting mental health and wellness. “These teams of professionals who operate strictly within the athletic department indicate that [athletic directors] and the leadership of these departments recognize the value in supporting student athlete mental health,” he wrote in an email. 

These efforts towards increased wellness infrastructure may be in part a response to recent N.C.A.A. wellbeing surveys revealing persistent mental health concerns among athletes. Notably, in a 2021 study, the educational resources respondents indicated most needing were tax and financial literacy. In the 2022 to 2023 year, “financial worries” were among the top three factors negatively influencing student mental health. 

To that end, there’s a basic understanding that all Division I schools should and do have some kind of financial literacy offering for its student athletes. The N.C.A.A. lists support for personal development, including N.I.L and financial literacy education, among its “Core Guarantees.” But what exactly those offerings look like is less easy to articulate and, likely, enforce. “What's the standard? What's the minimum expectation of support in that area? Is that something that the athletics department should fund solely, or should student athletes be directed to the broader institution?” Chick said of the unsettled specifics.

A critical consideration, Chick said, is that having services doesn’t mean they are useful or used. For that reason, he’s generally cautious to embrace every example of financial literacy support a college athletic department points to. “A way that institutions try to gain a competitive edge is to, of course, have a boutique of services for athletes,” Chick said. “It's very easy to pay lip service to support in this from an athletic-department perspective because you can just write a check, say you have this thing, this tool that helps financial literacy. Whether or not it's an effective one, whether or not it's well implemented, that's a different story.”

At Wake Forest, Currie described the benefit of partnerships with experts from the university’s financial partners and at the business school. For the football team specifically, there’s been “Top Hat Wednesdays,” an initiative to bring in speakers on various off-field life skills, including wealth management and N.I.L. opportunities. In large part, Currie said, students’ access to financial education will rely on coaches willing to take on that responsibility. The relationships Wake fosters between students and athletic staff, between students and university administrators all the way at the top, he believes, is “one of our competitive advantages."

Bryant and Nicholson are sensitive to the difference between services and services that work for student athletes. The two recalled one team meeting in particular when a financial advisor addressed the group about the importance of working with a C.P.A. (certified public accountant) to keep their taxes in order. When a player asked how to find a C.P.A., the expert instructed him to use whomever his parents did. The problem is, Bryant said, not all student athletes’ families have an accountant on call. Case in point, another teammate proceeded to raise his hand and inquire, “What’s a C.P.A.?”

Perhaps the most stubborn challenge for educators hoping to help young student athletes with their finances is indeed reaching them in a way that is broadly appealing or meaningful. Kelsey Kwon, who played soccer at Northwestern University and graduated this spring, described biding her time in the team’s annual compulsory financial literacy session. “We have to sit there for an hour and a half, listen to financial literacy class, and then we're like, ‘Okay, what are we having for dinner?’” 

In Clawson’s experience, players can’t actually be told or forced to do anything, including listen. On his team of 130, there were the savers and there were spenders, he said. Most were responsible, and he strove to give them all the same access to his counsel or other support. But in the end, they’re adults; he can’t make decisions for them. “You can imagine how that went. Some players were extremely receptive to the message and got Merrill Lynch accounts or whatever,” he said. “And other players, they pulled up in a brand new $80,000 car the next week.”

These days, the Final Whistle team is busy touring the country, visiting with athletic departments and team leadership to discuss potential partnerships. The duo said they’ve noted certain universities investing in promising financial literacy offerings for student athletes. They called out Butler University and the University of Missouri, for example, for building out tailored programs in association with financial services companies.

Bryant and Nicholson are one set of emerging entrepreneurs who stand to help universities in the push to create relevant, or any, financial support for student athletes. But as a short time has already shown, a host of other actors with less noble intentions are eager to share the field. It’s the fourth quarter. Our nation’s colleges have the ball.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.