• Sutter chose the Crimson Tide over Illinois, Ole Miss, and Ohio State.
• He is the No. 1 prospect in Illinois and the No. 80 prospect nationally, according to 247Sports Composite.
• Sutter is the first tight end in Alabama’s 2026 recruiting class.

PEORIA — Roll Tide.

Greg McElroy is getting real about the impact of NIL on high school athletics. The ESPN analyst opened up about the weight of NIL expectations on young athletes like Michigan Wolverines’ five-star recruit Bryce Underwood.

Underwood, who has an NIL valuation of $3 Million per ON3, possesses a first-hand experience with the changing landscape of college athletics. He is the No. 1-ranked quarterback in the 2025 class and flipped his commitment from LSU after Michigan offered him an NIL deal reportedly worth $10.5 million over the next four years.

In an appearance on “Always College Football” on Thursday, McElroy discussed the increased pressure placed on high school athletes in the NIL age.

“I think Bryce Underwood is making a lot more money than pretty much everybody,” McElroy said. “But there’s been a handful of guys that have not lived up to the expectations and the weight of the NIL expectations, because I do think – now in the era of the NIL – the expectations are higher and the pressure is higher as well.”

Expectations are certainly high for Underwood. The Wolverines’ massive NIL package highlights their need for the nation’s top quarterback recruit.

Michigan had one of the worst offenses in the country last season and played to an 8-5 record after going undefeated the year before. The Wolverines had the 131st passing offense, something they will look to bounce back from with Underwood’s help.

What Bryce Underwood brings to Michigan?

Bryce Underwood joins the Wolverines as the No. 1 player in his class with a perfect 247Sports prospect score.

Underwood was a four-year starter at Belleville High School, where he led the Tigers to two Division I MHSAA State Championships in 2021 and 2022 and three consecutive appearances from 2021 to 2023.

In his senior season, Underwood accumulated 2,509 passing yards and 32 touchdowns with just six interceptions. He made 71.8 percent of his passes and scored six rushing touchdowns with over 600 yards.

Throughout his high school career, he racked up 12,919 all-purpose yards including 11,488 passing yards and 179 total touchdowns.

Underwood was a dominant force in high school and played his way into being the nation’s top recruit. He will look to transform Michigan’s offense with his impressive skill set. He will hopefully look to transform Michigan’s offense with his impressive skill set and abilities.

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BATON ROUGE, La. (Louisiana First News) — When the LSU baseball team lifted its eighth championship trophy Sunday, it symbolized the end of a consequential era for college sports: the beginning of name, image and likeness (NIL). New rule changes will impact what it takes to stay atop the college sports world.

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“You have to be able to adapt,” said Fritz Metzinger, a New Orleans sports attorney.

A House settlement earlier this month paved the way for revenue sharing. Under this new model, athletic departments will be able to spend up to $20.5 million on the people who drive a program’s success.

“Schools like LSU can now directly pay their student athletes,” Metzinger said.

That will add a new wrinkle to what has been possible since 2021, when the NIL era first began. For the last four years, athletes could only profit from endorsement deals. Metzinger said an “arms race” started to acquire top talent, and a “pay-for-play” system developed across college sports.

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Groups called collectives stepped in to become fundraising arms for schools. At LSU, the collective is called Bayou Traditions. The money required to field top teams increased over the last four years, particularly in football and basketball.

“These collectives have become very powerful,” Metzinger said. “Local businesses that’re LSU supporters or Tulane supporters have thrown a lot of money at it.”

Baton Rouge attorney Gordon McKernan got in early.

“I signed (former LSU women’s basketball player) Alexis Morris,” McKernan said. “I think it was the first NIL deal at LSU. I don’t remember.”

McKernan signed many more athletes to deals, where they appeared on billboards, in commercials, and on social media posts. The money necessary to keep these players in Baton Rouge continued to rise.

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“You’ve got to have the facilities, the tradition, all the winning and all that stuff is great,” McKernan said. “But you have to have the money, or they’ll go somewhere else.”

Under new changes, boosters will be relied on less. An athlete who signs any deals with a booster or collective will need to prove the deal isn’t a pay-for-play situation to a newly-created board, Metzinger said, as programs can use their own revenue for that money.

“I’ve been told they’re not going to ask me for as much, or other boosters, as well,” McKernan said. “Like, ‘hey, we’ve got more money now, we’re in a good spot.”

Athletes can still do third-party deals, which will be advantageous for businesses and athletes in a culture that has become increasingly star-powered.

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“Any other businesses can pay any athlete whatever they want,” Metzinger said.

