NIL AND THE NEW POWER OF WOMEN’S COLLEGE SPORTS

The Lie We Lived With

The first thing to understand about women’s college sports is the problem was never talent, never effort, never even audience interest. The problem was belief. Specifically, the belief around who was valuable and who wasn’t.

For decades, women’s college sports existed inside a carefully constructed paradox. Games were good, athletes were exceptional, and fans who showed up were deeply loyal. However, the money, marketing, media coverage, and mythology that turn sports into big business all lagged behind, stuck in a different era. The excuse, or explanation if you want to call it that, was always this: women’s sports were growing. The word was everywhere: growing, emerging, building. Growth is a great excuse when you’re looking to justify not yet investing in something. Growth is later vs. not now. It means you can keep budgets small and expectations smaller.

So, we learned to live with the lie. We were told women’s sports were important, but not important enough for prime time. Women’s sports also weren’t important enough for major marketing campaigns, not important enough for the kind of infrastructure that turns college football and men’s basketball into billion-dollar cultural machines.

The system wasn’t saying women’s sports didn’t matter, it was saying they didn’t matter quite enough. That simple phrase, not quite enough, shaped everything.