We've seen one kid get paid over $1mm before graduating high school and sitting out his senior year. It's absolute lunacy.
It'll be interesting what the NFL does about this. I'm honestly not sure what they can do. The NFL is about to start competing with a league that has more freedom for players and maybe more money for some of them. A kid that might go in the 7th round of the draft may be earning more at his university than he will in the NFL. The only thing keeping the NFL from fully competing is eligibility limits in college. But I said in this thread yesterday that it's not a difficult logical leap to see the top 30ish programs in the country forming their own, independent league and eliminating eligibility requirements. At that point you'd have a direct competitor for the NFL. There would be little incentive for kids to leave for the NFL. They'd have no contracts beyond NIL deals (presumably), no "salary cap" for teams, no ownership group concerned with escalating player wages affecting balance sheets, etc. Beyond that, there would be no limits on player movement and rules restricting how much a player could make at a particular number of years of service and so forth. It's a professional athlete's panacea. If it got enough momentum the NFL would be forced to start taking high school kids to keep the influx of talent coming. But by that time the "college" game may be more popular than the NFL product. It's a bizarre rabbit hole to peek into.
I actually hope it happens. The byproduct of something like this would be a ton of great high school players with no place to go. If eligibility requirements disappear in a 30ish team "college" league then you won't have 20-30 scholarship athletes turning over on college rosters every year. Imagine so many players in the portal that top programs take 20 portal players and 5 high school kids every year. At that point the top high school players not selected for this league have to go somewhere. That's where the real college football comes in. Those players will play somewhere and I bet the remaining leagues agree to a particular scholarship model that limits player movement again, but also offers NIL opportunities (that cat is out of the bag forever). The NIL opportunities will just be much smaller than the professional college league. This is where I hope TCU lands. We would excel as part of 100 remnant programs of college football and I suspect the fan interest would be quite large.