Throughout his freshman year at Nebraska, Dylan Raiola was better known as a meme-worthy, faux Patrick Mahomes more so than anything else. After notoriously asserting that he can’t “help the way that god made him look,” the 20-year-old has since done his best to prove that he is a legitimate option at the quarterback position, and not just a Mahomes wannabe.
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Throughout the initial bulk of his sophomore season, Raiola has actually been able to do just that. The career Cornhusker was seeing improvements in his completion percentage, yards per game average, and even his passer efficiency rating. But an untimely injury, a broken fibula, has put a halt to his progress.
As if a season-ending injury wasn’t bad enough, the incident also comes at a time when Raiola’s NIL valuations are beginning to plummet. According to On3, he initially entered his sophomore season with $3 million in NIL dealings. But with just two weeks remaining in November, his total valuation has plummeted all the way down to $1.8 million.
Nearly 50% of the value on Raiola has been wiped out, making his NIL portfolio one of the biggest losers of the 2025 college football season. The only other comparable loss that occurred this year came with the Texas Longhorns’ Arch Manning.
The latest iteration of football’s royal family sported a benchmark total of $6.8 million before opening day, and even though he’s coming off a win at home against the Arkansas Razorbacks, he’s only managed to retain $3.6 million worth of that value.
As more and more money continues to flood into college sports, more and more investors or “donors” are going to get burned. Ever since the floodgates of name, image, and likeness were opened, the annual cost to field a relevant program has steadily increased, and there seems to be no end in sight for that trend.
There’s also the fact that Raiola’s brother, Dayton, recently made headlines by decommitting from Nebraska. Naturally, that’s led to the masses believing that the quarterback has likely played his final game in the Big Ten.
Even though he was able to show us some convincing signs of improvement, the 20-year-old’s time in Nebraska may still be viewed as a failure due to the amount of cash that was lost. It’s a perfect example of how the narrative behind the profits, or lack thereof, is beginning to take precedence over the narrative of the player’s growth and experience.
While it’s certainly great that players are now seeing their share of the revenue that they help to generate, it’s also disheartening to see the game of football slowly transform into more of a corporation rather than a league or a sport that has balanced the budget between dollars and loyalty. Nevertheless, this is the world in which we live, and until something better or government oversight and regulations come along, we’ll have to continue to see student athletes being treated as stocks rather than human beings.
