As walk-on wide receiver Jackson DeSilva went through his NC State career, he had a front row seat to the ever-evolving landscape of college football. He watched NIL enter the space, growing from a small operation to collectives and now university-sponsored revenue sharing.

Although he wasn’t a beneficiary of large sums of money heading in his direction, NIL still impacted DeSilva’s life. He was able to connect with local business owners, creating relationships that he feels he’ll carry for the rest of his life. 

DeSilva, who has a strong entrepreneurial mindset, had his perspective shift while he was at NC State. He knew he wanted to start a business after his football career ended last fall — he is the co-founder of Yard U — but he felt like there was an untapped way of entering the NIL space. 

Enter DeSilva Management, which prides itself on the slogan of “players representing players.”

College football looks different from Tom Brady’s days at Michigan, when the future Hall of Fame quarterback played in an era where athletes couldn’t capitalize off their name, image and likeness.

Now, college athletes can make millions of dollars.

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That, coupled with the frequent use of the transfer portal, has Brady thankful he didn’t need to deal with some of what athletes do now.

“My college experience was very challenging. It was very competitive,” Brady said on “The Joel Klatt Show.” “Those traits transformed my life as a professional. I was ready to compete against anybody, because the competition in college toughened me up so much that I had a self-belief and self-confidence in myself that whatever I faced, I could overcome that.

“I think if we take that away from a young student athlete, to say, ‘You know what, I know, it’s tough to compete, but what we’re going to do before you have to compete, we’re actually going to put you somewhere else so that you don’t have to compete,’” he continued. “That is absolutely the wrong thing to do to a young child.”

Brady didn’t blame the athletes, but rather challenged their parents to “teach your kid the right values.”

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“The value isn’t always about the last dollar,” he said. “We’re valuing the wrong things. I’m not saying it’s not important. It’s one of 10 things that are important, and certainly to me, it’s not the most important. So when kids do go through that the right way, they’re actually learning the right values. When you have the right values in life, that’s going to sustain you as you move on through the rest of your life.”

This isn’t the first time Brady has been critical of where college football is going. During a 2024 appearance on the “Stephen A. Smith Show,” Brady said the current state of the NFL has been “dumbed down” because there are no longer college programs, just college teams.

Brady played at Michigan from 1995-1999. His path to become the Wolverines’ starter was an uphill climb. But things are different now in the college football landscape. Athletes want to go where they’ll have a chance to not only play, but make money during their college years.

And Brady wonders if they’ll prioritize making money over learning sustainable traits.

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“Their frontal lobes aren’t even fully developed yet, and now we’re tempting them with real-life, adult situations and their parents, and now they have agents,” Brady said. “I’m sure it’s a very confusing time, and I’m sure a lot of parents are confused. I’m sure a lot of kids are confused, but because we’re just talking about money, money, money, money, like, that’s the only value in college. Is that what we’re saying? That, to me, the priorities are a bit messed up.”

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Read the original article on MassLive.

President Trump recently signed the Saving College Sports Act. This might be the biggest shift in college athletics in a generation and I believe its contents were largely overlooked.

While the media chases manufactured outrage, Trump is delivering real reform. This Executive Order protects women’s sports, secures the Olympic pipeline, reins in the NIL Wild West, and affirms what the NCAA seems to have forgotten: student-athletes are students, not employees.

For too long, the NCAA has operated like a bloated corporation pulling in billions while treating athletes as expendable. They’ve let NIL spiral into pay-for-play chaos, where fake “endorsement deals” mask under-the-table payments to star football and basketball players. Meanwhile, non-revenue programs (think sports like swimming, wrestling, gymnastics, track and field, really anything OTHER than football and men’s basketball) are quietly slashed to fund excessive recruiting budgets.

Women’s sports and Olympic hopefuls are the first on the chopping block. So what exactly does the Saving College Sports Act do? Let’s dive in.

The NCAA Has Failed…Again

Trump’s Order finally forces accountability from an organization that has proven itself meaningless time and again — whether it’s turning a blind eye to men competing in women’s sports, letting the transfer portal spiral into chaos, downplaying sexual misconduct by coaching staffs, or standing idle as non-revenue sports disappear. All this while its member schools receive massive amounts of federal money (taxpayer dollars) that indirectly prop up the NCAA’s billion-dollar operation.

