USC’s latest recruiting coup has sent shockwaves through college football: the Trojans landed five-star tight end Mark Bowman, reportedly set to earn up to $10 million in NIL deals.

The staggering figure, more commonly reserved for quarterbacks, has ignited debate—but analysts say USC is investing in more than just a position. They’re paying for a game-changing mismatch.

Why USC Paid $10 Million For A Tight End

When news broke that Bowman, the nation’s top tight end, would be earning between $8 million and $10 million in NIL deals at USC, the reaction was swift and polarized. Critics questioned the wisdom—and fairness—of such an outlay for a non-quarterback, while rival fanbases accused USC of buying its way to the top.

Yet, as analyst J.D. PicKell explained, the investment is about much more than Bowman’s position.

“USC is not paying for a tight end,” PicKell said. “USC is paying for a mismatch in their game plan every single weekend… You’re not thinking about how much you’re paying Mark Bowman when he’s catching a game-winning touchdown against Ohio State in the Big 10 Championship… The mismatch part of it is awesome. That’s what you’re actually paying for.”

Bowman’s rare blend of size, speed, and versatility makes him a nightmare for defenses, precisely the kind of weapon head coach Lincoln Riley has built his offenses around. Standing 6-foot-4 and weighing 225 pounds, Bowman moves like a receiver but blocks like a lineman, drawing comparisons to NFL-bound stars. In his last season at Mater Dei, he hauled in 32 passes for 435 yards and eight touchdowns, proving his ability to impact both the passing and running game.

USC’s approach is as much about strategy as it is about spectacle. Riley’s offense thrives on creating mismatches, and Bowman’s skill set fits perfectly into a system designed to exploit defensive weaknesses with tempo, motion, and creative personnel packages.

The Trojans aren’t just buying a player—they’re securing a tactical advantage that could define the next era of USC football.

Beyond the Numbers: The New NIL Reality

The Bowman signing emphasizes a massive change in college football recruiting. Even among signings sparked by NIL, financial packages are becoming a central part of the pitch for elite talent.

Though the $10 million number is eye-popping, it’s also emblematic of the market’s new realities. Top programs use their resources and location — USC’s campus in Los Angeles is a big part of the pull — to sell athletes on exposure and the earning potential few schools can offer.

But money wasn’t the only factor in Bowman’s decision. USC’s proximity to his Southern California home, the prestige of playing for a historic program, and the chance to be a focal point in Riley’s high-powered offense weighed heavily. Other bluebloods like Georgia and Texas were in the mix with competitive offers, but USC’s holistic pitch proved decisive on and off the field.

But they have not been without controversy. Others fear that NIL-created recruiting disparities will widen the haves-and-have-nots gap, ruin team chemistry, and chip away at the establishment amateur ethos of sports at the college level.

KEEP READING: ‘It’s a Blessing to Carry That Legacy’: 5-Star Ohio State Commit Chris Henry Jr. Reflects on His Father’s Impact

But as PicKell and others say, this is just the new normal: programs must be aggressive and clever to get the sorts of difference-makers that can change the game.

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On Saturday, Judge Claudia Wilken approved the House v. NCAA settlement, which officially ushered in the era of revenue sharing. Specifically, college will be allowed to directly pay their respective athletes $20.5 million per year.

It’s up to each college’s discretion on how they split up the money to each athletic program. However, some conferences have reportedly considered creating uniform percentages of the revenue for each program to receive from their respective school.

Per Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger, the SEC was one of the conferences examining this option. During an appearance on The Matt Jones Show, Dellenger revealed that Kentucky basketball, and several other programs, spoke out against the idea when it was proposed.

“The SEC had actually gone down the road on doing that,” Dellenger said. “I know football was at least $13.5 million. I can’t remember any of the other figures. Basketball may have been like $2.8 million, and the SEC had set some of those standards.

“But, Kentucky did not — and some others too — but Kentucky basketball, specifically, was a pretty big voice in the room to make sure that those standards weren’t set as a policy, because Kentucky obviously wants to spend more.”

While football still brings in the most revenue for Kentucky, the school’s basketball program reels in far more money than most competing SEC programs. Thus, it’s natural for members of the program to believe they deserve more of the $20.5 million available.

