Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, June 1st. Today on Forbes, here's why Tray Young,

Steph Curry, and other pros are going back to school. In April, as the NBA regular season was

barreling towards its conclusion, Atlanta Hawks Guard, Terrence Mann, had more on his mind than his team's push for a playoff spot.

The basketball program at his alma mater, Florida State University, had won only 17 games and failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament.

And Mann wanted to help. So he chipped in with recruiting, connecting the team with guard Martin Somerville,

a transfer prospect from the University of Massachusetts, whom he knew from off-season workouts,

and eventually steering Somerville to Tallahassee. Luke Locke, who was hired as Florida

State's coach in March, says, quote, Martin Somerville is going to play a lot for us next year.

Without Terrence, we had no shot at getting him, and we beat out some really big schools that

were willing to pay way more in NIL to get him.

The NIL that Lox is referring to stands for name, image, and likeness.

In the four years since the NCAA begrudgingly

began to allow its athletes to profit off their NIL, big-time college sports have quickly

become a bidding war for top players. In addition to the branded social media posts and local

television commercials that rulesmakers might have envisioned when they

opened the doors to commercial deals for athletes on campus, boosters have pooled their

resources and formed collectives to funnel money to recruits, nominally for marketing services,

but in practice, often a thinly veiled form of pay for play. Three antitrust lawsuits, House v. NC.A, Hubbard v. NC.A, and Carter v. NC.A,

are currently awaiting court approval for a settlement that would inject even more money into the

system, enabling universities to directly pay athletes a share of their media, ticket, and sponsorship

revenue, and effectively

ending college sports's commitment to amateurism.

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