• Programs making over $125M must expand scholarships and roster spots for non-revenue sports.
• Schools bringing in $50M+ can no longer gut smaller programs just to chase more TV money.
• Smaller schools are barred from slashing Olympic or women’s teams to pad football profits.

For the first time in years, the NCAA isn’t the one writing the rules. It’s about time someone else held the whistle.

NIL Reform That Actually Helps Athletes

This EO doesn’t ban NIL, but it DOES work to stop the abuses. Athletes can still earn from real opportunities, but those phony “deals” made just to dodge rules? Over.

And by reaffirming that student-athletes are not employees, Trump slams the door on labor lawsuits that could’ve collapsed entire athletic departments.

For the first time, federal agencies like the Department of Labor, DOJ, and NLRB are being tasked to protect college sports, not destroy them through unchecked litigation and legal gamesmanship.

This Isn’t Just About Money. It’s About Fairnesss

24% of D1 athletes report food insecurity. 14% say they’ve been homeless in the past year. Many full-scholarship athletes still live below the poverty line.

Meanwhile, the NCAA clears over $1 billion annually enriching executives and funneling resources to mainly two sports while ignoring the rest. It’s not a broken system. It’s a rigged one.

And it’s not just economic abuse, it’s academic abuse as well. Remember UNC’s fake “paper classes” to keep athletes eligible? Or the allegations that Duke steered basketball players into sham courses to protect playing time? This is a system that commodifies students — and discards them once their eligibility expires.

Trump’s Order says: enough.

The Return of the Presidential Fitness Test

Yes, Trump also reinstated the Presidential Youth Fitness Program that had been shelved the past 13 years when President Obama decided a comparative fitness test was bad for a child’s feelings. It consists of sit-ups, pull-ups, a mile run, sit-and-reach test, and a few other comprehensive fitness checkpoints. For decades, this simple program helped build a culture of strength, endurance, and discipline, but it was scrapped in the name of “equity” and “inclusion,” but America’s youth got weaker, slower, sicker, and bigger.

Regular physical fitness testing used to be standardized in schools across the United States.

Restoring it sends a message: We believe in building strong, healthy, competitive kids again.

The Left Will Call It “Control”. Trump Calls it Protection

It’s no shock that the NCAA wants total freedom, including the freedom to exploit when it’s profitable and cut athletes loose when it’s not. What Trump is doing is drawing a red line: you can’t gut sports programs for profit and then claim you’re “for the athletes.”

And Democrats? They’ve mastered the art of empty slogans about “supporting women’s sports.” But when it’s time for action, they fold. Trump didn’t. He acted (again) to protect female athletes from both institutional neglect and radical gender policies that erode fair and safe competition.

In just the past three years, Trump has done more to preserve real opportunities for women in sports than any president in modern history.

This Is a Line in the Sand

The Saving College Sports EO doesn’t just lay out policy; it sets a national standard. It says: the future of college sports should belong to the athletes, the students, and the fans, NOT to NCAA bureaucrats or corporate sponsors auctioning off integrity to the highest bidder.

You can assume schools that ignore it will face real consequences. Just look at how the Trump administration has responded to the usual bad actors who have definitely ignored federal law like Governor Newsom, Governor Mills, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Columbia University, etc.

(Roger LaPointe/The News-Messenger / USA TODAY NETWORK)

We’ve already seen what happens when organizations like the NCAA go unchecked: sports terminated overnight, scholarships erased, and safe and fair competition eliminated…all because a boardroom of mostly unathletic elitists chose to line their pockets over fulfilling their most basic duties.

It’s time to stop pretending the system is working. It’s time to stop treating athletes like dollar signs. It’s time to save college sports. President Trump has made it a priority to do all of that and more.

Editor’s note: This article is part of the Program Builders series, focusing on the behind-the-scenes executives and people fueling the future growth of their sports.

AUSTIN, Texas — The offseason remodeling of Texas football has mostly focused on the installation of a famous new starting quarterback for the Longhorns, but it also included a stylish makeover of their headquarters at the Moncrief-Neuhaus Athletic Center.

Open-concept, modern and sleek, the updated lobby doubles as a trophy room. An assortment of impressive awards welcomes visitors: the Golden Hat that goes to the winner of the Red River Rivalry against Oklahoma; just about every bronze statue a college football player can win from Heisman to Thorpe to Ray Guy (shout out, Michael Dickson); and, of course, a couple of national championship trophies.

