If there are two things that bring us together as a team at South Shore Analytics, it’s sports and data. With the college football season in the books and Indiana completing one of the most improbable runs in the sport's history, we decided to dig into something we've chatted about internally for years: Has NIL actually leveled the playing field?
For this analysis, we pulled data from multiple sources including ESPN's SP+ ratings, 247Sports Team Talent Composite, CBS Sports parity research, and Yahoo Sports' NFL Draft early entrant data. Sources are linked throughout.
A Changing Landscape
For most of college football's history, the sport was "purely" amateur. And by "purely," I mean until you decided to ask Reggie Bush where the $13,000 for his Chevy Impala came from.
But the old system worked a certain way - coaches met with families, they preached about building up young men, and they emphasized the importance of a college degree. The best recruiters won, and the best recruiters tended to be at the same dozen schools, decade after decade.
That all changed on July 1, 2021, when payments for Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) became official practice. Everyone knew NIL would change things … but nobody really knew how.
Some predicted disaster. Nick Saban warned in 2022 that NIL would create a "caste system where the rich will get richer and the poor get poorer."
Yahoo Sports described the immediate aftermath as a "near-endless barrage of 'sky is falling' proclamations" from coaches and administrators convinced that a few uber-wealthy programs would simply buy all the best players.
Others thought it might actually spread talent around. Give players economic agency, the theory went, and maybe they'd stop piling onto the same five rosters.
Our team at South Shore tended to fall into the latter camp, but the truth is we were far from certain ourselves.
So what actually happened?
The Big Ten has now won three straight national championships -the conference's first three-peat since 1940-42. Meanwhile, the SEC's current title drought is its longest since the late 1990s.
Within the SEC itself, the old power structure is fracturing. Georgia has looked vulnerable, Alabama is adjusting to life after Saban, and LSU is still looking for the right coach. Meanwhile, Texas and Texas A&M are spending at levels that would make an oil baron blush - and have seen their results on the field promptly turn for the better.
The 2025 season set the tone for chaos early: four top-10 teams lost on opening weekend for the first time in AP poll history, and it didn't slow down from there. Perhaps our favorite example - Penn State entered the season ranked #2 and finished 6-6 after losing to an 0-4 UCLA team, the first top-10 team to lose to a winless opponent since BYU fell to UTEP in 1985.
These anecdotes are interesting, but they're still surface level trends. By now you're probably asking - what does the data actually tell us?
Well, let's dive in!
Part 1: Parity Within the Top 25
ESPN's Bill Connelly maintains something called SP+ - a predictive efficiency metric that measures how good teams actually are, independent of record. It's the gold standard for this kind of analysis.
CBS Sports published a deep dive in October 2025 comparing SP+ ratings across eras. Here's what they found:
That's roughly half a touchdown of compression between #1 and #25. Between #2 and #25? Nearly a full touchdown.
Said differently: the difference between being a national title contender and a middle-of-the-pack Power 4 team has shrunk by an entire score. As Connelly himself put it: "It basically looks like you took some of the power at the top and redistributed it elsewhere."
Talent Is Spreading Too
247Sports tracks something called the Team Talent Composite - essentially a roster-level rating based on recruiting rankings. Here's how that's trended:
More programs have elite-level talent, and more programs are signing five-star recruits. In other words, the talent base is simply more distributed than it was eight years ago.
Part 2: The SEC's Margin Collapse
If you only take one thing away from this newsletter, let it be this chart.
The average SEC game was decided by nearly 21 points in 2017. By 2025? Under 11 points.
That's not a small shift - it's the SEC going from "regularly scheduled beatdowns" to "nobody's safe anymore." The 2025 figure (10.7 points) is the second-lowest this century, trailing only 2008's 10.3.
Georgia coach Kirby Smart explained the phenomenon: "There's been a closed gap. If you're talking about the median, then I think it's closer, because there are a lot of teams in the Power Four that don't have the capacity, and they get poached and picked over. Then there's a middle section that has plenty of money and they go and get the top section's backups and get closer to them."
Read that again. The middle class of college football is rising - not by outspending the elite, but by poaching their depth. Alabama's third-string linebacker becomes Vanderbilt's starter. Ohio State's backup corner transfers to Kentucky for playing time. The talent that used to ride the bench at blue bloods now plays everywhere.
Part 3: Players Are Staying
Here's a hypothesis we had going in: NIL keeps marginal NFL prospects in school who might have otherwise declared early. If you're a projected Day 3 pick, why gamble on a practice squad spot when you can earn guaranteed money in college?
The data backs this up beautifully.
From 2016 to 2021, at least 100 underclassmen entered the draft every single year. The 2024 draft had just 58 early entrants - the lowest since 2011.
Yahoo Sports put it plainly: players who aren't sure-fire NFL bets are choosing the guaranteed bag over the lottery ticket. And that means more experienced rosters, tighter games, and - you guessed it - more parity.
Part 4: The Indiana Story
If you need a single proof point that the old rules no longer apply, look no further than Indiana.
The Hoosiers' 2025 championship run wasn't just improbable, it represented something we had literally never seen happen before.
Since 247Sports began tracking the Blue-Chip Ratio - the percentage of four and five-star recruits on a roster - no team had ever won a national championship without meeting the 50% threshold.
Indiana's ratio? Not even close.
Curt Cignetti didn't build this roster through traditional recruiting. He built it through the transfer portal and NIL money, using a philosophy he calls "production over potential."
When Cignetti arrived at Indiana after the 2023 season, he inherited 40 scholarship players. Ten offensive starters had already entered the portal. Only one defender remained.
His response? 52 transfers over two years. Thirty in 2024, twenty-two more in 2025. Thirteen followed him directly from James Madison - including two-time All-American linebacker Aiden Fisher and All-Big Ten receiver Elijah Sarratt.
The result was the oldest roster in the College Football Playoff:
"Hands down, older people are better," Miami offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson said before the title game. "The more you play the game, the better you're gonna be. Typically older teams win championships."
He was right. Just not for the team he thought.
Using a strong organizational philosophy backed by NIL investments, Indiana acquired players who'd been overlooked, undervalued, or simply stuck behind better depth charts at bigger programs.
That's the new formula. And it's why we’re never going back to the decades of single team dominance
Conclusion:
Pull it all together and the story is clear: NIL didn't just make the rich richer, it grew the middle class.
The 2025 season featured historic levels of chaos, with top-10 teams falling at rates we hadn't seen in decades. And talent, as measured by 247Sports' Team Talent Composite, is spreading to more programs than at any point in the modern era.
Nick Saban predicted a caste system. Instead, we got Indiana: a program with zero five-star recruits, a below-50% blue-chip ratio, and a 16-0 national championship run built almost entirely through the transfer portal. The Hoosiers didn't just win a title. They broke an operational model that had held for nearly as long as College Football has been played.
And honestly? We’d argue the national appeal of the sport is better for it.
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