Colorado's Deion Sanders Calls for NIL Cap in College Football, Cites NFL Rules

Colorado head coach Deion Sanders called for an NIL cap in college football, akin to the NFL's salary cap, in an interview with Jarrett Bell of USA Today that covered numerous topics.

“There should be some kind of cap,” Sanders said. “Our game should emulate the NFL game in every aspect. Rules. Regulations. Whatever the NFL rules, the college rules should be the same. There should be a cap and every team gets this, and you should be able to spend that.”

Bell added more insight from Sanders: "Such a salary cap, Sanders envisions, would adjust with different conferences and levels of competition, based on revenues."

There's certainly a wide gap between teams regarding NIL money in Division I FBS and even within the Power Four conferences. A study from NIL-NCAA.com shows the NIL money from the 56 public schools in power conferences. Texas is at the top in NIL collective funding with $22.2 million, while Houston is last at $2.1 million.

Sanders notably made the news recently for his efforts to try to organize a spring football scrimmage with another school (Syracuse took him up on the offer). However, the NCAA shot the idea down (for this year, anyway), citing a "competitive advantage."

Sanders doesn't buy that notion, though, and he pointed to the money as the real reason for teams' edges.

“The competitive advantage is the school that has hundreds of millions of dollars, and not us,” he told Bell. “You look at who’s always in the playoffs, you can look at their budget and look at this budget. That’s the advantage, not who has the autonomy to do a spring game.”

Ultimately, when Sanders talks, people listen, and what he says here perhaps rings true. There was already a wide gap between institutions in the pre-NIL era given how much richer schools could pour into their coaching staffs, facilities, recruiting efforts, etc.

But now that chasm is even deeper in the NIL era, and it perhaps signals a time where the true underdog story will find it near-impossible to come to light. Obviously, this is a situation to monitor moving forward, but Sanders truly feels something needs to be done.

“There’s a lot going on in college football, and the NCAA has just washed their hands and they walk away,” Sanders said to Bell. “As long as they collect those checks, they walk away instead of saying, 'OK, we’ve got to do something about this.' Because if you don’t, it’s going to keep spiraling.”