Notably, there is plenty of space to add more hardware. Smart planning. After two consecutive appearances in the College Football Playoff semifinals and a program-record 23 players selected over the last two NFL Drafts, head coach Steve Sarkisian and the Longhorns seem to be just getting started.

For the first time, Texas will enter a college football season as the No. 1 team in the country, as the Associated Press on Monday proclaimed the Longhorns the preseason frontrunners. The Coaches Poll did the same last week. It’s yet another milestone for a program that is well past the point of being merely “back.” Now, the Longhorns are trying to solidify the elite status that comes from churning out national title contenders on a yearly basis.

“If you talk to any of our players, or you just listen to their discussions … our players are talking about national championship,” Sarkisian told The Athletic this spring, when the lobby project was still exposed drywall and wires hanging from the ceiling. “They’re not talking about a rebuild. They’re not talking about, ‘Well, we’ll see how this goes.’ There’s a standard here. There’s an expectation, and they understand that they’re held to the standard.”

In short, Texas is becoming the new Alabama. No, that doesn’t mean the Longhorns are going to rattle off a half-dozen titles in the next decade. But this is the season Texas puts its staying power on display. There is always another draft pick. There is always another All-American. The talent conveyor belt is fully operational — and well-funded. The days of stumbling as a 12-point favorite at home appear to be over.

Texas stepped into its new conference last year SEC-ready. Only Georgia kept the Longhorns from immediately running the league.

The Longhorns maneuvered past Alabama and created a new pecking order in the SEC. This year will determine whether it sticks, but everything appears to be in place for Texas to take the Crimson Tide’s spot alongside Georgia as the conference’s biggest bullies.

There is only room for so many superpowers in one conference.

Coach Kalen DeBoer enters Year 2 in Tuscaloosa with a roster talented enough to return the Crimson Tide to the ranks of the national championship contenders, but Alabama still faces questions about what its post-Nick Saban reality will be. Especially after DeBoer’s debut produced a 9-4 season, highlighted (or maybe lowlighted) by some losses that had previously been unthinkable.

Meanwhile, Texas has moved into a new phase of its development under Sarkisian. With Arch Manning ready to step in at quarterback, the Longhorns believe the arrow is still pointing up.

“I think Texas is in a phenomenal place,” said ESPN analyst and former Alabama quarterback Greg McElroy, who went to high school just outside of Austin. “There’s no denying, Sark’s got access to everything he wants.”

With Arch Manning stepping in as starting QB, Texas opens at No. 1 in both major polls. (Jerome Miron / Imagn Images)

Much like Kirby Smart did when he left Saban and Alabama to take over at Georgia, Sarkisian implemented the Bama blueprint at a school with more resources and easier access to talent than Saban’s old school, building a program to rival the Tide.

At a time when how much a school can spend has never been more directly tied to how good the team can be, no school is better positioned to fund a championship roster than Texas. Reports that the Longhorns built a $40 million-plus roster this year are difficult to confirm but not hard to believe.

“They can outspend anybody if they wanted to,” McElroy said.

As college football tries to move away from unregulated name, image and likeness spending and into a capped revenue-sharing system, the market advantage should shift to schools — and their collectives — that can align with companies big and small to provide athletes deals on top of rev-share payments. Business is booming in Austin, which has become a hub for tech companies. The Texas One Fund has at least 20 sponsorship partners, including Texas-based Benchmark Bank.

“The area to differentiate any university is, how many outside — call it true NIL or whatever you want to call it — how many of those opportunities are out there for student-athletes?” said Patrick “Wheels” Smith, president of Texas One Fund. “And having the best model not only is good for your university and you can recruit better and win, but it’s also good for kids to get opportunities. So our plan is to continue on that whole for-profit space, to get as many opportunities as we can for our student-athletes in the for-profit brand space.”

But the Saban way is not so much about a place or a plan as it is a culture that stifles complacency and prepares the next wave of blue-chippers to step up when it’s their time.

Saban’s message to players: This will be hard, but the payoff is plentiful — championships, individual accolades and the NFL Draft. Fun? The fun is in winning.

That culture has been difficult to build at Texas. Coaches who have been at Texas talk about an “I have made it” attitude that often arrives in Austin with highly touted recruits.

Sarkisian and his staff have tried to change that.