AJ’s Sports Cards on Drusilla Lane in Baton Rouge has been doing NIL signing deals with athletes, where they come to the shop and autograph memorabilia for fans.

“I think it’s good for the hobby,” said Nikki Erckert, AJ’s Sports Cards owner. “The little collectors get to meet their heroes.”

Erckert said the first NIL deal was with former baseball player Tre Morgan. The return on investment was immediately apparent.

“At least 150 people showed up to our very first in-person signing,” Morgan said.

The next AJ’s signing is Saturday, and it will feature members from the newly crowned LSU baseball champions. Erckert said that the signing was set up months in advance.

“A show that probably would’ve brought in about 500 customers…no telling what that’s going to look like now,” Erckert said.

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Under the new rules, Metzinger said LSU is primed to continue to thrive athletically because of the business support, marketability and revenue opportunities.

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Colleges are preparing for revenue-sharing with student-athletes beginning on July 1st. In anticipation of that, the Big 12 and Big Ten have announced a new partnership with PayPal to pay out their student-athletes.

Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark appeared on Get Up alongside PayPal CEO Alex Chriss. There, Yormark dove into what made the partnership a good idea for the conference at this point in time.

“July 1 starts rev-share with our student-athletes,” Yormark said. “A long time coming and well deserved from a conference perspective, but I speak beyond just the Big 12. I speak for all of collegiate athletics; we need a reliable payment platform to distribute money to our student-athletes.”

Revenue-sharing stems from the recent House settlement. That is going to lead to several new changes to college athletics and NIL specifically. That includes third-party oversight over NIL, a new enforcement agency, and roster limits. Arguably most important, it also allows for revenue-sharing between schools and student-athletes, with each school being able to share $20.5 million annually.

“We’ve [Big 12 and PayPal] been at this for over 14 months,” Yormark said. “Trying to figure out if there was a place and a point of entry for PayPal in this world of collegiate athletics, and we found it on the heels of the [House] settlement and rev-share. Truly excited about it. When you think about PayPal and Venmo, probably the most culturally relevant payment platform globally. 100 million customers, including consumers and merchants. It’s a big opportunity for the Big 12. Big for college athletics and I truly believe that the product is ubiquitous across all campuses, and today, yes, we’re announcing two conferences, but it’s going to go well beyond that moving forward.”

Per Ross Dellenger, the Big 12 deal with PayPal is significant. It’s added value of about $100 million over five years, or ~$1M per school annually.

“PayPal and Venmo are the applications that college students are using now,” Alex Chriss said. “Over half of college students are using Venmo today, and it’s the ecosystem that they use. Their parents are giving them money. It’s how they’re paying for their pizzas. It’s the ecosystem of the economy of college students. Now, they’re able to get the payouts from revenue share, will be able to do NIL distributions. We’ll be able to give them a debit card. We’ll be giving debit cards with Venmo with their college logo on them. So, we’re enabling this whole ecosystem to work going forward.”

Ultimately, Yormark believes that this step by the Big 12 and the Big Ten is the first step to some uniformity in how student-athletes are paid. Only time will tell, but Alex Chriss is confident that PayPal and Venmo are the platforms to accomplish this.

“It really is,” Chriss said. “We’re in discussions with all the conferences. PayPal is the ecosystem. The easiest way to distribute these funds. You want to make it seamless and simple for student-athletes to be able to get their dollars in their wallet and be able to spend it, and PayPal is the right way to do it.”

Florida State released a statement to CBS Sports defending language in drafts of the school’s revenue-sharing contracts. The school addressed reporting from CBS Sports detailing controversial language, which concerned agents and rival GMs.

FSU pointed out that individual situations will be “unique” as the revenue-sharing era gets underway in college athletics. Under the newly approved House v. NCAA settlement — which will be implemented July 1 – schools will be able to directly share up to $20.5 million with athletes, and 75% is widely expected to go toward football.

“As we enter into a new age of collegiate athletics, Florida State has put together an agreement that provides deliverables and expectations for all parties,” Florida State’s statement to CBS Sports read. “Each individual situation will be unique and the hypotheticals are impossible to predict. However, we are committed to continuing to provide an elite experience for our student-athletes in all aspects of their collegiate career. Florida State is looking forward to the mutually beneficial partnerships with our student-athletes in this new era.”

In drafts viewed by CBS Sports, a clause said Florida State could unilaterally extend a player at the end of a contract without going through negotiations with them. Additionally, there’s a maximum $2,500 fine for the first offense is a player loses any team equipment, such as cleats, and the maximum fine for use of a controlled substance for the first time is $1,000.

