NIL turns one – After a year of radical change, what happens next?

Former Rutgers guard Geo Baker spent the final summer of his college basketball career last year preparing for post-student life. He launched a clothing line, set up basketball camps and Cameo accounts and started learning to invest.

Baker, a third-team All-Big Ten guard, says he earned roughly $50,000 in the first year that college athletes were allowed to make money from the rights to their names, images and likenesses. He said he learned to read contracts, file taxes and made a point to sit in on meetings or speak with executives at any company he endorsed.

“You get to learn some things and see how businesses operate, and you can apply that yourself if you go down that road,” Baker said.

Anecdotes about the first year of radical change in college sports are as abundant as they are disparate and dangerous. The opportunities for entrepreneurial-minded young adults to earn money and learn how to manage it are real. The droves of athletes sending tweets for free products or minimal payment are real. The headline-grabbing, seven-figure deals that have purportedly incentivized transfers or commitments are (even if at times exaggerated) real as well. It’s all happening all at once.

Data detailing how athletes, schools and sponsors are using the new market is hard, if not impossible, to find. No individual or anecdote has proved to be emblematic of the past 12 months or provided a singular answer to where the world of college sports is headed.

More questions than answers remain one year after impending state legislation forced the NCAA to dramatically change its approach to amateurism. What is clear, though, is that the college sports industry isn’t going to move backward. And if there is any universal truth to what the NIL era has wrought, it is that the athletes themselves have realized their power to shape where it goes from here.

“NIL was the first step…