“Doing games with Sark in his first year, he was like, ‘We have got to get kids that hate to lose. They cannot after a loss be OK with playing well.’ And I think that took a year or two,” McElroy said.

“Ultimately the goal is to win the last game of the season,” Longhorns guard Cole Hutson said. “Still working on that, but they’re looking for people that have the want-to and the drive to kind of make sure that when things get rough that they’re going to push through, and they’re going to persevere.”

Third-year receiver DeAndre Moore talked about watching Sarkisian dial up plays for DeVonta Smith during Alabama’s last national title run in 2020, wanting a piece of that action. That’s what led the top-150 recruit from California to Texas.

Moore also noted that at one point the Tide had four future first-round draft pick receivers on their depth chart, and it was Smith who went on to win the Heisman after being fourth in line behind Jerry Jeudy, Henry Ruggs and Jaylen Waddle.

Moore enters his third year with Texas looking to take a leap from complementary player to one of Manning’s top targets after the Longhorns had three receivers drafted within the first two rounds over the last two years.

“Not gonna sit here and tell you that everything was just fine, you know, all rainbows and sunshine,” Moore said. “And there were definitely some days where I was just like, man, this is tough, but I knew there was a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.”

Texas high schools consistently pump out more blue-chip recruits than any other state in the country. That’s a good thing, of course, for the Longhorns, who don’t have to go far to lay the foundation of a championship team. The downside, McElroy said, is the well-oiled machine that is youth football in the Lone Star State also produces a preponderance of players who are near maxed out as teenagers.

“Oftentimes they might be a five-star and they get on campus and they’re the same guy for four years,” McElroy said. “While they want to take kids from Texas, you gotta take the right kids.”

Sarkisian, who broke into big-time college coaching at USC under Pete Carroll, tries to blend Saban’s process-driven discipline with Carroll’s cool competitiveness.

“Those guys were both uber successful, crazy successful coaches that instilled their personality into their building, into their culture, into their teams, and rebuilt those teams year after year,” Sarkisian said. “I think at the end of the day, anybody who’s been around those two guys would probably tell you I’m probably a little bit of both of them. And so I would say our culture, our team, is probably a little bit of both of those two.”

When Texas players are at practice or in workouts: no jewelry, matching socks, shirts tucked in. Hats off during team meetings. That’s Saban coming out of Sark.

“But also I think my ability to engage with people, and not that Coach Saban didn’t, but, man, it was definitely like a fear factor with him,” Sarkisian said. “And with Coach Carroll, it was more like, hug you. And I’m probably somewhere in the middle there. I try to engage with people. I try to relate to everybody in our building. My door is always open for our players and in recruiting, and I think that’s allowed some of that connectivity.”

Sarkisian can incorporate Saban’s process while not facing the pressure that comes with following the seven-time national championship coach.

As DeBoer tries to chart his own course at Alabama, the specter of Saban and the unprecedented standard he set looms over the Tide.

“In the end, we know we gotta win more games and we want those expectations, absolutely,” DeBoer told The Athletic this summer. “That’s what matters. You can come up with every excuse. It doesn’t matter. No one cares, and we understand that. But as a coach myself, having been at different places, there is a process that you have to go through. And every place, it’s been different challenges.”

While the first season fell short of the standard at Alabama, a top-five recruiting class coming in this year and another in the making for 2026 are a good sign.

Revenue sharing and NIL should continue to spread talent around college football more than when Saban was at his peak and it seemed only two or three teams in any given season could hope to compete against Alabama.

Just because the Longhorns are thriving doesn’t mean the Tide can’t keep rolling. But right now, the program in Austin is closer to the one Saban left behind than the one in Tuscaloosa.

“Excellence is exhausting, but it’s worth it,” Sarkisian said. “(The players) see the success of their peers, and they’re like, I want that, you know? The Outland trophies, the Thorpe awards, the All-Americans, the first-round picks, the draft picks, the College Football Playoffs. The on-the-cusp-of-a-national-championship. I want that. So how do I get there? It’s pretty simple. The only thing I just keep looking for is, is there a complacency? Because complacency is, that’ll get you. And we’re fortunate. We’ve got no room to be complacent, because we haven’t won the thing yet, you know?”

Program Builders is part of a partnership with Range Rover Sport. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.

(Top photo: Butch Dill / Getty Images)