Seven years after his son’s death, what haunts Marty McNair — and what drives his life’s work now — are the questions he never thought to ask before it was too late.

He now spends his days trying to prepare athletes and their parents for any possible scenario. In his books and seminars through the Jordan McNair Foundation, named for his son who died from heat stroke in 2018, he gets families to ask themselves hard questions:

Are they ready for medical emergencies? Can their children handle peer pressure? Can they advocate for themselves when coaches ask too much? Do they know how to handle NIL deals, or the money they’ll make in college?

But the biggest problem McNair sees on the horizon is that the number of questions athletes’ families need to answer — and the potential pitfalls to prepare for — are multiplying at a “scary” rate.

In a long conversation recently, I asked McNair if he could have anticipated how much college sports has evolved even in the years since Jordan was recruited by the Terps and other power conference schools.

“Short answer: hell no,” he said. “I don’t think anybody could really see it. How could we?”

It has been just a few weeks since the NCAA allowed revenue sharing with student athletes, a monumental change with very fuzzy implications. Some name, image and likeness collectives have shuttered. Some schools have opted out of revenue sharing. Some colleges have opted in, despite facing deficits elsewhere in the budget.

President Donald Trump has touted a possible executive order that would largely shift power to schools in the new ecosystem, keeping athletes from being classified as employees and protecting the NCAA from possible antitrust legal actions.

McNair sees an important group being left behind in these seismic shifts: athletes and their families.

I recently read McNair’s latest book, “The Fifth Quarter” — a slim yet efficient guide for parents on how to handle such decisions as checking in on their child’s mental health, the questions they should ask on recruiting visits, the language they should look for in NIL contracts and how to legally plan for medical events or financial management.

The book is useful, advocating for tools such as extensive role playing to help these folks prepare for some of the most consequential decisions of their children’s lives. But the sheer volume of topics that McNair touches on highlighted to me just how few resources are available to parents, who are pelted with nonstop policy changes.

It was something I considered deeply writing last month about McDonogh athlete Elise Cooper (a family friend of McNair): How can anyone deftly navigate this recruiting maze, which shifts every year?

“It’s like how you might buy a car once every few years, but a car salesman sells cars every day. Some people don’t come in as educated consumers.”

Marty McNair

Every success story feels like a minor miracle but, more commonly, athletes are butting up against the cold realities of how fickle some of these agreements and deals ultimately become. The splits have sometimes turned into lawsuits, including schools suing each other.

I feel convinced that there are few true experts in this dizzying landscape of money and arbitrary guidelines. Yet colleges will always have the benefit of experience, of lawyers, of lobbyists and entrenched power. Many of the athletes who are being recruited are going through the process for the first time.

“It’s like how you might buy a car once every few years, but a car salesman sells cars every day,” McNair said. “Some people don’t come in as educated consumers.”

Although families are getting money, many of them are leaping into the fray without understanding contract obligations, without knowing the value of investing or a need to set aside money to pay taxes. There are athletes making more money in college than their parents, McNair said, and some families lack the discipline to weigh the value of their child’s full career in favor of jumping at early, fast money.

Agents and managers with questionable credentials have propagated like cockroaches to grab their own cut from those who are looking for any help they can get.

When Jordan McNair was being recruited, the promise of athletic gear enticed him to make short-term recruiting decisions. Now, the money offered to high-level recruits dwarfs those perks that Marty remembers from less than a decade ago.

One of McNair’s friends’ sons plays football at Notre Dame and just signed a $1.5 million deal before July 1, when revenue sharing kicked in. The family takes solace that he lives in South Bend instead of South Beach, but the sheer amount of money brings anxiety that their son could make questionable decisions on a millionaire’s bankroll.

“You need to start planting the seeds so early, like ninth or 10th grade,” he said. “You realize everybody can get jammed in this. To say things are ‘moving fast’ is an understatement — to me, it’s kind of a scary scenario.”

Yet, for all the changes in college sports, policies that might safeguard athletes and their families are slow to come to fruition at the federal level, a hard lesson McNair knows from trying to pass national legislation on heat illness.

This is the second time the Jordan McNair Foundation has tried to introduce a bill, this time with Rep. Kweisi Mfume and Sens. Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen. This version of the bill would require colleges and high schools to implement emergency action plans with tools for heat illness, including cold water immersion tubs and defibrillators.

Although Maryland has a state law passed for these policies, McNair is concerned that heat illness problems haven’t reached the same bipartisan awareness as cardiac arrest — which Damar Hamlin’s heart stopping in an NFL game helped become a touchstone political issue.

McNair noted that, in the last few weeks, heat illness hospitalizations of high school athletes in Houston and Memphis have raised the need for widespread policy. Last summer, Franklin High School football player Leslie Noble died of a heart issue after collapsing during a summer practice.

It seems like a no-brainer that federal policy should be enacted. Yet, seven years after Jordan’s death, McNair is crossing his fingers that Congress will listen.

McNair said he doesn’t believe federal policies will ever completely insulate youth sports from tragedies like what happened to his son, but he added: “When we consistently see the same type of injury or problem, somebody’s gotta put the right safety situations in place.”

In a wider sense, that’s what he would like to see the NCAA and the federal government do to help athletes and families handle the increasingly complicated economic marketplace of college sports. Talking to as many families as he does, he hears consistent themes of parents feeling worried and overwhelmed. Handling their children’s recruitment feels like a full-time job.

As a part of the House settlement, the College Sports Commission was created to be an independent enforcement arm and arbiter of revenue sharing and NIL deals. But the chief complaint a few weeks in is that the CSC is quashing legitimate business agreements, which is spiraling into litigation.

The biggest advocates parents and athletes seem to have are each other. McNair is selling his books and offering summits with coaches, agents and attorneys in the region to help, but he says the most helpful tool he has seen for families is to share wisdom and best practices with peers. It’s one of the few tools they have — for now.

“Our goal is to create this ‘in event of’ mindset — always be prepared for what you think is gonna happen,” McNair said. “We want to get these education systems in place until we can get policy.”

The hope is that policy arrives soon enough to help families make safe, sound decisions when it comes to their aspiring athletes. But, given the pace of change at the NCAA level, it’s hard to see even well-crafted, well-meaning policy keeping up.

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated how the College Sports Commission was formed.