NIL has taken the world of collegiate athletics by storm and has changed the landscape of how they operate.
Three-time Super Bowl champion and College Football Hall of Famer Randy Cross spoke about NIL (name, image and likeness compensation for college athletes) and its impact during a recent appearance on OutKick’s “Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich.”
“The bad thing about (NIL), Dan, is there is no fair way to do this,” Cross said. “Fair has never been a factor or rarely a factor in sports, and there is no fair to say, ‘Well, we are going to pay these guys over here, but you know the guys and gals over here that play these sports aren’t going to get anywhere near that same kind of money.’
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Randy Cross of the 49ers is shown during the NFC Championship Game against the Chicago Bears at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on Jan. 6, 1985. (David Madison/Getty Images)
“Everybody wants to say [it’s] got to be fair. Eh, nah, life’s not fair.”
The 70-year-old former player wonders where the money is going to come from that’s going to fund the universities’ ever-growing NIL demands from athletes.
“I mean, if you look just at [college] basketball and [college] football, what are the limitations, and where is all this money going to come from? Not enough people talk about that,” he said.
“It’s like it’s coming out of the air, all these quotes you’ve heard lately about, ‘You know, what is this whole cloud thing?’ Well, is the money coming out of the cloud? No, it’s going to be soon coming out of companies like BlackRock and countries like Saudi Arabia, but it’s not coming out of the cloud.”
San Francisco 49ers offensive lineman Randy Cross, left, walks on the practice field with quarterback Joe Montana. (Getty Images/File)
The question is not solely about where the money is coming from, it is also turning into the main question for when high school athletes visit college programs.
“My son recruits college basketball. He’s at Illinois State. He said, ‘You know, Dad, we talk about the education and the path to play all of that, but all anybody really wants to know is the NIL money,’” Dakich said.
“I mean, really, he called me the other day, saying, ‘I just wasted 45 minutes of my life bragging about our school and our program and our history, and all the [dads] wanted to know was NIL money.’”
Cross said 16-year-olds are going to be cashing in big NIL deals with no laws in place.
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Randy Cross of the San Francisco 49ers is shown during the game against the Steelers at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh on Sept. 13, 1987. (George Gojkovich/Getty Images)
“That’s where we are. We’re at that point where in baseball, basketball and football specifically, you’re going to see these young kids, these 16-year-olds or so, that still have two years of high school left cashing in, and they can’t stop them,” he said. “You can’t have a law that says, ‘Well, at this age, you cannot make money off of your athletic ability.’ Yeah, why? Try to enforce that sucker. So that’s coming, and that’s coming fast.”
Cross played college football at UCLA and was named a First-Team All-Conference selection as a center in 1975. He was selected in the second round by the San Francisco 49ers in the 1976 NFL Draft and played both center and right guard during their Super Bowl XVI, XIX and XXIII championships.
After his playing career, Cross worked for CBS Sports and NBC Sports as a football analyst.
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