Pro basketball player James Nnaji was the 31st pick in the 2023 NBA draft, but ended up playing in Europe after his initial team rights were traded twice. So now, he’s taking his career to a nontraditional interpretation of the next level: College ball. He played for the Baylor Bears the first half of this year.
The NBA used to be seen as the pinnacle of a basketball player’s career, but recent changes in how much money collegiate players can make seems to be changing the old logic. Where once college sports were seen as a stepping stone to the pros, some Gen Z professional athletes are now trying to make their way back onto campus, with mixed results.
“You can make more in college now than you can in the pros,” said Arellano Weston, a professor at the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. “Everyone wants to stay in school or come back to school, and while that sounds like a good thing, they’re not going back for their education.”
We talked to experts and combed through the news to unpack how the economics of college sports has changed, what some young athletes are experiencing and what might be coming next.
For decades the NCAA operated on an “amateurism” model, in which players were considered students first and athletes second. By maintaining that education was the main goal of these athletes, the NCAA was able to justify not giving them compensation beyond educational funding, according to experts. The courts started looking at that argument in the mid-2010s.
In 2021, it became possible for college athletes to receive money from brands and even collectives of donors to schools for their name, image and likeness — commonly known as NIL. The rules governing this were a messy patchwork on a state-by-state and sometimes school-by-school basis; but one thing became clear as big NIL payments began flowing, according to the Athletic: These athletes had been under-valued for ages.
Then last year, another court case shifted the economics of college athletics a lot more. In the settlement in House v. NCAA last June, a district court ruled that Division I programs can now pay athletes directly for NIL and brand promotions, and through revenue sharing. Administrators said at the time that this will create more opportunities for athletes to financially benefit. They also expressed hope this will also bring some order to NIL payments, so that deep-pocketed donor collectives don’t have undue sway over the roster of a particular team, according to the New York Times.
After these changes in college athletes’ ability to earn money, some pros have tried to argue that they remain eligible to play at the collegiate level and should be able to go back. There have been numerous lawsuits just since the settlement last year, some of which have been settled in favor of athletes, some in favor of the NCAA.
“What’s happened with NIL is that that line has blurred, and so the players are saying, ‘you say that the rules are based on eligibility, but that impacts the money in our wallet and so it’s going to have a commercial effect,’” said David Weber, an associate professor of Sports Law at the Oregon School of Law.
The NCAA rules about eligibility have historically been multi-faceted, according to the NCAA’s website, or “rickety,” according to Courthouse News Service.
Athletes who had left college ball have argued for their ability to return with mixed success. Amari Bailey, who went pro for a while and is 21 years old, has asserted he has more eligibility on his college career and should be entitled to play; his case is pending. Twenty-four-year-old Charles Bediako, who was drafted and played for a G-league team, initially won an injunction to go back to the Crimson Tide, but then a judge reversed that decision. James Nnaji, who’s 21, chose to enter the NCAA transfer portal this summer after being allowed to play a season at Baylor.
As these athletes attempt to chart a path largely unseen in sports, new roadblocks have emerged that could potentially affect some pros trying to go back to the college level. The NCAA recently instated new eligibility rules based around an age-based model which will go into effect this coming school year.
As the wild west of college sports continues to be altered by ongoing developments in the eligibility space, one thing is for certain: Collegiate athletes will continue hitting shots all the way to the bank because the money is here to stay.
