84 Percent of NIL Money Goes to Two Sports. The Programs That Solve This First Will Own the Recruiting Conversation for a Generation.
Women's basketball engagement outpaces men's. NIL deal value in volleyball rose 146% year over year. The market is there. The infrastructure is not. This is the most underbuilt opportunity in college athletics.
The Concentration Problem
The NIL market's concentration in two sports is not a market failure. It is a structural outcome of a system built by collectives funded by football and basketball boosters, optimized for roster retention in revenue sports, and measured by deal volume rather than athlete outcomes. The $2.75 billion NIL market of 2026 distributes approximately $2.3 billion to football and men's basketball athletes. The remaining $450 million covers every other sport in Division I athletics combined.
Texas Tech's 2025-26 revenue-sharing allocation illustrates the institutional pattern: 74% to football, 17-18% to men's basketball, 2% to women's basketball, 1.9% to baseball, and 4-5% to all other sports. The allocation reflects revenue generation reality. What it does not reflect is the commercial NIL market opportunity that exists outside those two sports, which the collective-driven model has systematically underinvested in since 2021.
The programs beginning to recognize this are not doing so out of equity considerations alone. The commercial market for non-revenue sport athletes is growing faster than any other segment of the NIL economy.
Sources: Opendorse NIL at Four Report; MWW, September 2025; nil-ncaa.com, 2026.
The Women's Sports Opportunity
The Bank of America Institute's March 2026 report on the business of women's sports documented a near-tripling of overall women's sports viewership in the United States from 2020 to 2025. The Nielsen 2025 Global Sports Report found that 53% of women's sports fans are men. SponsorUnited reported that among the top 100 most-endorsed college athletes, women athletes earned 52% of partnership money while men earned 48%. NIL deal value in volleyball rose 146% year over year. Women's basketball engagement outpaces men's on social platforms.
The MWW analysis found athletes deliver an average 5.6% social engagement rate compared to the 1.9% average for non-athlete influencers. The differential is larger for women athletes in sports where the audience relationship is more personal and community-driven than in broadcast-dominated revenue sports.
Sources: Bank of America Institute, March 2026; MWW, September 2025; Fox Sports, June 2025.
The Flau'jae Johnson Standard
The counterexample to every underfunded program's skepticism about non-revenue sport NIL infrastructure is Flau'jae Johnson. The LSU senior entered the 2025-26 season with more than 20 active brand deals spanning Powerade, Amazon, Doritos, Puma, JBL, and Apple Cash. She holds an equity stake in the Unrivaled professional league — only the second college athlete in history to land an ownership stake through NIL. She is signed to Roc Nation. She has an active music career.
Flau'jae Johnson is not a NIL success story because LSU connected her to brands. She is a NIL success story because someone helped her understand that her name, image, and likeness were not a revenue source. They were a business. The equity stake in Unrivaled is not a brand deal. It is ownership. That distinction is the entire argument for building NIL infrastructure across every sport on the roster.
Sources: sportsepreneur.com, April 2026; On3 NIL Valuations 2025-26; Bank of America Merrill Lynch Study, March 2026.
What the Merrill Study Reveals
The Merrill Lynch Financial Reality of Today's Young Athletes study, released in early 2026, found that 74% of high-potential athletes expected $25,000 or more from NIL deals and related opportunities in 2025, while 32% had already earned $10,000 or more. Its findings on advisor relationships are directly relevant for non-revenue sport athletes: those with structured advisor relationships demonstrated meaningfully better outcomes on tax compliance, deal structuring, and financial planning than those without. The differential was larger for athletes outside football and men's basketball, where institutional support structures are less developed.
Volleyball NIL deal value rose 146% year over year in 2025-26. The sport's social media engagement rates consistently outpace football on a per-athlete basis. Brands including Nike, Gatorade, and a growing number of regional sponsors have activated volleyball-specific campaigns at the college level. The players generating those deals are doing so largely without institutional business infrastructure behind them. The programs that build that infrastructure now will be the programs those athletes choose in recruiting conversations in 2027.
Sources: Bank of America Merrill Lynch Study, March 2026; MWW, September 2025.
The Recruiting Conversation Nobody Is Having
The recruits and families of non-revenue sport athletes are asking NIL questions during official visits in 2026. In most cases they are receiving answers about collective budgets for football and men's basketball. That is not an answer. It is a deflection that costs programs commitments from athletes with genuine commercial market value who have decided to enroll somewhere that takes their business development seriously.
The programs that have built systematic NIL infrastructure for their full rosters are telling a recruiting story their peers cannot match. The volleyball recruit whose program can demonstrate a systematic approach to brand development, IP ownership, and revenue activation for Olympic sport athletes is making a four-year investment decision on fundamentally different information.
The commercial market for non-revenue sport athletes is growing faster than any other segment of the NIL economy. The programs that build the infrastructure to capture it first will own a recruiting advantage that their peers will spend years trying to replicate.
ROLA builds the business infrastructure behind athletic programs, NIL collectives, and the institutions developing the next generation of athlete-entrepreneurs. The strategy session is where that work begins.
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