Tim Tebow, Randy Moss among ex-college football stars who would have benefited from NIL, transfer portal

We are in the midst of one of the wildest offseasons of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness (NIL) era, seeing not just the usual waves of player mobility but also the feeding frenzy for rosters in the wake of post-College Football Playoff coaching changes at Alabama and Washington. 

With transfer portal movement and the opportunity to benefit from NIL very much at the center of the conversation in college football, we at the Cover 3 Podcast decided to spend some time going down memory lane through the sport’s history. 

Who, we wondered, would have benefited from the modern transfer portal and NIL era? 

While it was not the intent from the start, one aspect of this discussion became clear: The era of players who could have cashed in on NIL didn’t really begin until the true explosion of college football on a national scale. Cover 3’s Danny Kanell mentioned that when he was going through the recruiting process, it was a selling point that a program had six whole games on television. But by the mid-to-late 1990s (and certainly around the turn of the century), the stars of college football were benefitting from the explosion of cable television and highlight culture. They were not, however, benefiting financially as they may have been if the same NIL rules were in place in that time. 

So who were some of the players who could have cashed in? What players may have been able to not only capitalize on NIL but the free agency-style bidding wars available for the transfer portal? We dug into that, and here were some of our responses. You can also listen to the episode in which we discuss these players below: 

Tim Tebow, QB, Florida

No conversation of marketability in college football can start anywhere other than the former Florida quarterback, who was a household name long before his heralded career came to a close. 

“He was really impactful as a freshman in those sub packages, he won the Heisman Trophy as a sophomore so then he’s a returning Heisman winner,” Bud Elliott said. “I just wrote down one name, to me it’s Tebow by a mile.”

One corner of the “stars who could have cashed in on NIL” discussion focused mostly on players who were more successful in college than in the NFL. Tebow falls into that category, but not as much as some of the other names mentioned — Tommy Frasier and Eric Crouch, for example — because he remains a marketable star even…