As the NFL balloons into a $25+ billion entertainment behemoth, the world’s richest sports league is looking to profit more directly from any business that benefits from the popularity of American football.

It’s the driving force behind the NFL’s venture arm, equity-heavy commercial deals like its partnership with Genius Sports and new arrangements with ESPN and CBS that include ownership stakes in both networks. With that in mind, it stands to reason that the NFL might want to play a direct role in reshaping the other enterprise that benefits most from the sport: college football.

We’re in the middle of a multi-year overhaul of the business of college sports, with athletes finally being paid by their schools, conferences facing annual realignment and outside investors seeking entry into an industry they believe has been under-monetized. Any stable resolution is likely years away, and as untouchable as the pro game may seem, there are versions of college football’s future that look particularly good for the NFL, and versions that look more threatening.

It’s a rare combination of power vacuum and economic opportunity that NFL owners might ordinarily jump into. Instead, the league has so far stayed largely on the sidelines. From what I’ve gathered from conversations with people around the NFL and college football’s biggest conferences, there are no major active discussions right now. An NFL spokesman told Sportico there was “no talk at all of investments or equity.”

The obvious potential hurdle here is antitrust law. My colleague Michael McCann will wade into that topic in more detail later this week, but last year the NFL took a tenuous lead in a decade-long antitrust battle over its Sunday Ticket product—an earlier ruling said the league could be on the hook for as much as $14.1 billion—and it likely isn’t too keen to tempt that again.

That said, college football plays an invaluable development role for the NFL, and the two now feel like they’re on a collision course of sorts. NCAA football is the second most-watched sport in the America, ahead of the NBA, but financially, it remains far removed. Total NBA revenue last year was roughly $13 billion, while the 34 schools in the Big Ten and SEC reported about $6.4 billion in combined athletics revenue in that same span, a number that is itself inflated by subsidies from the academic side of the school and other non-standard accounting.

The rapid professionalization of college football will likely narrow that gap. And as that happens, there will be some consequences for the NFL. Here are some reasons why the NFL has a vested interest in how this college sports overhaul unfolds:

Labor

For decades the NFL Draft offered college football’s best players an opportunity to make a notable bump up in salary. Sure, some players were paid under the table, some quite well, but for the most part, the transition to the pros was also a transition to real wages. The changes in college football are already upsetting that dynamic. Under the NFL’s rookie wage scale, players taken at the end of the second round will make about $1.3 million this season. That could quickly become a pay cut for some of the sport’s most talented prospects.

Bears quarterback Caleb Williams, the top pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, offered an early example of what this might eventually look like. Williams played at USC before the revenue-sharing rules were in place, but he was able to make millions—$10 million, according to The Athletic—in his final two college seasons. Heading into the draft, Williams and his family reportedly discussed the possibility of him getting equity in the team that drafted him (though that was never a real possibility). More concerning for the NFL, the group seriously weighed options to circumvent the entire draft process, according to a book published this year by Seth Wickersham. They consulted with lawyers about the NFL’s labor accord and considered an unprecedented move to the United Football League.

“The rookie cap is just unconstitutional,” Williams’ father told Wickersham, adding that the CBA is the “worst piece of s— I’ve ever read. It’s the worst in sports history.”

Since Williams left USC, stars are now able to continue signing NIL deals while also sharing in the revenue earned by their schools. A $21 million cap on that revenue spending has, by most accounts, already been freely circumvented by the sport’s biggest programs. Should the economy for top college football talent continue to grow unchecked, it could permanently change the way the NFL’s next generation of stars view the league.

Personnel

As athletic departments adapt to the new realities of college football—salary caps, free agency, roster construction—they’ve begun hiring “general managers” to handle the uncertainty. And it’s not just a title cribbed from the pros; they’ve also looked toward the NFL to fill the roles.

