Part of the reason the unregulated, Wild West era of NIL in college athletics had to go, we were told, was because that system was unsustainable. It seemed to be sustaining just fine at Missouri though.
Via the Freedom of Information Act, the Columbia Missourian uncovered a treasure trove of documents related to Missouri's NIL program, giving perhaps the most unvarnished look at how college athletes were paid in the NIL era. Those documents were available because Missouri paid its athletes straight from the athletics department to the Tigers' collective -- Every True Tiger Brands, LLC -- and the newspaper got ahold of invoices ETT sent to the university.
The headline figure was that Missouri spent $31.7 million on NIL within the past year -- the vast majority going to football -- but even that hardly tells the true story. In fact, Mizzou spent just shy of $25 million from January 2025 to June, including a whopping $10.279 million in June alone. This practice came to be known as "front-loading," as Mizzou offloaded payments that likely would be denied by the new Deloitte-run NIL Go clearinghouse (whose legality has yet to be challenged). Mizzou also spent $4.647 million in January, a period that coincided with the football transfer portal, and $3.592 million in May, a period that coincided with the basketball portal.
To the original point above, the Missourian uncovered invoices dating back to September 2023, and the numbers generally rose over time, even before the House settlement and its consequences became a reality.
Broken into roughly 7-month periods, here's how the money rose over time:
September 2023-April 2024: $794,171 average (High: $881K | Low: $662K)
May 2024-November 2024: $1.64 million average (High: $1.872M | Low: $902K)
December 2024-June 2025: $3.738 million average (High: $10.279M | Low: $1.211M)
Even removing the outlier of June 2025, Mizzou was still spending an average of $2.5 million per month on NIL during the last six months of the "unregulated" system.
As for how that money was spent, the Missourian found ETT paid nearly two-thirds of every dollar it was supplied on football ($8 million of the $12.4 million in total), with men's basketball getting 23.5 percent, baseball just below 4 percent, women's basketball just below 3 percent ($348,100 in real dollars) and on down to the tennis team, which received $100,000.
Like all SEC schools, Missouri will spend the full $20.5 million "salary cap" as allowed under the House settlement, with $18 million coming in actual dollars and $2.5 million in new scholarships counting toward the cap. Most observers anticipate football eating up 75 percent of the cap, but Georgia announced in February it will spend roughly 66 percent of its $20.5 million on football, in line with how Missouri distributed its NIL money.
The fight for the money football and men's basketball does not consume will be real and vicious. At Mizzou, that likely manifests between baseball, women's basketball and the rest of the Olympic sports. The Tigers endured a historically bad season on the diamond, complete with a last-place 3-27 record in conference play. Afterward, AD Laird Veatch, in announcing that he would not fire head coach Kerrick Jackson, said a "lack of support" explained the club's performance.
“We have not invested at the level that we need to really be competitive in this league, and that sport in particular, it's an incredibly competitive sport," Veatch said. That support will likely come at the expense of Missouri's other sports -- but not football or men's basketball.
To make up the gap, Mizzou -- like every other school -- will increase its efforts to generate outside sponsorships for its athletes.
“We’re going to need our businesses, our sponsors to really embrace that as part of the new era,” Veatch said. “It’s going to be on us as athletic departments (and) Learfield as our partner to continue to integrate those types of opportunities in meaningful ways for sponsors."
As the numbers proved, the money to pay athletes simply for being Missouri Tigers was there. Will Mizzou find a way to get that money to its athletes in our new, guardrail-ed era?