Deion Sanders says college football needs NIL salary cap like NFL

Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders joined the long list of coaches calling for NIL regulation from the NCAA, according to Jarrett Bell of USA Today on Saturday.

Sanders talked about the NCAA's role, or lack thereof, in regulating what has swiftly become the wild west of teams throwing cash at players to entice them to play for their schools.

“There’s a lot going on in college football, and the NCAA has just washed their hands and they walk away,” Sanders said, "“As long as they collect those checks, they walk away instead of saying, 'OK, we’ve got to do something about this.' Because if you don’t, it’s going to keep spiraling.”

Sanders' solution to the problem? A salary cap that adjusts with conferences and levels of competition, insuring everyone has money to play with and no one can blow other schools out of the water.

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“There should be some kind of cap,” Sanders said, referring to NIL payments. “Our game should emulate the NFL game in every aspect. Rules. Regulations. Whatever the NFL rules, the college rules should be the same. There should be a cap and every team gets this, and you should be able to spend that.”

The comments provided a stark juxtaposition to the rest of the Buffaloes' Saturday, when new freshman quarterback Julian Lewis flashed a jewel-encrusted Darth Vader chain and drove off from a pop-up shop event on campus in a Lamborghini Urus.

While Sanders' ideas are certainly appealing in theory, they face a number of challenges to be implemented. Chief among them is that college football isn't the NFL, and if history has told us anything about the sport, it's that the schools involved are seldom, if ever, willing to work together and sacrifice any kind of competitive advantage to benefit the sport as a whole. The idea that schools like Georgia, Alabama, or Ohio State would sacrifice their financial advantage to make sure that Mississippi State, Minnesota, or even Sanders' Colorado would have a better chance at beating them is laughable.

On top of that, every effort to regulate NIL has not only been struck down by schools taking the NCAA to court, it has occasionally led to more money being made available to players. Don't forget, part of the reason Tennessee was able to pay Nico Iamaleava the amount they have is because they and Virginia successfully challenged the NCAA's regulations in court. When schools have to go from no rules to suddenly having rules, things tend to get messy.

Lastly, and most importantly, there's the issue of where those caps are set, how they're set, and whether they change over time. The reason that salary caps work in professional sports is because they are collectively bargained between players and owners. The players are employees of the teams, and that gives them the power to bargain and change the deal every few years as the league's financial landscape changes.

So far, preventing the players from being university employees has been the biggest hill that schools and the NCAA are willing to die on. They've fought tooth and nail to prevent any kind of unionization or becoming recognized as employees, which makes it all but impossible to collectively bargain salary caps into place. And without the collective bargaining, any attempt to cap player compensation is likely to lose, and lose badly, in court.

Ultimately though, it's clear that coaches feel something needs to be done to rein in what they see as unacceptable changes in the landscape of college football.

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