The numbers might be so high it's s no brainier to not match but I like that we are not "over paying" for players.
Sure, but if the numbers are consistently that high for guys that are out there, we have guys on our roster (and a lot of college rosters) worth north of $1M. So there's a bunch of guys throughout college that are turning down hundreds of thousands of dollars, or it's just a case of a handful of oddball deals that can't be translated to an actual market.
It's sort of like the saying about value or market being whatever someone is willing to pay. That's kind of a dumb oversimplification that ignores the fact that in certain situation outliers occur that cannot be translated to the broader market, certainly in a new market/industry.
Some of these college deals are like Ryan Tannehill or Deshaun Watson deals on steroids. The fact that there was a situation where 3% of the teams were willing to sign a deal that the other 97% would never dream of, does not a market make. There's a reason that right after those deals were done, far better players were signing fare worse deals. Those deals happened, but they were outliers that did not give a real indication of the broader market. And consider that the NFL market and salary cap makes it about 1000x more stable than NIL.
That's what I think is going on with NIL. It's still pretty new, the NIL $ are still coming in and uncertain, and while there are a lot of guys in the portal, it's still a very small percentage of players.
We hear things thrown out like "the going rate for a starting [insert FB or basketball position here] at the power conference level is $X00,000. The problem is the math in nonsense. You take every statement like that, apply those supposed market values to all the starting guys at power conference schools in FB and MBB, and it's not in the same planet as the $NIL out there.
It's not a market yet. It's just a bunch of one off and random noise that people are trying to assign to a market.