Some problems cost too much to address. Anyone that owns a home or a car has at some point needed a repair, done the math, and realized that it’s more fiscally responsible to live with the issue than it is to actually fix it.
This past weekend, football fans everywhere were confronted with an undeniable truth: as long as NIL deals keep football players in college, NFL Draft classes are going to be weaker than the ones we used to know.
There’s a long list of quarterbacks, led by Sam Leavitt and Brendan Sorsby, who could have gone pro that instead decided to run it back for one more school year. Sorsby probably wishes he could have a do over on that decision now.
Not everyone is Ty Simpson. The quarterback decided his film after one year as the starter at Alabama was good enough for NFL scouts, and it turns out he was right. But Simpson wasn’t just wrestling with whether or not he had done enough to be a first-round pick. He also reportedly had a $6.5 million offer from the University of Miami to stay in school and enter the transfer portal.
Simpson’s example is rare. We are all welcome to believe that he felt like he was ready for the NFL and chose to challenge himself instead of taking the easy cash. It’s more likely that next year’s considerably stronger quarterback class played a role in Simpson being ready to leave school right now.
“When 40 juniors go back to school for 2026, that’s about a full round of the draft that vanished,” one NFC executive told Mike Lombardo for the Between the Hashmarks newsletter.
Can the NFL afford to fix that problem? There is so much money at the owners’ disposal. There may soon be even more, and it still could be too costly a proposal.
The NFL is the country’s single most valuable entertainment property. Sure, the game ratings do most of the heavy lifting, but look at the numbers for the Draft last week. Even in what is considered a “weak” year, more than 13 million people tuned in for Round 1.
There are things the NFL could do to address the NIL talent drain on the Draft. The NHL’s draft is based on age. Teams select prospects between 18 and 21 years old (depending on where they are from). They are still welcome to go to college and play after that. It gives college hockey more talent and it gives the NHL a place for prospects that are not quite ready for professional competition somewhere to get more experience.
When a baseball player gets drafted, they are not obligated to report to the Major League team that drafted them to continue their career. They can choose to go to college if they are drafted straight from high school. They can also choose to return to college if they have any eligibility remaining. Their names will just go back into the pool for future drafts.
I have seen suggestions that the NFL could solve its NIL problem by adopting one of these draft models. No offense to baseball and hockey fans, but the NFL Draft is too big and too valuable to take its cues from those leagues.
The NFL Draft is an event for the Walt Disney Company. It gets three days of coverage on multiple networks. Plus, in the weeks and months ahead of actual picks being made, countless hours on shows like Get Up and First Take are dedicated to discussing prospects and team needs. As a media property, the NFL Draft carries real weight. Why would anyone mess with that?
League executives will continue to complain about what NIL has done to the Draft. Players staying in school longer means that rookies are older. Older rookies mean that you are having to make decisions on second contracts when a guy is already at his athletic peak. The math that these guys have understood for decades has changed.
For Roger Goodell and the owners though, there is no change. The league and the draft benefit from the popularity of college football. Fans of both the pro and college game tune in to see where guys they know will be playing next year.
The NFL Draft delivers a level of star power that other leagues’ drafts cannot. NIL is an inconvenience for the NFL. We’re talking about thinning out the talent pool for day three. Those are guys whose careers tend to last less than two full seasons on average. Prioritizing them decreases the value of the Draft as a television property. Doing anything that decreases the value of the Draft as a television property would be a real problem.
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