The Josh Innes Show - The Inconvenient Truth Of The NIL Era

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

The Nick Saban documentary drops tomorrow. Saban is probably the greatest college coach ever. But, he also benefitted greatly from an era in which the coaches had all the power. Now, the players have the power. Josh Innes questions if that is a good thing. Is the NIL era creating a problem for the future of the NFL? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Saban conveniently got out of coaching when they started paying players to pay, like when the guys started getting paid. Nick Saban all of a sudden isn't a genius all that much anymore. Actually, here's the genius of Nick Saban. Nick Saban got out of coaching right before the playing field was pretty much equal, although it's not totally equal because a school like Ohio State's always going to have more money than, you know, grambling or something. But like the playing field has equaled more because if you find the right dollar amount,

you can pay some kid to come play there and then it'll go play somewhere else next year. But I was thinking about this with Sabin the other day. And look, I admire Nick Saban. I think that Nick Saban documentary comes out tomorrow. And I think this is an interesting discussion about college and what kind of people it's creating. I think there are media people who currently are afraid to call out the current culture of college athletics because they are afraid of either being called old or outdated or worst, racist, right? So I think if you're a liberal media person, right, you're like a Dan Lebitard and his group of doofuses. Those people have to get on the internet and on their podcasts and shit and let you know that,

well, college coaches who don't want rules and regulations are the same people that can job hop every year if they want to. They can. There's also consequences to that and their employer has to pay and they may have to pay. There are zero consequences for college players to go from one place to the next, right? but people are afraid to get online or go on a television show or be a coach that says, hey, like paying these players while they should be paid is actually what's going to kill this thing. They're not going to say it. They're not going to acknowledge it.

But it's true. And it is. I think Nick Saban's full of shit because he's involved in this like protect college sports act and all this shit. And the reality is Nick Saban had an advantage for a quarter century that most people didn't have. You know, they did whatever they wanted to do in the SEC. The SEC had the true advantage. Now you've got these schools that can go out and just find these collectives and can pay all these players. And that's fine.

I am truly of the belief. This is my opinion. This is Josh's opinion now. I believe that college athletes should get paid and they should get paid what they're worth. Like if they want to pay Bryce Underwood $3 million or $4 million a year to be a dreadful quarterback, more power to you. That's the open market. But that said, I think it's to the detriment of the young people. I think in years to come, it's going to be to the detriment of the NFL,

and I think it's to the detriment of college football in general. Why? Well, and I believe it was Zach Randolph. No, it was Penny Hardaway. So Penny Hardaway, I believe, was on the Out the Mud podcast, which is a podcast you should all listen to. I'd imagine they don't listen to that podcast in Jason Whitlock World. But Out the Mud's a wonderful podcast hosted by Zach Randolph

and First Team All Defense Man, himself Tony Allen, and they just shoot the shit. They chop it up, as it were, with players and other people. But they were talking to Penny Hardaway, who's the coach at Memphis. And Memphis is a disaster of a basketball program. 15 years ago, 16 years ago, they're in the national championship game. I guess that was 0-8-09, so 17 years ago. They've got great coach there.

They got Caliperies, the coach. They got a ton of money invested in it. They found a way, quote, unquote, to get Derek Rose there, Chicago Kid to come to Memphis for a year. And they're in the national championship. game and if they hit a couple free throws, they're the national champions. The University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee would have been the national champions in basketball, right? And that's what they were. Now Penny Hardaway is the coach and I think there is an element here. And of course I'm

ripping all these people on YouTube because I think they're there for the wrong reasons. I think these people that are commenting on Jason Whitlock videos are looking to reaffirm or confirm their weird bigoted beliefs. Okay. I do believe that. But I do think there is a thought process, and this is how I feel about it, there is a process here where you've created a world now where there's no accountability for these young people. They're getting paid right out of high school, and this is something that Penny said about being hungry. And this is why I think this is going to be to the detriment of the NFL down the line. And I think the NFL product's going to take a major hit. And I think you're starting to see it with certain quarterback play not being great. You know,

why teams are going through quarterbacks pretty quickly. You're not getting a time. of Joe Burroughs. You're getting like the Cam Ward's who might actually suck, you know? You're getting these people of this NIL generation, and they came up getting paid. Like I think Daryon Mints was a stud in college. Daryon Minson, by the time he gets to the NFL, is going to be a multi, multi-millionaire. Part of what drove these guys. And this, in my words, this is someone like Penny Hardaway who grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, okay? Living in Memphis, Tennessee, not exactly the most glamorous place in the world.

