The Trump administration’s rollback of Biden-era NIL guidance weakens Title IX protections, deepening financial disparities for female college athletes.
Before July 1, 2021, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules could cause a student-athlete to lose an athletic scholarship for accepting a free Big Mac at McDonald’s. Since that date, collegiate athletes in NCAA Divisions I, II and III could earn money from their name, image and likeness (NIL): They could be in commercials, make personal appearances, and accept monetary compensation.
“What NIL did is it restored to college athletes a right that had historically been stripped from them under the NCAA bylaws,” said Alicia Jessop, an attorney and professor at Pepperdine University in the sports administration program. “The rules, as they stood pre-2021, prohibited this group of people, who are highly visible, highly marketable and oftentimes have a short timeframe to exploit that visibility and marketability, from cashing in on the opportunity.”
When most people think of student-athletes and NIL, their minds go to the jingle, “Like a good neighbor, JuJu Watkins is there!” State Farm commercials featuring the University of Southern California guard have been 20 percent more impactful than the insurance company’s average commercials, according to the Gist. Watkins just signed an exclusive deal with Fanatics, a prominent sports merch company. So not only is she playing great basketball—Big Ten Player of the Year—but she’s making a serious buck. (Watkins sustained a season-ending knee injury this week, but she will no doubt continue to receive honors like All American from various sources that confer such honors.)
Watkins and Paige Bueckers, a fifth-year senior guard at the University of Connecticut, along with a select few other female student-athletes, can hold their own against high-profile male student-athletes in one-on-one NIL action. But the rest of the women in college sports find themselves playing on a very uneven playing field, green-lit for colleges and universities by President Donald Trump’s new administration.
While individual outside deals make headlines, the vast majority of NIL opportunities come through schools. Male student-athletes, specifically football and men’s basketball, can earn big paydays simply by being on a team and receiving the opportunities that come straight to their college or university. Notably, collectives bring male alumni together to form a company with the goal of providing NIL opportunities to student-athletes of that institution.
“There is more deal flow going towards men,” Jessop explained. “The collectives are directing the deal flow.”
Toward the end of President Joe Biden’s term, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued guidance that advised colleges and universities to ensure equal NIL opportunities and resources for male and female student-athletes.
On Feb. 12, 2025, the OCR rescinded the Biden administration’s guidance, noting that it was “overly burdensome, profoundly unfair, and … well beyond what agency guidance is intended to achieve.” This rescission in effect implies that Title IX, an educational statute that prohibits discrimination based on gender at any institution receiving federal funds, which most colleges and universities do, is inapplicable to NIL.
“From a legal perspective, the rescission of that memo is not particularly monumental,” said Alexis Trumble, an associate attorney at Parker Poe in Atlanta, focused on advising colleges and universities on Title IX issues, gender equity, and college athletics. “It just reiterated a legal standard that colleges and university administrators have been operating under for years, which is that sports-related money has to be allocated equitably, and equitable has different definitions and applications depending on what bucket of funds we’re talking about.” Ultimately, it’s a question of Title IX’s application in the NIL era.
There is more deal flow going towards men.
Alicia Jessop, Pepperdine University
Dr. Lindsey Darvin, assistant professor of sport management in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics at Syracuse University, has researched women’s experiences with NIL practices and policies at multiple institutions. Her questions covered how much guidance the student-athletes had received, how many resources related to NIL were available to them, and how intentional they felt their athletic departments were in presenting opportunities.
“My overall consensus on a lot of the equity-related issues right now,” Darvin said, “is that it’s not equitable across women’s and men’s sports.”
At the Division I level, most schools give all student-athletes basic talks about how to access NIL, their obligations to be NCAA compliant, and their responsibilities to pay taxes on money earned. Some introduce student-athletes to a company like Opendorse, an athlete marketplace and NIL technology company. A student-athlete can create an account and profile, learn about the many aspects of NIL and make themselves visible, even beginning to pitch themselves directly to companies.
Interestingly, female student-athletes are excelling in advertising themselves, an essential skill for NIL. Many are adept at content creation and build up a following for themselves on social media. Jessop said social media has played a big role in the growing popularity of women’s sports, and female student-athletes have generated significant communities and followings.
However, self-promotion can only go so far without complete institutional support.
“A lot of this is the work that they’ve developed and cultivated themselves,” said Darvin. “They’re not receiving that support from the athletics department or from a collective. A lot of these women who aren’t as active on social media will tell me they wish those resources existed or they wish there was someone at the institution or in the department that could assist them with those things or teach them how to build their brand.”
Many athletic departments and collectives prioritize catering towards certain programs, and these are typically the men’s programs, said Darvin. Furthermore, because most deals are private, it’s hard to know dollar amounts and track exactly how inequitable NIL is at any given college or university regardless of OCR policy.
Institutions can say companies set the price and pick the athletes, that it’s all fair game. But the reality is that many institutions have positioned and promoted male student-athletes much more, and so companies naturally lean into those male-dominated programs, assuming they will get a higher return on investment. Having ostensibly fair policies that are easily evaded does not create the cultural changes necessary to drive actual equity.
Luckily, even if revenue doesn’t flow equally to male and female student-athletes, Trumble insisted that colleges and universities have a continued obligation under Title IX to provide publicity resources equitably. This includes social media, pre-and post-game press releases, opportunities to speak to the media, and information about brand building, all of which gives female athletes some chance of boosting their NIL status.
But without legal action to change the currently futile policies, NIL inequalities will continue to persist and burden female athletes with significant disadvantages.
“It will require the bringing of lawsuits, the litigation of lawsuits, and the resolution of lawsuits to bring us the level and degree of clarity that anybody is asking for,” Trumble said. “Ultimately, the judiciary is going to be the group that is going to give us any degree of certainty.”
