The winter holidays are a time of joy and celebration for some, but for others they are characterized by anxiety. Amid college football’s holiday tradition of bowl games, the shift from the traditional postseason to an expanded playoff phase is adding to the anxiety.
Regardless of whether one considers oneself a cheerful reveler or a curmudgeonly miser, consumerism plays a crucial role in the season. College football is no exception, with the recent arrival of the NIL (No National League Player) as a fundamental element of the game evident throughout the remainder of the playoffs.
As the field narrowed from 12 to eight with last weekend’s first-round games, the College Football Playoff demonstrated an exercise comparable to Eddie Murphy’s monologue about Christmas spending in the seasonal classic Trading Places: “I’m not going to have the money to buy my son the GI Joe with the kung-fu grip, and my wife isn’t going to make love to me because I don’t have the money.”
Well, making the playoffs and advancing are similar. The eight quarterfinalists are a testament to their spending power, although it is difficult to determine exactly how much, contributing to the growing anxiety.
A CBS Sports article prior to the first round divided the tournament into zero-spending categories, with five of the 12 classified as “elite spending teams.” Four of them are competing in the round of 16: the current national champion, Ohio State, Oregon, Texas Tech and Miami, which beat Texas A&M, also an elite spending team, in what was perhaps, not coincidentally, the closest game of the first round.
Both James Madison and Tulane took a beating against deep-pocketed opponents in Oregon and Ole Miss, which isn’t necessarily a fact worth applying to any NIL debate. Athletic departments with more funds from television revenue, merchandising, etc. have long had an advantage over their conference counterparts with fewer resources, and that disparity is a characteristic feature of the underdog stories that fans love so much.
However, for other historically underdog teams in this year’s Playoffs, NIL spending is an undoubtedly crucial factor in Indiana and Texas Tech’s pursuit of the national championship.
The top-seeded and undefeated Hoosiers reach their first Rose Bowl in nearly six decades with the support of Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza. The Indiana quarterback is valued at $2.6 million, according to On3.com estimates higher than the $1.6 million estimate he had been given shortly after his transfer from Cal.
And while less dramatic in historical context than Indiana’s rise, Texas Tech’s run at the national championship represents a significant jump for a program once destined to be a secondary team. The Red Raiders are underdog teams, having rarely been nationally competitive before, but Texas Tech reportedly invests in NIL with a fervor comparable to that of top-division football clubs.
The parallel with soccer works in part because, just as a once-middling Manchester City became an English Premier League powerhouse coinciding with an infusion of money, Texas Tech owes much of its rise to oil money.
On3 reported that Texas Tech invested an impressive $28 million in its 2025 roster, making it one of the most expensive rosters in college football. The public face of Tech’s NIL collective, former Red Raiders lineman Cody Campbell, sold his energy company Double Eagle for $4.1 billion earlier this year.
Do this year’s playoffs foreshadow all of our upcoming football seasons? Does a program need its own version of Landman to get rich and compete?
Analyzing the other close first-round matchup — Alabama’s comeback win over Oklahoma — offers a fascinating perspective. It pitted two historically notable programs that CBS Sports called “good, but not as elite as you might think.”
That’s an interesting description, as it particularly aligns with Alabama’s fall from the most dominant program in sports in the years just before the Supreme Court allowed NIL payments in 2021, to the Crimson Tide’s current positioning as a consistent winner but hardly a world-beater.
Now, it is overly simplistic to attribute Alabama’s slight decline to NIL spending and discredits Nick Saban’s remarkable performance as the Tide’s head coach. But it’s worth noting that Saban has openly criticized not NIL’s spending, but its lack of structure.
“I’m all for players making money,” Saban said last spring. “I think a lot of people would agree. As for the future of college athletics, not just football, how can we sustain 20 other non-profit sports that create a lot of other opportunities for people in the future?”
In parallel with the holiday season, Saban’s comments about the long-term health of college sports during this current era of unregulated spending may bring to mind nightmares of credit card bills coming due after a gift-buying spree.
You may have noticed that much of the information about NIL spending is presented in estimates. The lack of concrete oversight or regulation makes it difficult to assess the landscape and only increases anxiety around NIL spending.
