Earlier this season, UNLV quarterback Matthew Sluka made waves when he walked away from the Rebels after a hot start for the program, claiming that he was promised NIL money that he never received.
There's a similar story coming to light now out of Florida State involving multiple members of their basketball team from this past season.
Ross Dellenger shares this morning that six former Florida State basketball players have filed a lawsuit against head coach Leonard Hamilton, alleging unpaid NIL compensation totaling $1.5 million.
The report adds that players united in a boycott of a practice last season over the missed payments.
The six players allege that Hamilton promised each of them $250k in NIL payments from "business partners" of Hamilton.
Players never received the payments, despite promises in two separate team meetings on top of individual conversations with the players involved, as well as their families and several of the players actually transferred to Florida State based on the NIL promises that never materialized.
Evidence of the NIL promises reportedly includes multiple text message exchanges, both player-to-player and player-to-Hamilton, as well as with the executive of one of Florida State's NIL collective - Will Cowen.
Back in February, as frustrations reached a boiling point in-season, players staged a walk out during practice before a game against Duke with the intention to also boycott the game. Hamilton held a team meeting and shared that the money would hit the player's accounts the next week, and the team took the court against the Blue Devils, a game that they ultimately lost by 9 points.
Battling issues that surely impacted the locker room, the Seminoles basketball squad went 17-16 last season, and this year their roster includes a handful of players that were on the team during last year's drama, though none of the six players listed in the lawsuit are on the Florida State roster - four graduated and two players exhausted their eligibility.
This story, along with the handful of related stories from college football spanning from Florida to Tulsa, to Sluka and UNLV are all part of a troubling trend of NIL-related stories that highlight the lack of regulations and oversight in today's college athletics landscape when it comes to NIL.
While revenue sharing is on the horizon in the next six months, and that may solve some of the issues college athletics is facing, it's clear that both NIL and the transfer portal have been rife with issues that the most experienced in college athletics foresaw, but no one with influence stepped up to provide solutions - or at the very least guardrails - for.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.