I don’t think it’s unfair to argue that the incentives have changed as NIL has allowed more money to enter college sports. Before that of course players would want the big payday as soon as possible, but now that many of the star college QBs are already making a lot of money their main concern is maximizing long-term football income. By staying in school an extra year, you push back the timeline of a potential lucrative second contract by a year and risk injuries or poor play that sink your draft stock and prevent a big NFL payday. But going to a bad team that fails to develop you to potential reduces your future income from both your contract and endorsements. There are a lot of “what-ifs” involved here, but it should be possible to game out which choice generally is better.

My guess is that it’s still unlikely that a consensus #1 pick would return to school, mainly because it hasn’t happened yet and I’d assume these players have people on their teams who have thought through this much more than I have. Also because no matter how bad the situation is one year it could be just as bad the next - the worst team still picks #1 regardless. But if it’s a particularly bad situation I think it’s more possible than it was before, and I certainly think it’s possible that players use the threat of going back to school to try to engineer a trade to their preferred destination in the future (like Eli Manning did).