Dana White sat down for an interview ahead of Power Slap 23. When asked about the state of college football’s Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) landscape, and told that Texas Tech’s roster alone is worth an estimated $30 to $40 million in NIL payments, White did not hold back his frustration.
“Holy s**t. That’s what I want. I didn’t know that,” White said. “It’s a problem. It’s a problem. Let me tell you this. Money ruins everything.”
White, whose net worth is estimated in the hundreds of millions, acknowledged the complicated history behind the NIL debate, pointing to decades of college athletes generating massive revenue for their schools without compensation.
“It’s such a double-edged sword in talking about this when you think about some of these kids from the past that added so much value to these colleges that made so much money and those kids, you know, some of them don’t make it in the pros, so they didn’t make money,” White said.
He added that on the other end of the spectrum, schools are now “spending 30 or $40 million on college football for players,” and that “only time will tell as this plays out.”
He closed the thought simply: “My experience is money ruins everything.”
The irony of White’s comments was not lost given the current state of his own promotion. UFC recently signed its first athlete out of the NIL pipeline, Bella Mir, whose signing generated a wave of hype and publicity.
Mir entered her Dana White’s Contender Series debut as a -6000 favorite, one of the heaviest favorites in the show’s history, only to lose to Alex Apodaca.
While MMA is not an NCAA sport, UFC has long looked to college wrestling programs as a talent pipeline, with stars such as Daniel Cormier and Dan Henderson having competed at the collegiate level.
UFC executive Lawrence Epstein described the connection as a “natural fit” and said the organization could use the deals to boost UFC’s visibility among college fans. He stated, “So many of our great UFC athletes came out of college wrestling programs and were All-Americans or Olympians, too. It’s been a natural fit for UFC to support college wrestling, and [Mir’s NIL deal] is just the latest iteration of that.”
