What Is NIL? How College Athletes Are Getting Paid — And What They're Doing With the Money ft. Joey McGuire

Written By Ryan Morrison

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Introduction

College football has always been big business. But over the last several years, the business has changed faster than almost anyone predicted. Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals. A wide-open transfer portal. Conference realignment. Revenue sharing. Private equity interest. What was once a relatively fixed system is now operating more like a free market, and the people running programs have had to adapt quickly or get left behind.

Texas Tech head football coach Joey McGuire has been one of the coaches figuring it out in real time. In his four seasons leading the Red Raiders, he's overseen a program transformation that culminated in a Big 12 championship and a fourth seed in the college football playoff.

On this episode of Navigating Wealth, hosts Tad Fallows, Matt Shechtman, and Sriram Gollapalli sat down with McGuire to unpack what's actually happening inside college football's new economy, and what it looks like from the sideline.

 

Guest Snapshot

Name: Joey McGuire

Title: Head Football Coach, Texas Tech University

Credentials: Four seasons as head coach at Texas Tech; led program to first-ever Big 12 Championship and College Football Playoff berth (4th seed) in 2024

Current focus: Program development, NIL and transfer portal strategy, athlete financial education, philanthopy, alumni relations

 

College Football's New Operating Model

Joey McGuire described the current landscape in one word: chaos. But chaos with a structure to it.

Three forces are operating simultaneously and are deeply intertwined:

  1. The Transfer Portal - Athletes can move freely between programs during specific windows

  2. NIL and Revenue Sharing - Athletes are now compensated directly, either through brand deals or a share of university athletic revenue

  3. Conference Realignment - The conference map has shifted dramatically, driven largely by TV contract money

Understanding how these pieces interact is the key to understanding modern college football, and why programs like Texas Tech have had to build entirely new internal infrastructure.

 

The Transfer Portal: Speed Dating for Talent

McGuire's description of the transfer portal: "speed dating." You have a compressed window to evaluate, communicate with, and commit to players, and the calendar doesn't always cooperate because it's tied to TV contracts, hotel agreements, and other logistical realities.

Texas Tech's approach to the portal is disciplined. They don't recruit young or unproven players out of it. Their criteria:

  • Target players who have already graduated (grad transfers) or have one to two years of eligibility remaining

  • Only pursue players who have significant game experience at their level

  • Operate on a "plug and play" model - if they lose a first-round pass rusher, they find a portal player with 9+ sacks from the prior season

The logic is grounded in analytics. McGuire cited data suggesting that starters from Group of Six programs have roughly an 82% hit rate when they transfer to Power Four schools like Texas Tech. The reasoning is simple: if a player hasn't earned significant reps at their current school, they likely won't at the next one either.

At the same time, coaches are essentially re-recruiting their own roster all year. Top players negotiate with agents. McGuire has a GM who handles those conversations specifically.

 

Revenue Sharing and NIL: The New Salary Cap

Here's how the money actually works now.

Revenue sharing is the newer piece. Starting last year, universities can share athletic revenue directly with players. The current cap is approximately $21 million per school and rises 4% annually. Football and men's basketball receive the largest allocations because they're typically the only sports that generate positive revenue for most programs.

NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) sits on top of that. Think of it as endorsement deals at the college level. A star quarterback working out a deal with Adidas. A linebacker doing local commercials. The same concept as Patrick Mahomes and State Farm, just at the college level, now above board.

Texas Tech manages this through:

  • An internal NIL and revenue sharing department

  • A partnership with Learfield, which connects players to brand sponsors

The effect on recruiting is significant. For borderline NFL prospects, say, a projected seventh-round pick - the guarantee of NIL money plus revenue share can actually match or come close to what they'd earn by entering the draft. McGuire used linebacker Jacob Rodriguez as an example. Rodriguez, fifth in Heisman voting, was persuaded to return for his final season. He played his best football, won every major defensive award, and will now go higher in the draft. Win for the player, win for the program.

 

How Texas Tech Preps Athletes for Real Money

This part of the conversation might be the most relevant to the Long Angle audience.

These athletes are suddenly handling real money - in some cases, life-changing money - and many of them are 19 or 20 years old. They're not employees, which means taxes aren't withheld automatically. Self-employment taxes, estimated quarterly payments, the IRS - it all lands on them.

Texas Tech has built a program called "Suited for Success" to address this directly. It includes:

  • Mock interviews and resume development

  • Measurement for an actual suit for job interviews

  • Sessions with CPAs explaining how NIL income is taxed

  • Presentations from investors on what to do with their money

  • The revenue share app actually auto-segregates tax liability into a separate balance, so players aren't blindsided at year-end

McGuire cited two players from last season who had real job contracts lined up before the season even ended. One signed with a construction company two weeks after the Orange Bowl. Another, his quarterback, bought land. A wide receiver owns cattle, specifically for the tax structure.

