College Athletes Are Getting Terrible Money Advice and It Will Cost Them Everything

The NIL Gold Rush and the Advice Nobody Is Giving

College athletes are cashing NIL checks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars while still in high school, and the financial advice they’re getting is either nonexistent or dangerously bad. I’ve seen this story play out before, and it never ends well.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece highlighting how some of these elite recruits are spending their new money. We’re talking $2,500 custom suits, $1,100 sneakers, $1,500 Mercedes AMG rentals for prom night, and five-figure watches. These are high school kids. And the adults in the room, the advisors, the agents, the entourage members, nobody is stopping any of it.

That is a failure of epic proportions.

What I’ve Seen Happen to Athletes Before

This is not a new story. For decades I’ve watched professional athletes blow through enormous sums of money because nobody around them had the courage to say no. The yes-men and yes-women who surround these kids don’t get paid to give hard truths. They get paid to keep the athlete happy and keep themselves in the room.

Rob Gronkowski, one of the greatest tight ends in NFL history, said it plainly. He lived frugally during his entire NFL career because he understood one simple truth. NFL stands for Not For Long.

Think about that. The average running back plays fewer than three years in the NFL. These are professional athletes at the peak of their physical ability, and most of them are done before thirty. Now imagine an eighteen-year-old freshman getting NIL money, spending it like it will never stop, and then blowing out a knee in his sophomore year.

• The NIL checks stop immediately when performance stops
• An ACL tear can end an athlete’s earning window overnight
• There is no guaranteed income stream in college athletics
• Every dollar blown on prom night is a dollar that cannot compound over decades

The Math That Nobody Is Doing

Here’s what I want every one of these kids, their parents, and their advisors to understand. Time and compounding are the most powerful forces in personal finance. An eighteen-year-old who takes even a portion of that NIL money and puts it to work properly has a legitimate shot at building lasting wealth. But that window requires discipline and it requires someone willing to tell the truth.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know what happens when someone becomes a yes-man to a client who is making destructive financial decisions. In the 1990s I had clients pressuring me to load them up on tech stocks because their golf buddy said so. I told them no. Some of them walked. And I watched from a distance as those same people got destroyed in the dot-com collapse.

I will not participate in someone’s financial undoing. That is not what I do.

What Good Advice Actually Looks Like Here

If I’m sitting across from a college athlete who just signed an NIL deal, here is what I’m telling them.

• You are playing the most physically dangerous team sport in existence. One injury changes everything.
• This income may not last more than one or two seasons. Plan accordingly.
• The cars, the watches, the prom rentals, those are not investments. They are liabilities dressed up as status symbols.
• A fraction of what you earn today, invested properly, can generate income for the rest of your life. But only if you protect it now.

Congress is running hearings on NIL. Ted Cruz is getting involved. Everyone wants to debate the structure of college athletics and whether there should be a super league. Fine. But the conversation that actually matters for these kids is the one nobody is having loudly enough. What happens to this money, and who is responsible for protecting it?

The answer right now is not enough people, and that is a problem that will show up in the headlines a decade from now when we start seeing broke former college stars who never made it to the pros.