Image licensing?

I'm working on a site specifically focused on NFL and college football now. As I look around at various blogs and smaller sites, I see images of Tom Brady, Cam Newton, etc. that I'm assuming the sites just pulled from Google Images or something. On the other hand, if I take a look at what it costs to actually license images from a service such as Getty, it seems prohibitive for any startup. So, at his point, I'm really confused as to what to do. Are 98% of the sites out there just displaying images with no regard to licensing (and, evidently, no legal action is being pursued)? Is this a "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" type of thing? ...Or is there some fabulous free image archive that I've yet to find?