College football players are earning millions — wealth managers are helping them keep it

Name, image and likeness (NIL) rights were created to finally allow college athletes to profit from their talent. That’s led to formerly unpaid amateur players becoming instant millionaires, using their newfound wealth to save and invest, help out family, or even share the money with their teammates.

But handing that much money to teenagers is also risky. Grown professional athletes have blown through millions of dollars in the past, and while the stories of “going broke” are more infrequent today, there’s still a risk.

In steps NIL financial advisors, whose sole focus is making money earned from college stretch further than the one to five years an athlete is in school. They advise clients on the benefits of saving, investing, budgeting, taxes, and saying “no.”

In the past 10 years, there has been a massive shift in player compensation. Former and current players across different sports have successfully challenged and sued for greater equity in college sports revenue, including increases in stipends (2015), the right to profit from their NIL (2021), and the right to receive direct compensation from their university (2025).

According to Opendorse, a company that facilitates NIL endorsements for athletes, it’s estimated that college football players alone earned $1 billion from NIL payments in 2024. The company estimates that total will nearly double ($1.9 billion) by the end of 2025 after the introduction of revenue sharing on July 1.

Didier Occident is a wealth management advisor at Milwaukee-based financial services firm Northwestern Mutual. He also runs a financial literacy program, Secure the Bag. It is for college and professional athletes.

Secure the Bag is a 60-minute presentation in which Occident discusses budgeting, personal credit, taxes, and other money matters. It puts the audience through an interactive budgeting game that requires them to make financial decisions based on real-world examples from the four years of NIL’s existence.

For example, there’s an athlete Occident represented who made an expensive, beyond-his-means purchase that got him down to almost no money — $75 to be exact. To get the player’s money back, he posted the item on Instagram for sale.

“There’s always that ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ feeling, but now these guys gotta keep up with IG,” he said.

Occident began working with college athletes around 2018 when conferences began increasing some player stipends by about $2,000. He stressed to athletes at the time to view the stipend as a salary so that they know how to manage any kind of money.

“If you can’t manage $1,000,” Occident would tell the players, “you can’t manage $1 million.”

He’s presented at TCU, Florida State, Michigan, Oregon, Alabama, Tennessee, Oregon State and a few other football programs. He’s also presented with eight NFL teams, including the Los Angeles Chargers and San Francisco 49ers. 

When Occident first talks with teams or meets with prospective clients, he asks them, “What do you want to achieve with your money?” The more specific the goal — to travel the world or one day open a food truck — the more faith Occident has in his ability to show them the steps to reaching it.

“Because they have something that is in their mind that is going to keep them walking that straight line,” Occident said.

There’s a widely held assumption that rich people will eventually lose all their money. Whenever the lottery gets to a certain amount, it’s been said that 70% of lottery winners eventually declare bankruptcy, even though that likely isn’t true. Much of the interest in the various gambling scandals plaguing the sports world stems from interest in rich athletes risking millions on sports betting.

But these are adults we’re talking about. What happens when a bunch of teenagers are handed millions of dollars? It’s easy to assume they’ll blow their riches just as quickly.

Where college athletes spend their money isn’t all that shocking.

“Unfortunately, stereoptical things: the cars, clothes, the jewelry,” said Pat Brown, a wealth manager at Lawrence, Kansas-based financial services firm Creative Planning and the founder of “Financial Literacy for Student Athletes,” which specializes in money management programming for college athletes.

Brown was an all-conference linebacker at Kansas from 1994 to 1999, back when players received $600 monthly stipends compared to the estimated $5 million Texas quarterback Arch Manning is bringing in today.

“That was big money right there. Shoot,” Brown recalled.

During his final season, Brown took a class that introduced college athletes to basic financial literacy tools, such as investing and life insurance. Though Brown grew up middle class in the Ohio suburbs, he didn’t know anything about money management.

“Being Black, we just don’t talk about that stuff,” said Brown, author of the book, Financial Literacy for the Culture: Teaching What Wasn’t Taught-Credit, Budgeting, Investing, and Legacy for the Culture.

It is why Brown sees it as his purpose to teach today’s athletes how to earn, maintain and increase their wealth. He launched “Financial Literacy for Student Athletes” around 2021 and has presented at Kansas, West Virginia and Ohio.

Brown goes over opening bank accounts, the importance of credit scores/reports, and the various types of investment devices (traditional, Roth IRA, stocks, etc.). Through Creative Planning, which counts more than 500 college and professional athletes as individual clients, Brown helps his clients set up taxable and retirement accounts, establish limited liability companies, and review NIL contracts.

“I wasn’t exposed to this stuff until my senior year [at Kansas],” Brown said.

While working toward wealth for all college football players is the goal, it’s especially important for Black players, who make up nearly 45% of the sport.

Black people live within a system that legally held them back until about 60 years ago, creating a wealth gap that persists to this day: Median white net worth in America is almost six times that of Black net worth.

According to popular media such as ESPN’s “Broke” documentary, Black athletes are almost expected to blow all their money: Former NFL receiver Odell Beckham Jr. recently asked, “Can you make that last?” in reference to signing a $100 million contract.

But, young rich Black athletes aren’t any more irresponsible with their money than anyone else: Americans owe $1.23 trillion in credit card debt.

There is no group, Occident said, that has more opportunity to narrow that wealth gap than Black athletes.

“It is my mission to help them do what they can to erase the systemic part of what we’ve dealt with for 400-plus years,” he said.

Occident and Brown believe athletes are uniquely suited to handle money. The discipline to stick to a financial plan is no different than the discipline needed to play at a high level in college. Starring at the NCAA Division I level is almost impossible without being accountable and consistent.

“You don’t get that without being consistent and doing what you need to do,” Occident said.

Baltimore Ravens defensive back Malaki Starks neither had much money growing up nor did he know how to save it.

“It was like get money, spend money,” he said.

But after Occident’s presentation to the Georgia football team while Starks was on the roster, it eased Starks’ mind about managing his $160,000 in NIL deals.

Starks said he now has at least four investment accounts he manages. After getting his first NIL check his sophomore year at Georgia, Starks said he saved some, gave some to his parents, and the rest …

“I kept enough to get gas for the next month and go out to eat, like, twice,” he said.

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