These aren't anomalies. McGuire's view is that athlete development and financial literacy are core to the program's identity. His team GPA last fall was a 3.23, which he said is every GPA record in Texas Tech football history.

 

Why Offensive Line Development Is a Growing Concern

One of the more surprising threads in the conversation: the NFL is paying close attention to how the transfer portal is affecting player development, specifically at offensive line.

NFL scouts and executives have raised alarms about offensive linemen entering the draft underdeveloped. The reason ties directly to portal movement: linemen are physically and technically developmental positions. Strength, body composition, footwork, scheme recognition, it all takes years to accumulate. When young linemen bounce between programs every one or two seasons, that development gets interrupted.

McGuire described it as a "crock pot" position. You can't rush it.

Quarterbacks face a similar dynamic, though it hasn't shown up in draft outcomes as clearly yet. The NFL's concern isn't altruistic - it's about hit rates on expensive draft picks. More transfer movement means less evaluable film on consistent development, and that makes projections harder.

The flip side: skill positions that rely more on athleticism and natural movement - defensive linemen, running backs - tend to develop faster and aren't as affected by portal instability.

 

Conference Realignment: Where Does It All End?

The current structure is four Power Four conferences: SEC, ACC, Big 12, Big Ten. McGuire thinks we're in a relatively stable period, but only until the current TV contracts start expiring around 2030-2031.

What happened to the Pac-12 is the cautionary tale. McGuire's read: they didn't move aggressively enough on TV deals, and they underestimated the possibility that USC would actually leave. When USC went to the Big Ten, it triggered a collapse. The remaining schools scattered - Cal and Stanford ended up in the ACC, which means cross-country travel for student-athletes in every sport.

The Big 12 responded to OU and Texas leaving by adding BYU and other programs to maintain relevance and bargaining power. Whether that's enough long-term depends entirely on what the next TV deal looks like and which brands still carry weight at that table.

McGuire raised something that doesn't get discussed enough: college athletics is America's Olympic pipeline. Other countries have government-funded training programs. The U.S. trains its Olympic athletes through college programs. Cutting non-revenue sports, or allowing conference realignment to hollow out programs, has downstream consequences for the country's athletic development infrastructure.

On private equity: the University of Utah attracted investment from a PE firm, and the Big 12 had internal conversations about the concept. McGuire said Texas Tech hasn't gone down that road yet. But the logic is obvious: PE could help fill the revenue gap created by revenue sharing obligations. The tension is equally obvious: private equity doesn't operate in the world of subsidies, and a lot of what college athletics currently supports doesn't show up positively on a profit-and-loss statement.

 

Locker Room Chemistry in the Age of Unequal Pay

Bringing NIL money into a team environment creates a dynamic that most coaches didn't train for. Some players are making seven figures. Some are making nothing. They share a locker room.

McGuire's approach is directness. He draws a straight line from the locker room to the real world:

"The more you perform, the more productive you are, the more money you make. If you think you're going into an NFL locker room and the starting quarterback is going to make the same as the third receiver, that's not how it works."

The goal is to make the locker room feel like a professional environment with professional rules, not a place where inequality breeds resentment. McGuire said several programs have had seasons derailed by locker room conflict over pay disparities. Texas Tech's answer is transparency and genuine investment in each player's development so that players understand the disparity reflects market value, not favoritism.

 

Alumni Loyalty in a Mercenary Era

The question is fair: in a world where players move programs freely based on NIL deals and playing time, can a university still build real alumni loyalty?

McGuire thinks yes, but it requires deliberate work. His approach:

  • Never close practice to parents, high school coaches, or boosters. If a player is going to tell agents and scouts he developed at Texas Tech, he needs to actually know the people who make Texas Tech run.

  • Connect players to the booster network for real career opportunities, not just rhetoric. The players who signed job contracts after last season - that happened because those relationships were built during their time in the program.

  • Make them feel like this is home beyond their time on the field. When a transfer like Lee Hunter, a one-year guy who could sneak into the first round, hears "Lee Hunter, Texas Tech University" on Monday Night Football years from now, McGuire wants him to feel it.

Patrick Mahomes being a walking billboard for Texas Tech is part of this. The Adidas deal, the Gladiator brand. That's what brand equity from alumni looks like when it's maintained over time.

 

Memorable Quotes

"The people that are operating best in chaos and have the best backings are the ones that are succeeding." - Joey McGuire

"NIL now stands for 'Now It's Legal' - meaning the universities that are sharing at the highest level, they're doing it above board. And whenever you can do that, it evens the playing field." - Joey McGuire

"If you're late, you're saying your time is more important than my time. And so we're going to get that time back at 5:30 in the morning." - Joey McGuire

"I think when you get into high school recruiting, it's still more traditional. But the transfer portal - we're plug and play." - Joey McGuire

 
 

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Ryan Morrison
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