“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” – Charlie Munger
In 1939, California passed a statute protecting child actors. They named it after Jackie Coogan, Charlie Chaplin’s famous co-star, who turned 21 and discovered his parents had spent nearly everything he’d earned.
The Coogan Law required studios to lock 15% of a minor’s earnings in a trust until adulthood. It exists not because his parents were criminals. It exists because the system handed families enormous financial stakes with no guardrails, and families behaved accordingly.
We’re doing it again.
Here’s Texas Tech GM James Blanchard describing how a mother recently called him saying, “We’re thinking $2.5 million per year” for her son who was in the portal.
Not an agent, not an attorney, a mom. Blanchard’s response: “That sounds about right.” Then he hung up and never called her back.
Nobody in that story is a villain, and that’s what makes it alarming.
I had Miller Moss on the podcast two years ago. The USC-turned-Louisville quarterback (one of the most thoughtful players I’ve spoken with on Under the Number) put it plainly when we talked about NIL and locker room dynamics: “The biggest area that comes up is taxes. At 19, you don’t want to file your taxes. Kids will just be like, I don’t know what taxes are, so I’m just gonna keep living my life and spending the money in my bank account because it’s there.”
He went on, “If kids have had a poster of a Lamborghini in their room growing up and now there’s $300,000 in their bank account — shoot, why wouldn’t they go buy one? It’s an unfair responsibility to put on a young kid without infrastructure to support them.”
Carson Beck did exactly that.
Is he an adult? Yes. Is it his money? Yes. Is this a free country? Yes. Is his prefrontal cortex developed? No.
Colin Hurley, one of the most promising young quarterbacks in the country, nearly died after crashing his purchased-with-NIL-money Dodge Charger.
Seth Wickersham (S2 E16) visited Colin in the ICU after his near-death accident.
“Colin goes off to LSU as a boy, as a child. He wants to move off campus. His dad doesn’t want him to, but Colin can because he’s got NIL money.
He’s got his own freedom. Colin wants to buy a car. His dad doesn’t want him to. But again, he’s earning a lot of money. He gets a car.
This ended almost the worst way possible. Last January, Colin crashed his Dodge Charger into a tree right off of campus at 3:00 in the morning. And I was in the ICU with him that night.
Thank God he’s alive. Thank God he recovered. Thank God he’ll live a productive life and will probably have a career as a quarterback still, but it’s a dangerous road.”
The pushback writes itself: Isn’t this just paternalism dressed up as policy? Are you saying these athletes – who are revenue-generating employees of the universities – shouldn’t get anything?
That is not what I’m saying.
It was, however, interesting to hear an old teammate now coaching college say to me, “What do you think it’s like for these kids – who won’t get drafted – to earn $200k a year from age 19-21, and then never earn anywhere near that kind of money for the rest of their lives? It messes with their perception of the world.”
He wasn’t arguing they shouldn’t get paid, but that unstructured early money warps a person’s baseline. A 19-year-old who earns $200K builds a reference point for their own worth that the rest of their life will struggle to match.
The Blanchard call didn’t come out of nowhere. Incentives built it…and they explain why kids are chasing boosters and parents are pushing for top dollar.
The calculus for parents has shifted. It's no longer 'A few thousand a year now means a full ride later.' It's that, plus a six-figure NIL projection, plus the family debt that's been accumulating since third-grade travel ball.
Here’s where it gets nuanced. Not every family arriving at this table looks the same. Some athletes come from wealth. Some come from nothing. Others have parents making $40K a year who see a six-figure deposit land in their kid’s account and face a set of incentives that have nothing to do with bad character and everything to do with math. The current system doesn’t distinguish between them. It just hands everyone a live wire and walks away.
A flat percentage solves for that without means-testing anyone. The proposal is simple: lock 51% of NIL earnings in a trust (an index fund, a money market account, anything low-cost and compounding) until the athlete finishes college or turns 25. Universities already manage scholarships, housing, and academic eligibility—the trust is the natural extension. Leave the rest liquid.
A kid making $100K keeps $49K per year in liquid access — enough to cover living expenses and still send something home if needed. Yes, NIL is taxable income and that $49K covers it and then some. And the locked portion compounds quietly in the background: $51K locked from a $100K NIL year grows to roughly $67,000 in 4 years at a 7% rate. That’s money that didn’t exist before, built entirely while college was covering the cost of living.
We’ve been in the wild west since July 1, 2021, but there are some signs of structure developing. Senators Cantwell and Blackburn introduced the “Helping Undergraduate Students Thrive with Long-Term Earnings” (HUSTLE - what an acronym) Act in December 2025, a bipartisan bill creating tax-advantaged NIL savings accounts, capping agent fees at 5%, and mandating financial education.
Trump’s “Save College Sports” executive order this month adds structural guardrails on transfers. Both are meaningful. Neither hits the core problem. The HUSTLE Act is voluntary, which means it helps the kids who already have the infrastructure to make good decisions. The EO addresses roster mobility, not financial literacy.
Cooper Manning (S2 E7) kept money entirely off the table when Arch was choosing where to go to school. Not a conversation with coaches, not a factor in the decision. The Mannings, of all families, had every platform to maximize NIL from day one. Arch is currently the #1 NIL-valued college athlete in the country at $5.4M. That restraint, of course, comes from the privilege of not needing the money. A mandatory flat percentage is what that restraint looks like for everyone else.
The Coogan Law didn’t kill Hollywood. Mandatory NIL trusts won’t kill college sports. Jackie Coogan’s parents weren’t monsters — they were people responding to a system that let them. The fix is the same: stop building policy around the assumption of good character and start building structure that doesn’t require it.
I publish an essay every other Thursday.
Stay tuned and share this with someone who should be paying attention to where the Sports Economy is headed.
If you’re building, investing, or advising within the Sports Economy — please reach out!
Email: [email protected]
– Brent
ICYMI: This week’s podcast episode with Pete Wilson, Co-Founder of Grass League
