Former Texas Longhorns Coach Mack Brown Worries About Impact of Current NIL Model

After coaching college football for 36 seasons, former Texas Longhorns head coach Mack Brown has chosen to spend 2025 in a more limited role.

He spent the past five years as the head coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels, but they terminated him following the 2024 season. Brown now works for ESPN as an analyst and has launched a podcast with Vince Young called "The Stampede: A Podcast on the Texas Longhorns.”

Brown also commented on NIL and the ways in which it has impacted the landscape of college football recently.

Brown on NIL

He recently addressed the issue on Triple Option Podcast, which is hosted by Urban Meyer, Mark Ingram and Rob Stone. 

“We should have paid players forever,” Brown said. “Urban (Meyer) and I got $15 a month. Mark (Ingram), was a super player. He should have gotten a lot of money when he played — and what happened was the universities abused it. They took the money, the conferences took the money, and the players and the families didn’t get any. If we had given even a stipend for graduation, give Mark (Ingram) 150,000 when he graduates to get his life started. If we could have paid parents way to games, or we could have done something to help these families before it got to a point where it was just ridiculous.”

Brown’s belief that college football exploited talented players like Ingram is not an uncommon one. However, he doesn’t believe the way in which NIL has been introduced in the past few years is a model that can succeed long term.

“And then what we do, we panic," he said. "We get all the toothpaste out of the tube, and we make decisions. A lot of smart people that maybe didn’t have enough common sense made decisions that have bad consequences,” he said.

Whether the planning that went into rolling out NIL can be considered sufficient remains debatable. Brown believes that the haste with which it was implemented caused certain unintended consequences to be overlooked.

For example, he believes that players who do well with NIL but don’t end up joining the NFL could be at a disadvantage when they enter the world that exists beyond college. They might be faced with making less money than they did in college, which could lead to financial troubles or mental health problems.

Additionally, he worries about the relationship between NIL and transferring schools. 

“If a guy transfers one time, he’s got a 63% chance to graduate because a lot of his courses don’t transfer,” Brown said. “If he transfers four or five times, he’s not going to graduate and he’s not going to have a home. He’s not going to have boosters that get to know their favorite players. He’s not going to get a job in that community when he gets out.”

In other words, he believes that the blind pursuit of NIL deals can come at the unknown expense of building relationships and prioritizing community. 

“Right now, we don’t have any guidelines,” Brown said. “Then you get transfer portal — and the transfer portal and NIL at the same time are a disaster because that’s creates tampering.”

Only time will tell whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of the current NIL model, but Brown believes that better methods are out there.