AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster: Former Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark is greeted by Hawkeye fans during the Women’s Final Four last year in Cleveland.

The powers-that-be may not realize it just yet, but there’s a storm brewing in the world of college athletics.

I’m not speaking from the perspective of a mainstream media member, a coach, a player or a big-time donor. To a certain extent, we’ve always kind of just been living in their world anyway.

This is a soapbox rant on behalf of the average fan.

The Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) era has quickly turned many of the nostalgic comforts we feel toward our schools and programs into a cold-hearted business. And while that may be the way most of the aforementioned main characters view college athletics in 2025, I would suggest not biting the hand that feeds you. The success of the system still depends on our collective support.

We’re expected to show total commitment. We’re expected to give — our time, our money and our beliefs. We’re expected to trust that what we do and how we feel truly matters.

For decades, we’ve done so without much hesitancy. College football and basketball became the feel-good darling of sports, and the rich got richer during its meteoric rise in popularity.

In many ways, the balance sheets today have never looked healthier. The NCAA cleared well over a billion (with a ‘b’) dollars in revenue last year, with television broadcasting rights also soaring into the nine- and even 10-figure areas of negotiation.

None of this is news. We know coaches receive guaranteed multi-million dollar annual contracts because of it, many school presidents and athletic directors are now nearly millionaires yearly themselves, and even football assistants and coordinators for high-end Division I programs are able to say the same. They’ve all benefited tremendously from the exponential growth of the excitement over bowl season or March Madness.

The athletes, on the other hand, have become a sticking point. For decades, their “compensation” came in the form of scholarships, room and board, etc. That once seemed like a fair trade, but as time passed and more money poured in, the supply and demand arrangement seemed increasingly off.

Enter NIL in 2021-22. The NCAA adopted a policy that would allow players to profit from their individual popularity and success, based on their market value. The athlete maintained his or her amateur status in the process, and school “collectives” were formed to also financially back both incoming and current players.

This is where long-time college sports advocates like myself started to see inconsistencies and double standards. I have always been a proponent of NIL. If an elite athlete like Caitlin Clark or Spencer Lee wanted to use their greatness to partner with a business for an advertising campaign, I’m all for it. Let the market decide their value. They should be compensated accordingly.

I’ll use Clark as an example here, though: think of the added revenue she generated for the University of Iowa. Women’s basketball games inside Carver-Hawkeye Arena were drawing anywhere from 5-10,000 more fans per date. Ticket prices soared, as did apparel sales, concessions, parking and, like clockwork, coaching salaries.

Yet did Clark benefit from any of that directly? Not specifically.

A revenue sharing plan with the NCAA does go into effect in 2025-26. Even then, schools will reportedly be capped at $20.5 million per school for the entire athletic department. Women’s basketball players, for example, are projected to earn $16,447 each on average through the agreement. Men’s basketball (average of $218,506 per athlete) and football ($140,741) players will benefit most, but the numbers pale in comparison to the current wild west of the NIL/collective world – which to date has been more like a bag-drop style of bringing dark money into broad daylight at many schools.

Combined with looser rules fueling the transfer explosion — over 1,000 Div. I men’s basketball players entered the portal within the first 48 hours it opened last week — and it’s starting to feel like we’re on the crowded deck of the Titanic.

None of this strikes me as sustainable, and it won’t take much more for fans to get fed up. Some already are. Everything we’ve loved about college athletics is either being tainted or taken. Everything we don’t love about professional sports is taking over — or, even worse, being applied in a more distorted and dishonest fashion.

This isn’t on the athletes, who are just playing the game as it is presented to them today in order to strike while the iron is hot. The NCAA had decades, literally, to figure out a compromise between where we stood in the 1980s and where this lives now. Instead, it pushed the responsibilities on to the collectives, which in turn, asks for boosters to keep footing the bill.

Why is it up to us to do even more of the heavy lifting here? We already pay for tickets, travel, television packages and everything in between that feeds the beast. Now you want us to use even more discretionary income to collectively bankroll a coach or cover a player’s salary, knowing they can — and often do — leave at a moment’s notice for a bigger payday?

Many of us feel powerless, surrendering to the idea that we don’t really matter in the big picture of this equation. We love our schools and programs. We’ve shown fierce loyalty through the years. Yet are we investing in a product that shows any love or loyalty back in 2025?

Eventually, resignation usually leads to apathy. And I don’t think the college sports world wants to find out what a disinterested fanbase looks like, especially given how truly dependent it has been on us through the years.

We may not have much of a voice on our own, but together, this could make serious waves very soon. It all depends on if and when we, as fans, draw a line in the sand.

The world of collegiate athletics is approaching another crossroads. The time has come not just to more efficiently protect student-athletes, but also, respect the concerns of everyday people who collectively give the product its heart and soul.

Until now, we’ve been an afterthought. But the NCAA can’t just forever have its cake and eat it, too.

Eric Pratt is Sports Editor at The Messenger. Contact him via email at sports@messengernews.net, or on Twitter at @ByEricPratt