After all, programs like Kentucky basketball have to worry about competing against other blue-chip programs outside of the SEC such as Duke or Kansas that would likely not be facing the same cap. Kentucky basketball reportedly wasn’t the only program that disapproved of pre-arranged revenue percentages.

“It wasn’t just Kentucky that wanted to spend more in basketball,” Dellenger said. “Think about South Carolina women’s basketball, Arkansas baseball, LSU baseball… There were plenty of programs that wanted to spend more than the standards, sort of the maximum standards, that the SEC was talking about doing. So they kind of bailed on it for now.”

Of course, the SEC could circle back around on the idea. After all, college athletics is only in the earliest stages of this new era. New authorities such as the College Sports Commission could have a loud voice in discussions, such as the one Dellenger mentioned, moving forward.

To pile on, new issues will arise as schools and athletes bring forward further lawsuits that contest Wilken’s ruling. Additionally, schools are currently still unfamiliar with the new clearinghouse process that will approve of NIL deals that emerge from outside the school’s direct payments.

BATON ROUGE, La. – The West Virginia University baseball team saw its season come to an end on Sunday as the Mountaineers fell to No. 6 LSU, 12-5, in the NCAA Super Regionals at Alex Box Stadium. WVU finishes the season with a 44-16 overall record.
 
Juniors Sam White and Ben Lumsden each hit home runs for the Mountaineers and drove in two. Senior Jace Rinehart added his ninth home run of the season as well.
 
On the mound, graduate Jack Kartsonas suffered the loss with six runs allowed in 2.0 innings. Sophomore Chase Meyer had four strikeouts in 4.0 innings while junior Ben McDougal tossed 2.1 hitless innings.
 
The Tigers scored a run in the first to take an early lead before adding five in the second to go up 6-0 after two innings.
 
In the fourth, White got the Mountaineers on the board with a solo home run before Lumsden added a two-run shot a couple of batters later. White got West Virginia within two in the fifth with an RBI single.
 
WVU’s defense failed them in the seventh with three errors as LSU scored six runs, five of which were unearned.
 
In the eighth, Rinehart hit a solo home run, but that was the end of the scoring for West Virginia.
 
LSU advances to the College World Series which begins Friday, June 13 in Omaha, Nebraska.
 
For more information on the Mountaineers, follow @WVUBaseball on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
 

When the National Collegiate Athletic Association authorized students to monetize their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights in 2021, the decision was framed as a transformative disruption of amateurism, a chance to democratize financial opportunities across all college athletes, regardless of gender, sport or institutional affiliation. Advocates envisioned a marketplace where visibility, entrepreneurship and merit could eclipse systemic bias.

Four years later, the results are starkly disproportionate. Despite NIL’s promise of inclusion, early outcomes reveal a new iteration of entrenched hierarchies. Football and men’s basketball athletes capture the overwhelming majority of NIL earnings, while women athletes and athletes on nonrevenue teams fight for a marginal share of the market. Without deliberate structural reform, NIL threatens to entrench long-standing inequities under a modern guise.

NIL’s Uneven Impact

Industry data shows that nearly 80 percent of NIL dollars flow to male athletes, particularly in football and men’s basketball. Female athletes, even those with notable athletic success or strong social media presences, remain vastly underrepresented in the NIL economy.

Structural factors reinforce this disparity. Booster-backed NIL collectives, which pool financial resources to support athletes, heavily favor men’s sports. Corporate sponsorships and media deals mirror historical inequities, channeling investment into male-dominated programs while relegating women’s teams to the periphery. Visibility begets value, and in a marketplace where women’s sports still struggle for equitable media exposure, the playing field remains far from level.

NIL was not designed to correct these underlying market forces, but it now magnifies them. Without intervention, it risks solidifying a two-tiered economy in college athletics.

Structural Challenges on the Horizon

Experts in college athletics governance warn that emerging legal frameworks will further complicate the NIL landscape. The House v. NCAA settlement is slated for implementation on July 1. It will allow universities to directly share revenue with student athletes, capped at $20.5 million annually per institution.

