There’s a lot of opinions out there about the current state of college athletics and its landscape that has drastically changed over the last handful of years. The one change that helped fuel everything is that athletes have been able to profit off of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) since July 2021.
At Michigan State, one of the top earners is starting quarterback Aidan Chiles, a 20-year-old junior from Long Beach, California. According to a survey done by ESPN with college general managers and agents (also a new thing), a quarterback good enough to start at the Big Ten level generally get paid between $1-2 million per year. Elite quarterbacks are worth even more.
“I think anybody can figure out what going rates are, because everybody speculates,” Nikki Chiles, his mother, said exclusively to WKAR Sports. “They want to know (how much he makes). They have numbers online for Aidan, but it's whatever the going rates are for Big Ten quarterbacks. Let's just say that.”
Those numbers are very high for someone of his age.
That type of money is life-changing for somebody like Chiles. It’s also enough to help change the lives of Chiles’ parents, who both work in education. Nikki is a district-level administrator at Long Beach Unified School District and his father, Adrian Chiles, is a P.E. teacher at Peary Middle School.
“For me, (life) would be a lot different (without NIL),” Nikki said. “Something that has happened this year is I have taken a leave of absence (from work) to just support my son. I don't believe I would have been able to do that without the NIL space. I'm a little crazy now just supporting him, but I'd be a lot crazy trying to manage my position still at the school district and manage his career.”
Adrian is still teaching right now.
“I just like being at work,” Adrian said. “I'm a teacher, so I like working with my kids, things like that. But she's also working too. She's working for him. She's doing things to help him.”
Chiles has also used his earnings to give back to his community in California. According to his mother, Aidan has donated money to his alma mater, Downey High School, and to the high school where his little brother Aaron attends and plays basketball.
This past June, Aidan also coached a football camp in Detroit, alongside Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood. The Wolverine was the No. 1 overall recruit in his class and is reportedly making more than $3 million per year.
There’s also the story of MSU safety Armorion Smith, Aidan’s teammate. Last year, Smith lost his mother to breast cancer and became the primary guardian of four of his younger siblings. He named Nikki as someone that has helped him out as he tries to balance grief, raising his siblings, football, and school.
A GoFundMe for Smith had been started and it raised more than $300,000. Under old NCAA rules, that might have not been allowed.
“What's really cool is I was really surprised that he shared my name, because I think I did things behind the scenes that I don't even know if they knew about,” Nikki said. “Maybe they do, or maybe that's why he shared my name, but absolutely, we contributed to that GoFundMe immediately. We got on the phone and called furniture stores and said, ‘This family needs furniture…’
“Pre-NIL, we probably wouldn't have been able to make moves like that.”
The money has never been the top priority for Chiles and his family. His parents said during the high school recruiting process other schools were offering Chiles more money, but he chose to go to Oregon State. He then transferred to MSU after his head coach there, Jonathan Smith, took over in East Lansing.
“My son wasn’t for sale,” Adrian told WKAR Sports. “It wasn’t a factor to me at all, to any of us, actually. I’m not just speaking for myself. It was never about the money… Yeah, there were offers, but we weren’t trying to hear that.”
There are other important things to Chiles’ family than money involved with experiencing college football: education, developing as a player and perhaps making the NFL some day, and just overall fit with a coaching staff. That was the mix that Chiles and his family found to be the most important, which is why they chose Smith/Oregon State, at first and then Smith a second time at Michigan State.
What still remains is the conundrum for Chiles’ parents keeping their 20-year-old son close to Earth despite him being greater than 2,000 miles away. They didn’t seem to be worried about it. Chiles has representation and a financial advisor to help him out, but his natural personality also helps do the job.
“He doesn't really do a lot of splurging and things like that,” his dad said. “He's pretty grounded. We try to make sure we help him understand this is a necessity, not the wants, you know. That's pretty much it.
“It's not perfect, though. It's not perfect. I’ll put it like that. It's not perfect. Sometimes you’ve got to reel him back in, but he's really not a guy that likes to just blow money, though. He's not that type of kid, to be totally honest.
Adrian added, “He’s kind of like me. I'm cheap. I'm just going to tell you straight up. We’re kind of the same, so it works well.”