Penny Hardaway said that when they were coming up, your goal was to get to the next level because the next level is where you were going to get paid and take care of your family and get your house and get your mom taken care of and your family taken care of so you had to grind and you had to care and then once you got there you were appreciative of it. Imagine your Dary and Minsa

who's played at like, what, three different places now? Great young quarterback. And maybe Dary and Mensa will go on to be an all-timer. Maybe Sam Lever will go. go on to be an all-timer. Maybe. These are guys who, by the time they even get to the NFL combine, are multi-millionaires. Sam Levitt got paid $4.5 million to go to LSU.

He's not even really all that good. Darien Minsa, pretty fucking good, is getting paid. I think he's got the biggest NIL deal of anybody this year. Bryce Underwood, awful, is getting $4 million. What's happening is, and this is human nature. Basically, what's happening here is a lot of these guys are having to skip that step of like they're skipping Rocky 1 and 2 and they're getting right to Rocky 3.

Am I making sense here? They're skipping Rocky 1 and 2, the climb, the grind, the, you know, the, the, you know, the yelling at Mick. It stinks, Mick, it stinks. And live in a shitty house and all that kind of shit. A lone shark breaking people's legs and shit, right? they're skipping that step. And what's happening is they're jumping right to Rocky 3

where you're fucking on pinball machines and you're doing the Muppet show and you got a motorcycle and Adrian's magically hot now. And like you skip that. And what happens is, again, dude, I know I say this all the time. You can learn so much about life from all the Rocky movies. Not necessarily the Creed movies. I don't give a shit about those.

Those are their own world. But you can learn a lot about life. from the Rocky movies. And what you get here is you get that, you know, whenever Mick dies and he, you know, he loses to Clubberlang, spoiler alert, and he's kind of hanging out in the old gym and Apollo shows up. He goes, yeah, that's it. He goes, Apollo?

He goes, yeah, that's right. And he starts talking about how, you know, you've lost that eye of the tiger man, that edge, all that shit. I think what you're getting here is you're creating a generation of people. who have not had to climb. That's not to say they all grew up, you know, in mansions or anything. But you get, I mean, if you're a super talented young person, like you find a way to get taken care of,

whether it be you go from going to a shitty public school to getting to go to a private school, like that type of shit. If you're a super talented person, there will always be opportunities for you, okay? You know this. But what's happening is you're jumping that whole thing. Like part of what it used to be is the coaches made all the money in college and the players were getting paid under the table and getting cars and everything under the table,

but they weren't multi-millionaires. Like there were still some sort of illusion that we were dealing with, you know, amateurism, right? And I think that kept people hungry because you had to get to the NFL because the NFL's or the NBA is where you were going to get paid. Well, if you're making, I mean, how much money is Darian Minson made over the course of his college career? I mean, I imagine this is the biggest deal he's had, the biggest NIL deal he's had. But let's look this up. Let's get out of the Jason Whitlock clan comments section here. We'll call that cland parenthood.

And let's go, how much money has Darian Minsa made in college? Let's take it because he's probably a big number. Or Arch Manning for that matter. He's reportedly earned about $6.5 million in confirmed NIL deals during his college career with a prior $8 million two-year contract at Duke and now a $6.5 million valuation at Miami. Guys made a lot of cash. Set for his life. If he take care of that money, right, you should be set and be in pretty good shape, right? What do you do when you get to the next level? And like, mentally, what does that do to you? Right? Like, if you go from like, hey,

you know, things got tough here, I'm going to leave and go to another school. Or, oh, there's more money at the school. I'm going to keep hopping from place to place to place. And by the way, that's your right to do that as the current setup in college athletics. That's your right to do that. I'm not trying to keep these guys from making money. See, that's the thing. When people hear this take, a lot of people would hear someone make this take and go, oh, you just don't want the kids to get their share? No, make all the money you can.

But I'm telling you what it's creating. The unintended consequence of this is that you're creating people who I don't think are going to be as driven. You're creating people who have not had to be tested as much. You're creating people that have every ounce of power. Now, the college coaches have no power over these guys. Like, you've got a college coach. Like you're, what's his name?

That's the coach at Miami, right? I can't believe I'm drawing a blank on his name, but the guy that coaches at Miami, right? The dude that played at Miami and all that shit, right? Coached at Oregon. All right, so I'm thinking about that dude. So you got the coach down there. He's making a ton of cash.

His quarterback is making similar money. So help me understand what authority he has over Darian Mensa. None. So you've got a group, a generation of people, and we're going to really start seeing this down the line. Now we still get kind of the tail. end of the old era of college athletics. What you're going to get now is a group of people

who have really had no consequences. They can jump from place to place when things get tough. They have not had to deal with adversity. They're getting paid boatloads of cash. They have more power than the coaches. And I am a big believer in this. I do believe it is important to have someone above you who is an authority figure, whether it's for you to look up to or look to for guidance. When I have been my best at shit, I've had someone I respect the shit out of that has been above me. I had two PDs that I respected the shit out of and I admired them and I wanted them to be happy with what I was doing. We had a nice collaboration. I was talking to my old boss Gavin yesterday. Like I like he was a great leader and I respected him and I think you need that.