The drafts also include a clause regarding breach of contract. It includes “illness or injury which is serious enough to affect the value of rights granted to the school,” CBS Sports reported. Florida State could either renegotiate or cancel a player’s deal at its discretion after any sort of injury, according to the way the clause is written. The language concerned rival general managers’ agents who spoke with CBS Sports.

“Some of the concepts are pretty standard,” an agent, who represents at least one player at Florida State, told CBS Sports. “But FSU is going about this far more aggressively than any school I’ve seen. I’m disappointed by the adversarial nature of these contracts.”

Judge Claudia Wilken approved the House v. NCAA settlement earlier this month, officially ushering in the revenue-sharing era in college sports. The cap is set at $20.5 million for the first year of the settlement, and that figure is expected to increase annually as part of the 10-year agreement.

While Florida State has not confirmed how it will distribute the rev-share funds, the Board of Regents paved the way for the university to do so. Many schools across the country are planning to share 75% of the funds with football, 15% with men’s basketball, 5% with women’s basketball and 5% with the remainder of the sports.

Apologies to any NBA teams hoping they unearthed the next Draymond Green, Jalen Brunson or Nikola Jokić on Thursday night.

The second round of this year’s NBA draft became unusually barren after many prospects returned to college to take advantage of a skyrocketing NIL market.

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In the pre-NIL era, college basketball underclassmen routinely entered the NBA Draft even if they were projected to slip to the second round or go unselected. They earned more money chasing an NBA two-way contract or an overseas payday than they could returning to a college model where the only payouts came under the table.

The calculus began to change in 2021 when a series of court rulings forced the NCAA to allow athletes to benefit financially from their name, image and likeness without fear of penalty. This spring, underclassmen who were fringe NBA prospects returned to college in record numbers because deep-pocketed college programs were willing to pay them as much as $3 million to $4 million per year.

Only 106 players entered the 2025 NBA Draft as early entry candidates, the lowest number since 2015 and down from a peak of 353 in 2021. More than half those 106 early entrants then withdrew from the draft before the NBA’s deadline — even some who might have been selected in the 20-45 range this week.

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Texas Tech’s JT Toppin, Florida’s Thomas Haugh, UConn’s Alex Karaban, Duke’s Isaiah Evans and Purdue’s Braden Smith and Trey Kaufman-Renn were among the prominent college stars who did not even test the waters this spring. Alabama’s Labaron Philon, Kentucky’s Otega Oweh and Auburn’s Tahaad Pettiford withdrew from the draft just before the May 28 deadline for underclassmen to make their decisions. So did Houston’s Milos Uzan, Florida’s Alex Condon, Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg and San Diego State’s Miles Byrd.

“This year’s draft class, more than any ever, has been affected by the NIL and affected by the new pay-for-play,” Boston Celtics general manager Brad Stevens told NBC Sports Boston last month. Stevens added that the absence of the prospects who returned to college would be felt in “the back end of the draft and even into the late first.”

That much was apparent from which players were selected on Thursday night. Ten of the first 14 to come off the board played at least four years of college basketball. Many were fifth-year seniors with no college eligibility remaining, from Duke’s Sion James, to Auburn’s Johni Broome, to Florida’s Alijah Martin, to Tennessee’s Chaz Lanier.

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The deeper the second round progressed, the fewer NBA-caliber options remained. How often would a player like little-known Liberty catch-and-shoot specialist Taelon Peter get drafted in previous years? Or French wing Mohamed Diawara, who at 20 years old averaged a modest 5.8 points and shot sub-30% from behind the arc for Cholet this past season?

The good news for NBA teams is that the dearth of second-round talent could be a short-term problem. Some prospects who returned to college this year will exhaust their eligibility by 2026. Others could have more incentive to chase NBA money in the future.

The House vs. NCAA settlement puts a cap on how much colleges are allowed to pay athletes via revenue sharing and calls for the establishment of a new enforcement entity responsible for stamping out the pay-for-play deals that have dominated the NIL era of college sports. Athletes are required to submit to the new NIL Go clearinghouse all third-party NIL deals that exceed $600. The clearinghouse then must determine which deals are for a valid business purpose and are within a “reasonable range of compensation” and which are simply a recruiting incentive.

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How will the clearinghouse determine which deals are circumventing NIL rules and which are legitimate? Nobody knows. Nor does anyone know whether the clearinghouse’s decisions will hold up in court against a legal challenge.

The answers to those questions will determine whether future fringe NBA prospects turn pro as quickly as possible or keep returning to college in record numbers.

That trend will only continue if the seven-figure NIL money is still available.