Under this model, institutions must balance new forms of direct compensation with Title IX obligations and financial sustainability. Yet as legal scholars note, mechanisms for ensuring gender equity in relation to institutional NIL payments remain vague. Enforcement is expected to focus on egregious violations, not on proactively monitoring systemic disparities.

It is worth noting that these reforms are built around the infrastructure of the Power Four conferences, former Power Five members and high-revenue sports programs, leaving smaller institutions to bear the consequences. A key critique raised during policy discussions is that the NCAA is funding legal defenses and settlements (such as House v. NCAA) largely stemming from Power Five football, despite receiving no revenue from the College Football Playoff, which is independently operated by the conferences. The NCAA’s primary income source is March Madness, yet it shoulders the regulatory and legal burdens tied to football governance.

The settlement also introduces roster limits as a cost-control and Title IX compliance strategy. While reducing football roster sizes may create financial savings, roster limits risk unintended consequences: shrinking athletic opportunities and destabilizing programs that have historically expanded access for women. Institutions must tread carefully to avoid worsening inequities under the banner of financial reform. Fewer athletes also mean fewer enrolled students paying tuition and contributing to campus life, subtler but significant consequences for institutional sustainability.

Additionally, with federal guidance on NIL payments and Title IX in flux since the change in presidential administrations in January, it remains unclear how Title IX should apply to direct athlete compensation and NIL structures. This regulatory uncertainty is unfolding alongside a broader retrenchment in higher education equity efforts. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have faced mounting political and legal challenges, with many institutions scaling back public-facing commitments to equity under state pressure or due to administrative caution.

For instance, states like Florida, Oklahoma and Texas have enacted laws and policies that dismantle DEI offices and restrict related programming at public universities. These states collectively host more than a dozen Power Four institutions, including prominent programs in the SEC and Big 12 conferences. The elimination of DEI infrastructure in these states not only limits institutional capacity to address equity in NIL implementation but also exacerbates compliance challenges under Title IX. In this climate, even well-intentioned NIL reforms risk deprioritizing gender equity, not only at institutions facing state legislative pressures, but across the broader higher education landscape, where structural limitations and regulatory ambiguity increasingly constrain equity-focused work.

Without a coherent federal framework, institutions are left to interpret compliance on their own, often inconsistently and without the tools to embed gender equity into NIL design. As regulatory momentum builds, there is a real risk that top-down reforms will entrench existing hierarchies rather than dismantle them. Legal pressure is mounting as well: Cases against the NCAA are increasingly addressing more nuanced areas of NIL, including media rights, retroactive compensation and the classification of athletes as employees. These developments signal that without clear, equity-centered policy, institutions may soon find themselves not only out of compliance, but in court.

Building Equity by Design

Higher education must recognize that NIL is not just a financial or athletic issue; it is a fundamental equity issue. Institutions cannot afford to replicate old hierarchies under a new system.

Concrete steps forward include:

• Building equitable promotional strategies: Ensure comparable visibility across men’s and women’s sports by investing in joint marketing campaigns, content creation resources and equitable social media promotion, not just traditional media coverage.
• Implementing comprehensive NIL education programs: Offer workshops that directly address gender-based disparities in financial literacy, contract negotiation, branding strategies and legal rights, for both student athletes and coaching staffs.
• Strengthening institutional NIL infrastructure: Equip athletic departments with trained NIL administrators, general managers and compliance officers to support equitable deal facilitation and roster management across all sports, not just revenue teams.
• Structuring donor engagement more inclusively: Actively encourage booster support for women’s and Olympic sports by creating collective fundraising goals, incentive matches and branding opportunities that spotlight underrepresented teams.
• Embedding Title IX compliance at every stage: Require that institutional NIL deals undergo equity review for gender representation before approval and align NIL policies with broader Title IX audits to ensure systemic, not incidental, compliance.
• Expanding shared governance around NIL oversight: Engage faculty senates, equity officers and trustees in the design and review of NIL policies to ensure they align with broader institutional commitments to Title IX and educational access.

NIL offers unprecedented opportunities for student-athletes, but opportunity alone does not guarantee equity. Without intentional correction, the marketplace will reflect and reinforce historical biases. Colleges and universities must commit not merely to participating in the NIL era, but to shaping it in a way that honors the values of inclusion, fairness and educational purpose.