New "E60" Special Takes Closer Look at How College Sports Operate in 2025 and Beyond

A new E60 special is set to take a closer look at how college sports operate in 2025, with Paid to Play: Understanding College Sports in 2025. 

What’s Happening: 

• In a new ESPN E60 special, Paid to Play: Understanding College Sports in 2025, Jeremy Schaap unpacks the seismic shift that has transformed college athletics from an amateur ideal into a high-stakes marketplace.
• For generations, the NCAA defended one sacred principle: college athletes were amateurs - students first, playing for school pride, tradition, and the love of the game. But now, in 2025, that world has all but disappeared. A series of federal rulings has ushered in an era of athlete sponsorships via Name Image Likeness (NIL), free agency through the transfer portal, and after this year’s landmark House settlement, direct school payments to student athletes.
• For even the most diehard fan, the pace of change has been hard to track. How’d we get here? Who’s benefiting or not? And what does the future of college sports actually look like?

• In the one-hour E60 special, Schaap explores and reveals the forces reshaping the billion-dollar industry. Through the biggest names in college sports, he breaks down how schools are now paying players, the explosive rise of the NIL industry, how the transfer portal really works and what the role of the NCAA is in a landscape it no longer fully controls.
• The program takes viewers on a journey across the country with stops including SMU, which was once crushed by the NCAA’s harshest penalties; Texas Tech, home to a new powerhouse fueled by ambitious NIL collectives, with an interview with megadonor Cody Campbell; Ole Miss, where star guard and four-time transfer portal veteran AJ Storr is rewriting the rules of player mobility; and Indianapolis, inside NCAA Headquarters, where President Charlie Baker answers today’s most pressing questions.
• ESPN staff writer Dan Murphy, who has covered the rise of NIL in college sports, was a consultant during the production of Paid to Play: Understanding College Sports in 2025 and is one of many people interviewed in the special.
• Paid to Play: Understanding College Sports in 2025 debuts Sunday, Dec. 28, at 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN, streaming on the ESPN App after the television debut.
  

Deep Dives with E60: 

• ESPN’s E:60 is their long-running, award-winning sports newsmagazine and documentary series that goes beyond scores and highlights to tell in-depth stories in sports, including powerful human-interest profiles to investigative reporting.  Currently, E60 serves up content in the form of a one-hour single story program. 
• The series is known for its exceptional journalism, exclusive interviews, and narrative depth that you won’t usually see in standard highlight shows that populate the schedule of ESPN programming. 
• E:60 has won 112 Sports Emmy Awards Nominations with 21 wins and other industry honors for its reporting and storytelling. 
• Recently, the series took home the Emmy for “Outstanding Hosted Edited Series” for the first time in the 2025 Sports Emmys.