In April 2025, the NFL Draft—broadcast in primetime on national television—revealed a great deal about the political economy of modern sports with a single pick. Shedeur Sanders, son of Hall of Famer Deion “Prime Time” Sanders, tumbled from a projected top-ten pick to the fifth round. His slide was neither a failure of talent nor a surprise fluke. Rather, Shadeur’s drop represented the new institutional antagonisms that have cropped up in a hyper-commodified athletic landscape.

Money in college sports is nothing new, but the NCAA traditionally guarded against payments to “student-athletes.” Many advocated for athletes to receive payment since they were generating billions in revenue for their schools, but for decades universities argued that their student-athletes were just as much students as they were athletic competitors, and that their free education (if they were a scholarship recipient) and room and board was payment enough—regardless of the vast amounts of money that is generated by their labor. 

Schools have the power to revoke a scholarship for any reason, including for career or season ending injuries, while coaches—some of the highest paid state employees—can move from program to program without warning. Players did not have the benefit of that kind of leverage, but that all changed with Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) and the transfer portal, two developments that turned college athletes into entrepreneurs of themselves.

NIL, the Transfer Portal, and the Creation of Student-Athlete Entrepreneurs

NIL refers to the rights of college athletes to monetize their personal brands through endorsements, social-media promotions, autograph signings, personal appearances, and other activities that exploit their name, image, and likeness. NIL contracts can range from one-off paid social-media posts or event appearances to multi-year partnerships with brands, local businesses, or booster collectives. NIL deals are, unlike many professional league contracts, not uniform; enforcement relies on institutional compliance and state law. Disputes may be settled in civil courts or via NCAA investigations if institutions face allegations of facilitating improper inducements. 

Top-tier athletes—especially quarterbacks and basketball standouts—now stand to earn millions with this new NIL compensation structure, but without standardized contracts or guaranteed payments, many agreements are informal (“handshake deals”) and subject to renegotiation or nonpayment. The transfer portal, which has made it easier for athletes to move between universities, amplifies NIL: athletes can leverage more lucrative deals by moving to programs with richer booster collectives, creating a free-agent-style marketplace with few rules and regulations.

NIL deals have transformed student-athletes into “student-entrepreneurs,” and the transfer portal has encouraged them to make the most of their opportunities by deregulating the labor market of college sports. By dismantling the NCAA’s amateurism model, NIL has empowered athletes to profit from their own marketability—but it has also introduced a speculative frontier where short-term gains compete with long-term security. In addition, such athlete-entrepreneurs must face off against new powerful interests that the monetization of college sports has invited in. 

While universities cannot pay athletes directly as employees, their boosters can redirect NIL money that their sports programs receive toward players. This dynamic has created all of the traditional antagonism between employer and employee, but with the wrinkle that the typical protections of employment contracts are absent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, venture capital has become quite interested in this situation (imagine Florida State football, brought to you by Blackrock), and while the schools are still fighting off the urge to accept the venture capital cash, the lack of regulations and clear contracts have been a fierce battleground for students and universities. 

In addition, while the new transfer portal rules technically allow greater player autonomy, they’ve also introduced new forms of precarity. Before, many young players entering top programs as freshmen might have to wait to earn playing time. Today, athletes can transfer between multiple schools throughout their college career for any reason at all, including NIL enticements. 

The problem is that transferring does not guarantee success. Many players have left schools for the promise of better deals which never materialize, no matter if they perform well or not. Without system-wide regulation of the contracts involved, negotiating with the university is like dealing with the mafia, where their “deals” are always changing to suit their needs. The university is Darth Vader, and the athlete is Lando Calrissian, praying they don’t alter the deal any further. Because many of these student-athletes choose to enter the transfer portal without the resources to hire experienced agents, the greater freedom of movement can also mean increased risk and lack of protection. 

Another downside to the“school as corporation” model is that schools can simply “fire” athletes who perform well and request to renegotiate their deal.  There are no guarantees in the new free market of college sports because there are no salary caps that universities have to maneuver or contractual obligations. 

However, while schools are trying their best to stay ahead of the ambitious athlete, the NFL wants no part of the new college football entrepreneurialism. There is no case more indicative of this than the fall in the draft of Shedeur Sanders.

Platform Rather than Destination

Shedeur Sanders stands at the crossroads of twenty‐first century sports capitalism, being both a product of and a challenger to the emerging NIL marketplace. As the son of Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, he has learned the rituals of professional athletics—from media management to performance analytics—yet his ascent is not merely a byproduct of nepotism. Coached by his father and mentored by Tom Brady, he embodies elite preparation rather than inherited celebrity.

Media narratives about Sanders routinely invoke coded racial tropes—questioning his “speed,” or speculating about his “locker-room presence” and leadership. Statistically, Shedeur Sanders checked all the boxes that would quell the naysayers. Yet when Sanders arrived at the NFL scouting combine, the media coverage continued to speak in thinly-veiled racialized narratives—fixating on his backward cap or draft-day jewelry, reviving the tired “urban athlete” cliché that should ring hollow when we’re talking about a top-tier prospect and son of an NFL Hall of Famer who’s lived a life of privilege. These distractions reinforce stereotypes and obscure the deeper issue: the NFL’s discomfort with athletes who monetize their own brand equity and negotiate power via NIL deals.

The rise of NIL has shattered the illusion of amateurism and laid bare the brutal economies of extraction that have always defined college sports. The question now isn’t whether athletes are exploited—it’s who gets to exploit whom. With figures like Shedeur Sanders, the traditional script has been flipped. As the highest paid college athlete, and in command of his own brand empire, he’s been able to capitalize on the chaos of an unregulated marketplace. 

For the NFL, this new form of player empowerment poses a threat. The NFL isn’t built on churn, but rather on the stability of its laborers' loyalty, especially at quarterback—a position where you are both field general and corporate figurehead. In the NFL, you’re not just signing a contract; you’re entering into ideological discipline.

For the majority of aspiring college football players, playing in the NFL is the goal. For Shedeur Sanders, the league seems rather like a stepping stone in a larger project of self-mythology and brand expansion. 

The NFL knows how to market a diva, but not how to respond to someone who sees the league as another platform to be leveraged. Sanders represents something that frightens the system: a player who sees the NFL as a pitstop in his hero’s journey. NFL owners responded to this posturing by holding off on drafting Sanders in the higher rounds, as a reminder to Shedeur and anyone else that may forget how labor power dynamics work.

College football under NIL has become a frontier of capitalist experimentation—young athletes are learning to see themselves not just as players, but as portfolios. Shedeur has leaned into this fully, building his Legendary brand, curating media around his career in real time, and preparing his “Last Dance” narrative before his pro career even begins. This isn’t arrogance—it’s awareness, and one that makes him a threat to the status quo.

The NFL, unlike the still-fluid world of college athletics, has an established system of control: rookie deals, franchise tags, and collective bargaining agreements that have historically limited player autonomy. What do you do when a player enters that system not looking to conform, but to leverage it for his own purposes? That’s the unspoken tension. The suits in the front office aren’t worried about gold chains—they're worried about the implications of a player like Shedeur looking to use the league as a platform rather than a destination.

Shedeur Sanders’s slide on draft day was thus not a question of talent or “leadership.” It was rather about a conflict between two systems of power: one that has encouraged entrepreneurialism of the self and one that wishes to extinguish all traces of such an attitude that stands to upset their labor dominance. Sanders understood the opportunities that NIL and the transfer portal made possible, and for that he’s been made an example.

Jason Myles is the host of THIS IS REVOLUTION>podcast and documentarian whose work can be found exclusively on Means TV.