Help me out here. Are you saying that with Rookie caps in the NFL, NIL can beat a NFL starting salary/contract in terms of money or guarantees? Like high first-round-draft-pick numbers?Honest question. I have no clue about the numbers.
Yes, they can in certain situations. There are already several college players who are likely to make more in college than they ever make in the NFL.
Now, this is going back a bit in time but for instance when I mentioned Coker's NFL contract or Stewart's NFL contract, both those guys were making less than a million a year in the NFL and it wasn't guaranteed!
Now specifically first round guaranteed money, at least at the top of the first round, probably not wise to try to do that. Bryce had around 10 million a year guaranteed. What you can do with NIL though is move people who are on the fence. Even going back to pre-NIL there were a lot of QBs who agonized over leaving for the draft or not, it is certainly within NIL budgets and what's going on now to offer a multi-million dollar deal to keep a QB around.
The best bang for buck could be a Tebow like player, his NFL deal was a little over 2 million a year, certainly worth is in today's NIL market. I'm kind of covering two different scenarios though. One is the extended eligibility, for instance Diego Pavia could have a 7th year of eligibility, which he says he won't use but the eligibility rule will continue to be challenged. Once you do that, you have the potential to keep a core together. Then it's just a matter of assembling the right pieces.
Then there's the strike while the iron is hot type of situation like Ohio State currently has (their head coach currently has the highest winning percentage of all time). Which is you invest in a good roster, then if you can continue to invest you can at least for a few years keep the key pieces together. It will be expensive, but a few schools can afford it, up to a point at least. If you have a championship caliber team, it makes it easier to write the checks I'm sure.
There's the third variation though, which is the value proposition and that's being used as well but could be used more effectively if someone gives it the moneyball treatment. We know the downside of NIL and the portal, you can lose key backups. The upside though is you no longer should have holes anywhere on your roster. You lose a QB? You can get a QB (that's what Ohio State did, they already had the next one lined up via NIL). You lose a kicker? You can get a kicker.
So a school can now spend up to 20 million themselves on NIL (plus what ever boosters spend) and the roster of scholarship player can now go up to 100. That's quite a bit. The key here by the way is only so many schools can afford to keep up, Alabama football alone makes more than all but about 25 of the athletic departments, their department takes in over double what UCLA or Maryland does.
If you use the money wisely, you won't ever have bad special teams play again. You can affordably find elite kickers, punters, snappers, and returners anytime you need one. You won't have players leaving early for the middle rounds, you can always afford to pay them more than their rookie contracts will be. Only about a dozen programs in my opinion can afford to keep up at all with NIL, it is an expensive proposition but of those programs, it's just a matter of spending wisely. Which is no different than the NFL, or any other league, where dynasties do continue to exist. In fact, I think since there's no cap and there's so much stratification, it's might be easier now to build a dynasty in college football than the NFL and in fact might be easier than before if you have the means.