A bit more on "improper payments"

When I think about massive amounts of NIL money being spent on athletes--I've heard estimates in the millions annually for some of the top earners, and even floors of $150,000 annually for the bench-warmers, my mind goes instantly to what I remember from college about fellow, um, "students" who we graciously and kindly referred to as "trust fund babies".  You know the kind I'm talking about--the kid was driving a late model BMW while we mere mortals were making do with bicycles or rusted out LeCars.  The kid who you wouldn't see in the dorm cafeteria because he (she) had the money to eat out every meal.

And with that kind of money, all too often, those kids didn't do the studying they needed to do to pass their classes, which could lead to "graduating to a lesser college" (i.e. flunking out), or if their parents particularly cared, getting a lot of tutors and some "come to Jesus moments" about how they could go from upper class to middle class or worse in a hurry if they didn't learn to work.

Often, we'd see them running out of money, because, as Dave Ramsey will tell you, no amount of money will cover up a spending problem.  And that is, in my view, what you're going to see with a lot of athletes bringing home big money when they're fresh out of high school with 680 points on their SATs.  Never having learned math well, let alone how to balance a checkbook, they're likely to run through that NIL money in a hurry, ending up with a lot of month to go before their next paycheck.

And now that same player comes in to the coach looking pretty hungry because, quite frankly, they got back to the dorm too late to get dinner, and asks the coach for something to tide himself over.  I don't know if this is what happened at Michigan State, but to me, it seems somewhat likely.  

What to do?  Well, the old system had a training table for the athletes, but the downside of it was that too many of them were getting to the end of four (five) years without a degree, injured, and with no prospects of going to the pro leagues at any level.  So you've got to compensate these athletes somehow, and so I wonder if NIL money ought to be--beyond being capped at a certain level--placed by default into investment accounts for the most part, instead of simply being given to the athletes.  No matter what, some serious attention needs to be paid to financial training for marginal students who are going to be getting huge sums of money.