It's well known nowadays that millions of dollars are flowing to college football players.
Now that players are allowed to do endorsements through name, image,
and likeness deals, playing for a big college can mean big bucks.
But did you know that millions of dollars are now flowing into high school football too?
A high school football is this kind of beloved and cherished institution in our country,
and we have a lot of warm feelings about it, like Friday night lights and all that.
That's our colleague Harriet Ryan.
She's an investigative reporter based in Los Angeles, where high school football is a very big deal.
Southern California is just a completely different beast.
The competitive level, the number of D1 prospects, it rivals Florida or Georgia or Texas.
Families come from all over the country to have their kids play in Orange County or LA.
And for a long time,
Harriet's been hearing rumors that high school players there were getting paid under the table.
There's a lot of great high school football teams here and I, you know, always got this,
well, everybody knows it's dirty, but, you know, I never seen it proven.
And when I started working on this story and I started seeing the amounts, I was very surprised.
At its most elite levels,
there is a very ugly side to it that basically turns the best players into commodities that can just be sold around like their assets.
What I was hearing from agents and other people, they said, look,
when you're giving teenagers vast amounts of money, a lot of bad stuff happens.