On October nights, people of all ages flock to Halloween theme park Scary Acres, paying to be terrorized by zombies and chainsaw-wielding mad men.
But there was nothing scary about another big draw there on a recent Sunday night: University of Nebraska football star Jacory Barney Jr.
The popular Husker receiver readily dished out high-fives and handshakes, signed autographs and snapped photos with fans while picking up a paycheck along the way.
Less than 18 hours earlier, Barney had been on the West Coast catching balls and taking hits in the Huskers’ last-second 17-14 loss to Oregon. All in a day’s work for today’s major college athletes, who balance sports and studies with opportunities to cash in on their name, image and likeness.
Even in a new era where schools now directly pay their top stars, the NIL dollars athletes can collect from a public appearance or online business pitch remain an area where schools seek to gain an edge.
While schools’ direct pay to athletes is capped by the NCAA this year at just over $21 million, there is no such limit on NIL – enabling schools to pad team payrolls and lure top players with what are often called “above-the-cap” dollars.
In one element of that, NU and other schools are diverting increasing amounts of money from their media rights contracts and pouring those dollars directly into NIL deals for athletes. At NU, it’s all part of what one top athletic official calls a “talent retention and acquisition-first business model” — one he said the Huskers need to compete.
“For some people at some places, they have equated spending to success, and it doesn’t always pencil out that way,” said Kortne Gosha, NU deputy athletic director and chief commercial officer. “However, if you don’t spend, you’re guaranteeing yourself probably to not be successful.”
A recent report by The Athletic pegged Nebraska’s combined direct pay and NIL for its football team this season between $31 million and $35 million. That ranked in the top 20 among the 68 major conference colleges and sixth among the 18 Big Ten schools, though still below the reported $50 million-plus of top programs like Ohio State and Notre Dame.
Both of the 5-2 Huskers’ losses this year – by three points each to Indiana and Oregon – have been to programs that reportedly ranked ahead of them in NIL spending.
Nebraska’s roster spending is in addition to the more than $70 million NU spends to operate its football program, a figure that more than doubled over three years.
While it remains to be seen whether NU’s spending will help the Huskers break out of two decades of football doldrums, you can take to the bank that the financial landscape in the game will continue to evolve.
The next big change could come in the form of the Protect College Sports Act, a measure before Congress intended to level the playing field and bring some order to college sports.
Here’s a primer on how the college athletics money game is played today and how it could soon change.
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For decades, the NCAA maintained a strict ban on paying athletes. That didn’t stop some athletic boosters from handing cash to athletes under the table, as was often rumored. Though schools would occasionally be caught in the act, such allegations tended to be hard to prove.
Over time, the NCAA’s prohibition on paying players became harder to defend as big-time football schools became flush with TV money.
They began bidding up the salaries of coaches, with top coaches commanding close to $10 million annually. Nebraska doled out more money buying out the contract of former coach Scott Frost than it spent annually on scholarships for all of its athletes.
As coaches got rich while players received only scholarships, it sparked widespread criticism that schools were exploiting athletes.
That prompted California lawmakers in 2019 to pass the nation’s first NIL law. Allowing athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness was seen as a backdoor way to compensate athletes.
To keep up, Nebraska and dozens of other states quickly passed similar laws. That in turn prompted the NCAA to legalize NIL in 2021.
NIL was largely sold by its supporters as simply enabling athletes to earn pocket money by pitching a local burger joint on social media. But the NCAA green-lit NIL without any guardrails. The results were predictable.
At Nebraska and other schools, outside collectives quickly formed to raise huge sums of money from fans, businesses and deep-pocketed boosters to be paid to top athletes through NIL deals.
The NIL dollars were supposed to be tied to a true commercial purpose. But no one was regulating them. It was widely acknowledged that many collectives operated as a system of booster-funded pay-to-play – the reason some suggested NIL stood not for name, image and likeness but “now it’s legal.”
At the same time, the NCAA loosened its long-standing restrictions on transferring, ultimately allowing athletes to transfer every year.
“Coaches are now not only recruiting new kids, but they’re recruiting their current rosters back,” Gosha said. “No one imagined this level of complexity within college athletics four or five years ago.”
Free transfers produced a Wild West system where top players shopped themselves to schools in pursuit of multimillion-dollar contracts. Colleges with big sugar daddy boosters had the largest war chests. Nebraska didn’t appear to be among them.
To try to settle things down, the NCAA finally caved on the issue of directly paying players. In the landmark 2025 House v. NCAA court settlement, colleges were authorized beginning last year to share athletic revenues directly with athletes.
The settlement also sought to rein in rogue NIL deals by creating the College Sports Commission. That independent body scrutinizes all such agreements to make sure they have a valid commercial purpose and are valued fairly.
The new structure generally meant the demise of collectives, including Nebraska’s 1890. Still, it didn’t take long for schools to find other creative ways to pay players above the revenue share cap.
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Blake Lawrence, a former Nebraska linebacker, is the co-founder of Opendorse, a company his alma mater and dozens of others schools contract with to manage athlete NIL endorsements. He also wrote the book on how schools use NIL today, recently publishing “NIL 101: The House Settlement.”
“It’s been a wild last five years,” Lawrence said recently while explaining how the system functions today.
This year, schools under the House settlement can pay their athletes a maximum of just over $21 million across all sports. Each school allocates those dollars differently. But it tends to be about 75% for football, 15% for men’s basketball, 5% for women’s basketball and 5% for all other athletes, Lawrence said.
Nebraska likely prioritizes its powerhouse women’s volleyball team, but schools don’t disclose how they split those dollars or which athletes get them.