I still talk regularly with my high school principal slash basketball coach who have known for 30 years who I respect the shit out of. If I went to his house today and he said go run a suicide, I'd probably fucking do it because that's the level of responsibility. respect. And I think that's important because it makes you better adults. It makes you better humans to understand that. What we're going to do is, and again, I'm not saying take money from these guys. Pay them. I mean, look, it's a multi-billion dollar business. But what's going to happen is you're going to create a generation of people who have no concept of how to acknowledge authority, how to respect authority, and you're not going to have a hungry group of people. So what you're going to have is guys that are in college, they're playing three years in college because they have to. They can't go straight to the pros. And these guys are going to have to. going to go out and they're going to get paid ungodly sums of money and they're going to be set for life. They're going to be millionaires at 18, 19 years old like a Bryce Underwood. And what you're going to do is create a generation of people that are going to go to the next level. And they're going to be people that aren't going to be mentally prepared for that and

they're just not going to be driven. They're going to be Rocky, three Rockies. They're not going to be Rocky 1 and 2 Rockies. So to the point about Sabin. Well, I think Sabin and a lot of those coaches from that era were full of shit because, you know, they got to, you know, they benefited from the old system. That's why he got out of it. I don't blame him. Get the fuck out of Dodge. If Sabin were still around today, would Saban still be super successful at Alabama? And I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. But he got out because he didn't want to fuck with it. He didn't want to fuck with contracts and shit with college guys. That's a guy that's been in the pro level, been at the college level, doesn't want to do pro shit in the college level. I respect that. Cool. He's also full of shit.

because he knows that these guys should be getting paid, but he's not full of shit in understanding that that's going to be the death of college sports and that's going, I think, ultimately going to be to the detriment of professional sports because you're going to get more people who are so used to being taken care of. Like, that was kind of like coming up in the business I'm in, man.

Like, you know, there was a hierarchy. You knew that if you got to a bigger city, there was more money. Now that's not the case. I moved to bigger cities now, make less money than I do. did when I was a third kind of morning show in Houston. But like in the day, it was, all right, now I'm in Baton Rouge. I'm making $19,000 a year. If I move up to Houston or move up in my mind when I was a kid and I was in the radio biz, I was like, if I can move from Baton Rouge market number 80 or whatever it was

to Memphis, market number 48, 49, that'd be a logical move for me. A Baton Rouge to Memphis or Birmingham. Those were the two places I circled. Like those could be places I could end up. I could probably go make 30 grand, 35 grand, something like that. And then you move from there to Houston. Very a few people make the jump from, you know, Baton Rouge to Houston like I did, because I'm a G, what do you want? So I make that move. But you know that you move up in life, and that's why you keep hustling because there's something at the end of the rainbow. If you're 18 years old, and you get $4 million to come play quarterback at Michigan, by the time you're 22 and you've got 12, 13, 14, 14 mill in the bank, what drives you? And I think people are less competitive than they

used to be. I think that we're seeing a group of a generation of people not as driven by competition because people don't want to compete with each other anymore. It's not a competitive world. We grew up in competition. That was our vibe. That was our MO. It was, you know, compete, compete, compete. And, you know, you got to be the best. You got to be number one. I don't think people live that way. I think there's a different mindset of people. Now, they just don't give a shit about that anymore. Competing doesn't intrigue people anymore. It's just not that way. I'm not saying that as a. negative or positive. I'm just telling you that's the observation. So all that said,

I think what we're going to see is we're going to see, you know, we went from a past era of dudes who were ultimate competitors, Brady's, Mannings, Breeze, Rothlisberger, super competitors, the Mike Vicks, all the people, the elite players of that era that were just super competitive, live and die, like lived and die, like they got paid. They got paid. obviously, but winning mattered. And I think what you're going to see is college coaches have no authority anymore. You piss off a player, you know what he's going to do? I'm going to pack up his bag and go somewhere else and get paid $8 million.

So college coaches have no authority. And they're going to get to the next level, and they're not going to be prepared for that next level. And ultimately, what's going to happen is the next level is going to get watered down. And the NFL knows that. And the same reason why the NBA didn't want 18-year-old dudes coming into the league. That's why they implemented the one-year deal, which whatever. but like that's why they did that because you got like you're not going to have driven people man and i don't think it's just going to be in sports i think it's going to be everything because we live in

this world where like you should be making $25 an hour to fucking make lattes you know we're creating a group of people that don't know that kind of adversity and it's only going to get worse that's why i already tell you that when i watch college football i'm kind of me on it now like I root for my team and I want them to win i want lSU to win i want them to get good players but I don't feel any commitment or affection for most of the guys on the team. I'll all be playing somewhere else next year to be new people in here. So, anyway, more to come.