Florida’s new GM spent 17 seasons with the Atlanta Falcons as director of football administration and director of football operations. Nebraska, Northwestern, UNC, Notre Dame and Cal are among the top-tier schools that have raided the NFL for similar roles. Even Delaware, which until this year was an FCS school, hired a pro scout to fill its new position.

In short, it’s likely about to get harder—or at least more expensive—for NFL teams to retain talent in scouting, football ops and analytics.

Media

The NFL season kicks off later this week on what is the only Thursday until December without a college football game. That’s not a coincidence. Like every other major sport that plays in the fall, college football is aware of the NFL calendar and cognizant not to schedule against its most important games. For a while, that was federally protected—the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act has for decades delineated that Friday was for high school football, Saturday was for college and Sunday was for the NFL. Those lines, however, have begun to blur as the NFL and others have sought new midweek game windows.

Nowhere is that more evident than in December and January, when the expanded College Football Playoff overlaps with the business end of the NFL season. Last year, the two went head-to-head on the penultimate Saturday of the year. Predictably, it was a blowout. At noon ET across the WBD networks, No. 11 SMU and No. 6 Penn State averaged 6.6 million viewers, while the Texans vs. Chiefs drew 15.5 million on Peacock/NBC. In the afternoon, No. 12 Clemson and No. 5 Texas managed 8.9 million across the WBD family, while Fox’s broadcast of the Ravens vs. Steelers drew 15.4 million.

Interestingly, there was one more college football game that night, with no pro competition, and it drew an NFL-like number. No. 1 Ohio State’s demolition of No. 9 Tennessee averaged 14.7 million across the Disney networks.

The NFL/NCAA media overlaps will only grow moving forward. For the past two years the NFL has begun playing a Black Friday game that competes with college football’s “rivalry week,” perhaps the biggest regular season week of the year. The NFL is also playing a game this Friday, in Brazil, that will occur alongside multiple Big Ten games. The NFL’s standing Thursday games will have NCAA competition, and the College Football Playoff will continue to conflict, increasingly so if current expansion talks come to fruition. 

Fans

No sport has more fans in America than the NFL. Fifty-eight percent of internet-using adults in the U.S. root for an NFL team, according to global sports marketing firm Two Circles. That’s about 127.1 million fans.

College football, by contrast, has about 35.7% of the internet-using adult population, or about 77.8 million fans. The overlap there is significant, with 69.5 million saying they are fans of both the college and professional games. That means there are more than 8 million U.S. adults that root for a college football team that don’t root for a pro team. My guess is that many of those fans are in the American south, in the middle of SEC and Big 12 country, where the density of NFL teams is comparatively light. 

The NFL is already looking overseas for its next batch of untapped fans, but colleges currently hold the data and affinity of millions of Americans who love football, just not the NFL. That’s a much easier, and much cheaper, demographic to convert than soccer fans in Brazil or Germany. 

Other Business Ties

The NFL has had myriad opportunities to partner with other pro football leagues, and it has passed, leaving instead a graveyard of defunct acronyms like the AAF, XFL and USFL. The current active spring league, the UFL, inked a technology and innovation partnership with the league back in 2022 but hasn’t codified any deeper relationship. That’s despite UFL ownership including RedBird Capital, a partner with the NFL on EverPass Media and the new Paramount structure.

There are, of course, more direct business ties between the NFL and college sports. Some NFL owners are big college boosters, and a few league bigwigs—including Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, Commanders investor David Blitzer, and Brian Rolapp, the league’s former No. 2 executive—were at times part of College Sports Tomorrow, a group proposing a new “Super League” model.

Perhaps most directly, the 49ers are a founding partner in Elevate, which works with myriad college programs and recently launched a $500 million private equity fund to provide capital to athletic departments.

Of course, that’s very different from any league-wide involvement. And while none of the above needs to be an immediate worry of the NFL’s, college football a competitor/collaborator, in an unstable state, with direct impact on the league’s future. The NFL won’t stay on the sideline for long.

With assistance from Anthony Crupi.