If a school puts 75% of its revenue share dollars into football, that’s roughly $16 million. So then how does NU come up with its reported $30 million-plus football roster?
Most universities have long signed media rights contracts with third parties that guarantee the schools an annual rights fee. The contracting company gains the rights to broadcast games on the radio and to sell radio advertising, corporate sponsorships and venue advertising.
Now schools are striking agreements with their media rights partners to have them put part or all of the school’s rights fee into third-party NIL deals instead. In effect, schools forgo media dollars that previously helped fund the athletic department to instead pay athletes to be pitchmen for athletic corporate sponsors.
“The athletic departments are redirecting the funds and saying, ‘Stop paying us, pay our players,’” Lawrence said.
In December, the University of Nebraska Board of Regents voted to amend the Husker athletic department’s media rights contract with Playfly Sports to direct roughly $9 million of rights fees into athlete NIL agreements by June 2026. The change reduced the fee going to athletics to $5.5 million.
The university says athletes earn those NIL dollars through making appearances, signing autographs, appearing in video ads during games, doing photo shoots, recording podcasts and making social media posts on behalf of university sponsors.
Earlier this year, the College Sports Commission rejected $7.5 million in NIL agreements Playfly had struck with 18 Nebraska football players, determining the deals lacked specificity as to what the athletes were delivering for the sponsors. But after the same deals were reworked, they were approved in July.
Many schools are similarly designating a portion of the funds they receive from their apparel partners to go into NIL, Lawrence said.
That’s not happening at Nebraska. The school is currently locked into a $129 million, 11-year contract with Adidas that does not expire for another two years. Gosha said NU has explored including NIL in its apparel contract.
A third source of university NIL dollars includes having teams appear in sponsored tournaments that offer NIL dollars as prizes, Lawrence said. The Husker volleyball team earlier this season played in two such tournaments, each offering teams a $1 million NIL pool.
Under the system, just how marketable the athletes are is actually “very ancillary” to how it all works, Lawrence said.
With the way the College Sports Commission values athlete appearances, it’s not hard for universities to rack up millions in NIL if the athletes make enough of them. A $1 million player just needs to work harder than a $200,000 player.
Schools with the biggest media rights and apparel contracts have an advantage in this game, as do athletic departments healthy enough to divert revenue, Lawrence said.
Thanks in part to its passionate fanbase, Nebraska is one of a few schools that does not subsidize athletics with tax, tuition or student fee dollars. That positions the school to be among the top spenders in athlete compensation, Lawrence said.
In taking stock in his program last week, Husker Coach Matt Rhule expressed an optimistic outlook about NU’s financial competitiveness.
“We have the right people supporting us in the university so that we can hopefully have the resources that these other teams have,” he said.
Gosha noted his own title – chief commercial officer – reflects how player compensation has changed the game. It’s required universities to go out and find new sources of revenue, like the beer sales at Memorial Stadium that launched a year ago.
NU officials have also said the upcoming $600 million stadium renovation – including a controversial plan to prioritize the best seats for the biggest donors – is a key part of that drive for dollars.
“The stadium renovation itself is going to generate significant revenue, head and shoulders above where we are today,” Gosha said. “In college athletics at this level, that’s what it takes to remain competitive.”
But more change could soon be on the horizon.
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In a rare showing of bipartisanship, the U.S. Senate recently voted 77-22 to pass the Protect College Sports Act – an effort by lawmakers to rein in some of the current anarchy in college sports.
The bill would raise the amount of money that could be paid directly to athletes to about $49 million annually, including $5 million devoted to women’s and Olympic sports.
It also limits athletes to a single transfer during their college years. It attempts to bar the media rights and apparel side deals schools are using to get around the rev share cap. And it provides more regulation for third-party NIL deals.
Both of Nebraska’s senators voted for the bill, which was also backed by the Big Ten and its members.
“This bill helps to stabilize the current chaotic state of name, image and likeness regulations,” said Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts, a co-sponsor of the bill. He said it would go a long way toward preserving college sports, which he called “one of Nebraska’s greatest traditions.”
But the House of Representatives has yet to take up the measure. Whether it does could depend on how willing the parties are to work together after the bruising battle for control of Congress.
Gosha said Nebraska is hoping lawmakers act to “slow the machine down” and provide some needed governance. But the university is prepared to continue to work with the status quo if it has to, too.
“You’re kind of living in two worlds,” he said.
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At Scary Acres near 170th Street and Giles Road in Sarpy County, the recent appearance by Barney harkened back to what NIL was originally sold to be — a way for a small local business and an athlete to work together.
Barney’s agent – yes, top college athletes have those today – reached out to Scary Acres last year offering his services. After they struck a deal, Barney drew a huge crowd.
“It was Husker Nation all around Scary Acres, and he had such a great time,” a Scary Acres spokesperson said. “He just takes a real kind of Nebraska homegrown interest in people.” It was a “no-brainer” to do it again this year.
As soon as the gates opened for Barney’s recent Sunday appearance, fans, mostly young kids, began to crowd around him. The star wideout politely and enthusiastically interacted with the kids, not seeming like someone who had just taken a red-eye flight home after a tough loss at Oregon.
Nine-year-old friends Tanner Griffin and Braxton Rhode of Omaha came out to see their favorite Husker player, whom Braxton called “the best wide receiver ever.”
Barney took up a Sharpie and signed his name to Braxton’s Husker shirt, which was emblazoned with Barney’s name and jersey number.
Being able to buy a shirt with a college player’s name on the back would have been unthinkable just over five years ago, when such apparel violated NCAA rules.
It was just another small reflection of how NIL continues to change the game.
