College athletes are not required to reveal what they earn from NIL deals, so the actual amounts of money they are making are difficult to verify. This explains why the figures are so low in this article. The athletes can make deals with companies and endorse their products, and they can also accept unlimited amounts from boosters. Players do have to do something in return for the cash they receive from boosters, but a selfie with the player or an autograph covers that stipulation.
The money that boosters used to give to universities was dispersed to support all of the school's athletic programs. Most boosters only have a limited amount of money they can donate and if top basketball and football stars are being paid a million dollars or more, people should expect that many athletic departments will have less money to support these teams that play minor sports.
NIL is also going to have a major impact on the college football and basketball world. UConn's athletic department has been losing millions of dollars in recent years and if a lot of the money from boosters is diverted to their hoops stars, the university is unlikely going to be able to continue financing a football team at the FBS level. Four of North Carolina's starters who played in last year's national basketball championship game returned this year and they're all making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Armando Bacot drives around campus in a $80,000 Audi SUV and according to his mother he has deals worth well over $500,000. There are a lot of schools in the conference that are not going to be able to remain competitive in the future with the league's biggest programs.
The biggest disparity in college sports is the conference television contracts. The Big Ten's new contract dishes out more than $7 billion over the next seven years, while the ACC has a contract that runs through 2036, and only pays the conference $240 million annually. A lot of universities are going to be left in the dust by the changes that are coming to college sports