Mapping the shifting landscape of NIL in college sports
Book edited and co-authored by UK faculty member examines broader implications of NIL policy
Imagine that you’ve been asked to play a new game. The premise: throw a ball at a target that is not only constantly moving, but also continuously changing shape.
For college athletes, athletic organizations, institutions and policymakers across the U.S., the game is very real and not always understood. For Dr. Simran Kaur Sethi, Ph.D., assistant professor of Sport Leadership at the University of Kentucky and a former international student-athlete from India, this uncertainty became a clear call to utilize her research skills to look deeper.
The result: Sethi, Dr. Billy Hawkins (Professor in the Department of Health and Human Performance at the University of Houston), and Dr. Aquasia Shaw, senior lecturer in Sport Management at Coppin State University, recently published “The Evolution of Collegiate Athletics: Embracing the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) Era.”
In 2021, following a series of legal challenges and a Supreme Court ruling (National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston) the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reversed long-held rules and allowed college athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness, subject to state laws governing which sponsorship deals students can enter into.
As college athletics entered the NIL era, policy changes led to an unprecedented and still-evolving shift in the landscape of college sports – something that Sethi, Hawkins and Shaw examined closely through a scholarly lens.
“This project began through conversations with one of my co-editors, who recognized the need for a comprehensive scholarly volume examining the rapidly evolving NIL landscape in collegiate athletics,” Sethi said. “In many ways, the rapid pace and occasional uncertainty surrounding NIL made it even more important to produce a scholarly work that helps readers understand the larger forces shaping college athletics rather than simply reacting to the latest headline or policy update.”
The fluidity that had first drawn Sethi and her colleagues to the topic of NIL proved to be their greatest challenge in researching, writing and editing the book.
“As contributors were drafting their chapters, new court decisions, federal policy changes, state legislation, NCAA guidance, and institutional practices continued to emerge, requiring us to revisit and update content to reflect an ever-changing environment,” Sethi said. “At the same time, this constant evolution reinforced why rigorous scholarship on NIL is so important. Rather than viewing NIL as a single policy shift, our goal was to examine its broader structural, legal, economic, social, and educational implications for collegiate athletics. While specific rules and regulations may continue to change, many of the underlying issues explored in the book, including athlete rights, governance, commercialization, equity and access, will remain highly relevant.”
One of the most striking findings of her research, Sethi said, was how unequal the NIL playing field can be. “While NIL has created unprecedented opportunities for many college athletes to monetize their personal brands and achieve greater financial independence, those opportunities are far from equally or equitably distributed,” said Sethi, also a former NCAA Division I and professional tennis player for India. “As someone whose research focuses on international college athletes, I was consistently struck and saddened, though not surprised by the structural barriers they continue to face. … As policies continue to evolve, international athletes are often left navigating uncertainty and exclusion from a rapidly growing and evolving marketplace.”
She hopes the book will offer critical perspectives to students (including student-athletes), educators, administrators and policymakers navigating and studying NIL, and will underscore the importance of looking beyond compensation or endorsement deals to consider larger questions of policy, ethics, equity, systems, and business issues shaping the sports industry and the U.S. economy.
“At the University of Kentucky, I have had the opportunity to engage with students who are eager to discuss current events and critically examine questions surrounding athlete empowerment, athlete rights, the unintended consequences of policy decisions, and the future of college athletics,” Sethi said. “It is exciting to help equip the next generation of sport leaders with not only practical skills but also the critical perspectives needed to navigate and shape an increasingly complex and interconnected industry.”