Sonny Dykes calls NIL 'pay-for-play,' raises question of chemistry

Though the NIL market has begun to settle down somewhat, coaches are still having to deal with the full impacts of the more accommodating policy on their rosters. NIL ‘pay-for-play,’ as some refer to it, isn’t always easy.

Just ask TCU coach Sonny Dykes.

“The funny thing about NIL is it’s like anything else, let’s call it what it is, it’s pay for play,” Dykes said at Big 12 Media Days. “If you go out and you give a high school kid NIL money, well then he comes in and now he’s in the same room with a starter that may not be getting NIL money. How does that affect your team? How does that affect your program?”

Those are the obvious questions that coaches have been wrestling with since NIL was introduced. Without any real sense of market values early on, it was a question that regularly came up as NIL deals were inked.

The deals were not uniform in nature, leading to some disparate outcomes that could cause real friction in locker rooms.

Dykes continued to outline the myriad ways that NIL pay for play can be a burden for coaches and programs alike as they try to sort through the thorniness of the various issues.

“Now you’ve got NIL. How’s that going to affect?” Dykes said. “You have to decide what do we want to do with NIL. How are we going to, is it going to be set up so that every player on the team gets money? Is it going to be set up where only a certain number of guys get money? Is it going to be set up where high school guys get money? You have to make these decisions all the time about what you think fits your philosophy, what fits your program. And also, too, what gives you an advantage.”

For TCU and Dykes, the approach seems to be to help orchestrate things as equitably as possible.

The TCU head coach doesn’t want a situation where players are getting disgruntled as a result of NIL pay for play deals or the lack thereof. Having a program infrastructure that can help ease those concerns is also important.

For Dykes, protecting the locker room at all costs is paramount.

“If you look around the landscape of college football, some of the teams that have been most active in NIL have also had issues with chemistry and probably performing at a high level,” Dykes said. “That’s one of the things that I think should be very important, and really important to us and TCU is making sure we have a good chemistry and making sure that what we do makes sense.”