The Real Cost of NIL Payoffs in High School and College Wrestling

Jordan Burroughs vs Mitchell Mesenbrink at the 2024 Olympic Team Trials. Photo from Sanjay Kumar

How is NIL playing out?

On July 1st, 2021, the trajectory of athletics in the United States changed forever. The NCAA granted its student-athletes permission to use their individual name, image and likeness (NIL) for personal financial gain. When you think of companies paying athletes for the use of their name, image and likeness, you probably envision athletes starring in product endorsement videos, their faces featured on billboards promoting a local business, or getting paid for signing jerseys. While these types of endorsements are happening, they don’t seem to represent the majority of NIL deals. Rather, a significant amount of NIL money is coming from wealthy alumni, fans or donors who hold a vested interest in seeing their college team succeed. 

Many of the individuals funding these NIL deals will never see anything close to a positive financial return on their investments and in reality, most of them don’t expect to. These NIL funders are more than happy to help a program succeed by buying the next big recruit or the next big transfer. 

To be clear, I am not saying there is anything morally or legally inappropriate happening here. People are free to “invest” to their hearts content in NIL deals that will likely have no monetary return. At first glance, it appears no different than making a poor financial investment in the stock market or in an underperforming startup. And, it’s easy to see that there’s intrinsic value in watching your ride-or-die college team succeed. It feels good to get those rivalry wins and to help add some All-American plaques to your favorite wrestling room wall. It feels good to give back. Maybe these NIL backers are more philanthropists than investors. 

NIL incentives can reduce intrinsic motivation and performance 

Fifty years before the NCAA’s game-changing NIL decision, there was something game-changing happening on another playing field - the field of psychology. Cognitive psychology was born in the 1960's. By 1973, two cognitive psychologists studying motivation conducted a (now famous) study on children which was titled; Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest With Extrinsic Reward. 

This experiment took children who had already shown “great initial interest in a drawing activity” and split them into groups. The “Expected Reward” group received an external motivator.  Before they began, they were told they had a chance to earn a “Good Player Award” if they were helpful in drawing pictures. The “Expected Reward” group was then given their “Good Player Award” after they finished drawing. The “No Award” group did not receive an external reward for their drawing and were not told about any possible external reward. 

Here’s the kicker. In the weeks following, the children who had received external rewards for their drawing eventually “spent less time playing with the drawing materials than children in the other conditions”. Let me say that again. The introduction of expected external rewards had an immediate negative impact on children's interest and performance in an activity which they had previously shown “great initial interest”. 

NIL rewards are no longer just for college athletes. High profile high school athletes like U17 World Champion Bo Bassett and U17 World silver medalist Jax Forrest are reported to be significantly involved in the NIL game according to this EssentiallySports article. Does this model, especially in adolescents, perpetuate an already concerning trend in our society? It seems with the rise of social media we’ve seen an increased emphasis on identity development (think “I want to build my brand, to look a certain way”) and a decreased emphasis on character development (think, “I want to become hard working and a supportive teammate”).

Unfortunately, the external incentivization doesn’t stop at the high school level. Now there are even youth and middle school clubs offering their athletes monetary incentives for winning major tournaments. The screenshot below shows part of an actual post that was made by a youth wrestling club within the past year. In the post, the Midwestern club stated that “[our club] wants to promote hard work, and we believe in motivating our athletes to succeed”.

Part of a post from a youth wrestling club in the midwest offering payouts for winning tournaments.

This club likely has the best of intentions in “motivating” their young athletes to succeed. Yet, consider the table, taken from this scientific journal, which outlines the impact extrinsic rewards can have on intrinsic motivation. While the entire table is useful for understanding motivation, the first two factors are especially relevant to NIL and monetary rewards for youth success.

Reducing intrinsic motivation by offering extrinsic rewards is known in psychology as the Overjustification Effect. How might this psychological phenomenon impact the motivation and interest of our young athletes? Just as the children in the drawing study lost interest and motivation in drawing, are we reducing the amount of intrinsic motivation these young and passionate wrestlers will have in the future?

Does NIL compromise development? 

More than just a pass-time or a game, wrestling requires its participants to embrace a different lifestyle, mindset, and philosophy. For most of its existence wrestling has held an important developmental role for young men and women - a rite of passage. 

I’ve written about the Rite of Passage in a separate post, but for brevity’s sake, just consider it to be an important developmental phase which serves to test and fortify a young person’s spirit. Rite of Passages are seen throughout history in cultures like the Spartan Warriors, and still today in African and Native American communities. These valuable experiences offer young people a platform in which to prove to themselves and their community that they are prepared and capable of taking on life’s challenges.

It’s a difficult thing to monetize or quantify, but anyone who has wrestled knows that it’s generally considered to be a priceless part of their character. The thousands of hours of human labor invested by the athletes, parents and coaches returns what is in the business world referred to as “human capital”, or in layman's terms as capable and impactful adults. 

Legendary football coach Nick Saban spoke of his concern toward this shift in values saying:

“All the things I believed in, for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics. It was always about developing players. It was always about helping people be more successful in life.”

Coach Saban then quoted his wife saying:

“Why are we doing this? All they care about is how much you are going to pay them. They don’t care about how you are going to develop them, which is what we’ve always done. So why are we doing this?”

I don’t think Saban and his wife are alone in their belief that NIL has altered the integrity that has long existed in the heart of coaching. By providing external rewards for an internal quest like wrestling, are we compromising one of the most effective Rite of Passages left in our society?

Does NIL weaken the “brotherhood”? 

The rise in NIL has fueled a significant rise in college athletes transferring from one institution to the next as well as a major increase in recruits committing to several schools before finding the highest bidder. The landscape of many college sports today now resembles that of free agency rather than team loyalty and commitment. 

According to this American Perspectives Survey, 15% of men now report having no close friendships. This is a statistic that is especially high for men and points to a problem that could be exacerbated by exchanging team loyalty and commitment for NIL gains. Shared experience, time and commitment are the critical components to lasting friendships. These are the elements that have led so many to describe wrestling as an invaluable “brotherhood” like the one depicted in the well-known Minnesota Wrestling video titled A Brotherhood.

Relative to sports like football or basketball, wrestling has never been considered a “revenue” generator. Before NIL, what motivated wrestlers (and most athletes) to pour their blood, sweat and tears into their pursuit was the simple satisfaction that came from the act of wrestling itself, the faith that the difficulty of the sport would lead to personal growth, and the brotherhood of human connection.

It’s obvious that NIL has changed athlete motivation in a monumental way and in doing so it has changed the benefits these athletes receive from their sport. It's not that NIL is bad, it’s that we may not be accounting for the tradeoffs accurately. Some of the benefits we are trading for NIL may be far more valuable than we could have ever imagined. What price tag do you put on intrinsic motivation, on personal growth, on a brotherhood? 

— Joe Nord